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

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Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, at the Conservative conference in Brighton, the morning after the bombing of the Grand hotel. The IRA plot, hatched in a Ballymun flat and a Tralee pub, was not initially approved by its army council, nor was Patrick Magee the first choice to carry it out. British police had his fingerprints since his days as a juvenile offender in Norwich, where he spent some of his childhood. These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. The Brighton bombing is a magnet for alternative histories, sliding doors theories in which it is possible to enter a world of infinite speculation about what might have followed had the most consequential British politician of her time been murdered that night.

Mrs Thatcher was still fully dressed and polishing her speech for the final day of the Conservative Party conference when the bomb exploded five floors above her at 2. In 2013 his first book, COMANDANTE: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin Press and Canongate) was published. Bestseller ‘As taut as a fictional thriller’ Mail on Sunday ‘Gripping, detailed and richly layered’ Guardian KILLING THATCHER is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet – an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot. She came to power in 1979, a few months after her confidant, Airy Neave, had been killed when a bomb exploded under his car in the House of Commons.Magee’s counsel, a former Ulster Unionist politician, did his best, trying to persuade the jury that police had faked evidence.

Thatcher emerged more or less unscathed but five people were killed and several more were horribly injured. He covers the political background of Northern Ireland’s Troubles with brisk efficiency, but the real fascination lies in the countdown to the assassination attempt, the tension building with every page.Just two minutes before the bomb went off, its primary target, Margaret Thatcher, emerged from the bathroom of the Napoleon suite on the first floor to continue working on various government documents that required her attention. Disputing that principle was at the heart of the Provisional IRA’s long campaign, yet all these years later, after thousands of deaths and stuttering peace, it still applies. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He looks at the origins of the Troubles and the difficult background of Magee himself, who was largely brought up in England. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Opening with a brilliantly-paced prologue that introduces bomber Patrick Magee in the build up to the incident, Carroll sets out to deftly explore the intrigue before and after the assassination attempt – with the story spanning three continents, from pubs and palaces, safe houses and interrogation rooms, hotels and barracks. In 2013 his first book, COMANDANTE: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela (Penguin Press and Canongate) was published. 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. Tebbitt never recovered from chronic pain and grief for his wife, also named Margaret, who was paralysed by the bomb, while Thatcher developed survivor’s guilt, feeling that she was responsible for his fate. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive View image in fullscreen The Grand Hotel in Brighton after the 1984 bombing.

Fortunately for all, the madness and destruction of this period has evolved into diplomatic and political dialogue; long may that continue. British intelligence agents would later nickname him “the Chancer” such was his willingness to undertake clandestine operations that others in the movement thought reckless and foolhardy.

In those innocent days, there was nothing odd about a former prime minister exchanging a few words with a stranger as the two of them queued for a cup of tea and a rock bun. In the end, even while Carroll does full justice to the drama of the event and its aftermath, there is a core of cold futility at the heart of the story. Her survival and her anti-EU rhetoric made her a progenitor of Brexit and its unforeseen consequences for Northern Ireland, Carroll says, adding that this created “the great irony” that “it may be Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, not IRA bombs, that delivers a united Ireland”.The IRA’s statement after its bomb exploded in a bathroom on the sixth floor of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in October 1984, was cleverly sinister but, with its repeated emphasis on luck, oddly airy. One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night?