Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

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Killing Thatcher is even-handed, never shying away from the conditions and deprivations that led young men like the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee to sign up to kill.

It was the last day of the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in the coastal town of Brighton, England. She kept her nerve as 10 men starved themselves to death, before finally bringing the strike to a close. She was more than midway through the first of her three terms as British prime minister and she was already arguably the world’s most powerful woman, lauded by US president Ronald Reagan as “the only European leader I know with balls” and glorying in the label “Iron Lady” bestowed on her by a Soviet newspaper.

The security services had been lax in protecting the Grand Hotel and in monitoring Magee’s movements before October 1984, but dogged and painstaking police work in Brighton, London, Belfast, Norwich and Dublin led to his capture and imprisonment. Rory Carroll, currently the Guardian’s chief Ireland correspondent, was a 12-year-old living in Dublin at the time and remembers the scenes in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing. In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 – an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come.

Even more fascinating is that a mere 14 years after this, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, essentially bringing the 'troubles' to an end and the Brighton bomber was released by the British Government as part of it. Even as a young child and teenager in London during the 80s and 90s IRA bombs were part and parcel of life, a thing that might at worst kill you and at best disrupt your travel plans. Norman Tebbit and his wife, Margaret, hid the scale of their injuries from each other as they grasped hands under the rubble – though Margaret, a nurse, had probably guessed that she would be paralysed for life even before rescuers dug her out. For want of two minutes, or a few feet, history could have turned, and with it the fate of Northern Ireland, Thatcherism, and the Cold War”. Were the dead – Jeanne Shattock, Anthony Berry, Eric Taylor, Muriel Maclean and Roberta Wakeham – victims merely of ill fortune?This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees.

Had she lingered there a little while longer, she would, as Carroll puts it, “have been cut to ribbons, perhaps fatally” by the lethal trajectory of the falling debris.Thatcher’s personal conduct, even to her many enemies, was remarkable: she seemed neither shaken nor stirred. Thatcher’s own security team put her in a submarine of sorts, and it was one that dived ever deeper after Brighton. Moreover, on the advice of a sympathetic engineer who studied the hotel, the bomb was placed so as to bring the chimney stack down on those below, effectively using the building itself as the real weapon.

He notes, in the understated tone that characterises the book, the revelation that struck Magee 16 years later when Berry’s daughter Joanne asked to meet him: “for the first time [he] perceived Anthony Berry as something other than a Tory.Magee’s counsel, a former Ulster Unionist politician, did his best, trying to persuade the jury that police had faked evidence. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. The army wanted to crush the IRA militarily, but the RUC chief constable Kenneth Newman persuaded her that the policy of ‘Ulsterisation’ and ‘criminalisation’ of IRA captives was working. Magee was eventually arrested and convicted but he was released from prison after the Good Friday Agreement. So although no Tory supporter I thought the bombing of the Brighton hotel was an affront to democracy and she (along with the others at the hotel that night) certainly didn’t deserve being bombed or targeted in such a manner.