During the mid-1970s Fowler was Shadow Minister of Transport. In April 1976 he was photographed outside the Palace of Westminster having just taken delivery of his third four-cylinder MG MGB GT – he had reportedly rejected the idea of buying a V8 version on account of the cost.
In government
Upon Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister in 1979, she did not immediately appoint Fowler to her Cabinet, explaining: "we were short of one place. As a result, Norman Fowler, as Minister of State at Transport, was not able to be an official member of the Cabinet, although he attended all our meetings." As Secretary of State for Transport, Fowler drove through Lord Nugent's 1981 bill to make seat belts compulsory, a law that came into force in 1983. As Secretary of State for Health and Social Security in 1986, Fowler implemented the first official drive to educate the British public to the dangers of AIDS. Edwina Currie and John Major both served under him as junior ministers.
Backbenches, retirement and Shadow Cabinet
Fowler later resigned from the Cabinet as Employment Secretary in January 1990; he later claimed that he was the first politician to cite "to spend more time with my family" as his reason for leaving office. Following his resignation from the frontbench, Fowler was knighted in 1990. Fowler then returned twice to front-line politics, first as Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1992 to 1994, during which time he oversaw the parliamentary boundary changes of the early 1990s; then on the Conservative front bench as Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Transport and the Regions and finally as Shadow Home Secretary. In 2001, he stepped down as a Member of Parliament.
After standing down from the House of Commons, he entered the House of Lords, sitting on the Conservative benches as Baron Fowler, of Sutton Coldfield, in the County of West Midlands. In 2003, Lord Fowler proposed that the European Union should appoint a high-level coordinator with ambassadorial rank to deal with the AIDS epidemic. In 2006, he chaired a House of Lords select committee which criticised the use of the television licence fee, which is used to fund the BBC, as a tax. His book A Political Suicide was published in 2008, and was shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year Award. In May 2013, Fowler gave his support to legislation aiming to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, stating: "Parliament should value people equally in the law, and that enabling same-sex couples to marry removes the current inequity." He was elected as Lord Speaker in 2016. He is the third person and first man to hold the office since it was established by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Lord Fowler has stated that he favours reducing the House of Lords to 600 members. On 19 March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic he announced that he would be withdrawing from Westminster and working from home, with deputy speakers taking over his role in the House of Lords.
