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

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He was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army, but Thatcher, understandably, saw little difference between the two organisations. 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. The members of the IRA gang that fired that rocket, and a second mortar bomb, from a Ford Transit van parked in nearby Whitehall on February 7th, 1991, have never been identified or apprehended. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). 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.

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. 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.Disregarding warnings that the building was likely to fall down, firemen went to extract the wounded. In Carroll’s telling, culled from multiple sources and interviews, the devil is very much in the detail. If the prime minister had been killed, her successors could never have been seen talking to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and politics in Northern Ireland would have been frozen for a generation. 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. 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.

He was arrested in a Glasgow flat and police found a list of targets hidden on one of his associates. 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.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. 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. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site.

Margaret Tebbit, wife of the prominent minister Norman Tebbit, was among the seriously injured, having fallen through four floors. The “you” being addressed was, of course, the primary target of the bomb, Margaret Thatcher, who escaped unharmed. British police had his fingerprints since his days as a juvenile offender in Norwich, where he spent some of his childhood. 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.He heard that he had failed to kill Thatcher but was relieved that his handiwork had been up to the job.

He looks at the origins of the Troubles and the difficult background of Magee himself, who was largely brought up in England. Politicised on the streets of Belfast by his first-hand experience of the casual brutality of the British army, the quiet and intense Magee soon became adept at the art of bomb-making. The Irish government cracked down hard on the IRA but Irish courts were independent and unlikely to allow the extradition of a man accused of a political offence.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. After sending handwritten, individual letters to the families of the 18 British soldiers who were killed by the IRA at Warrenpoint, Co Down, on the same day that it murdered Mountbatten alongside an 83-year old woman friend and two teenage boys in Sligo, Mrs Thatcher flew to Belfast and Armagh to consult army and police chiefs. 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. 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.