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

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The main players, in both the IRA and the security services, are fleshed out in detail and the narrative has the feel of a thriller. At its centre are three figures: the bomber, Patrick Magee; his target, the British prime minister; and, looming in the background, the ghostly figure of the republican icon , Bobby Sands. On one side, an elite IRA team aided by a renegade priest, US-raised funds and Libya's Qaddafi and on the other, intelligence officers, police detectives, informers and bomb disposal officers. He checked in as Roy Walsh, later insisting he was unaware that it was the name of another IRA volunteer who had carried out a bombing in London in 1973, and paid in cash for a three-night stay in room 629, which afforded him an expansive view of the promenade and the sea. Apart from Magee and Thatcher, the person who looms largest in this book is former Sinn Féin president, TD and abstentionist MP Gerry Adams.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in her suite when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry would have sliced her to ribbons. When he was home secretary in the mid-1960s, Roy Jenkins suggested that the uniformed policeman who was detailed to stand outside his door might come inside and make himself useful as a part-time footman. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. 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. Less than three months later IRA bombs targeting Falklands veterans killed 11 soldiers in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s Park on the same day.About the Author: 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.

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton the day after the bombing in 1984.Within six months the IRA had assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten with a bomb that exploded as his boat exited Mullughmore harbour in Co Sligo.

Her acceptance of ‘police primacy’ informed her intransigence during the IRA hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, making her the IRA’s prime target. 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 toppled through the blast hole, then veered sideways and plunged down a vertical stack of rooms with numbers ending in 8. One of only 25 women among the 630 MPs in the House of Commons after the 1959 general election, Mrs Thatcher became the first mother to hold government office in Britain before being elected in 1979 as Britain’s first woman prime minister and first woman head of a European government. The target narrowly missed being injured, if not killed, when the bomb went off on the sixth floor and sent all manner of debris cascading through the hotel. Bomb-disposal expert Peter Gurney walked in to find his best friend lying dead in the basement of a fast-food outlet in London in 1981, after an IRA booby trap was triggered.

Politicians associated with Northern Ireland, defence, home affairs and justice – and, a fortiori, the prime minister – could no longer walk the streets or strike up casual conversations. He begins with the infamous execution of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 – for which the IRA took full responsibility – before tracing the rise of Margaret Thatcher, her response to the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland and the chain of events that culminated in the hunger strikes of 1981 and the death of 10 republican prisoners, including Bobby Sands. Rory Carroll – the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent– has written a gripping, detailed and richly layered account of the bombing and its consequences. On one side, an elite IRA team aided by a renegade priest, US-raised funds and Libya’s Qaddafi and on the other, intelligence officers, police detectives, informers and bomb disposal officers. Margaret Tebbit, wife of the prominent minister Norman Tebbit, was among the seriously injured, having fallen through four floors.Magee avoided extradition from the Netherlands in 1980 and dodged arrest in Blackpool in 1983 before arriving undetected in Brighton and checking into the Grand Hotel on Saturday, September 15th, 1984, the day that Princess Diana gave birth to her second son, Harry. One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night? I really re-lived a lot of my teenage and student memories (I was a student in London at the time of the London campaigns). The number of British politicians who were killed by republican groups was small, but British politics was changed for the worse.