At 2.54am on 12 October 1984, a bomb, which had been concealed in room 629 of the Grand hotel in Brighton several weeks earlier, detonated with such force that it toppled one of the hotel’s five-ton Victorian chimney stacks. “Like a monstrous guillotine, it sliced through concrete, steel and wood, all the way to the ground floor,” writes Rory Carroll in Killing Thatcher, his meticulously rendered account of the IRA’s most audacious terrorist operation.
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. 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. Others in Thatcher’s extended retinue, who had gathered for the Conservatives’ annual conference, were not so lucky. Five people were killed, including the MP and deputy chief whip Sir Anthony Berry, and Lady Jeanne Shattock, the wife of a local party chairman, who was decapitated by the full force of the blast. Margaret Tebbit, wife of the prominent minister Norman Tebbit, was among the seriously injured, having fallen through four floors. She was left paralysed from the waist down.
Killing Thatcher is a deftly constructed narrative punctuated by dramatic moments that often seem determined by the fickle hand of fate as much as by rigorous planning, intelligence gathering and dogged adherence to a cause. 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. In 1981, it was Thatcher’s absolute intransigence on the issue of political status for IRA prisoners that had led Sands and nine others to start the hunger strikes that led to their deaths. And it was Thatcher’s apparent callousness in the face of their protracted ordeal that was a determining factor in the IRA’s decision to attempt what many pragmatists in the movement thought impossible – the assassination of her and several of her cabinet ministers.
Of the three principal players, it is Magee who emerges as the most enigmatic, unknowable character, a drifter whose life was given form by adherence to a single defining cause. “Some people sailed into the IRA as if born to it, bidden by fate,” writes Carroll. “Patrick Joseph Magee edged in like a crab who so easily could have washed onto a different shore.” 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. 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. A missing fingertip on his right hand bore witness to the precariousness of his deadly vocation.
Magee’s ability to slip unnoticed in and out of England, despite being on the radar of British security forces, brought him inevitably to the Grand hotel on the morning of Saturday 15 September 1984. 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. Over the following days, he was visited by another man, most probably his accomplice in priming and concealing the device, and by two “elegantly dressed” female couriers, who delivered the bomb-making materials.
In Carroll’s telling, culled from multiple sources and interviews, the devil is very much in the detail. He deftly maps out the wider context of the dogged and bloody conflict, as well as bringing to life the high stakes cat-and-mouse game between the IRA and British security forces. As with all accounts of the conflict, there is carnage and atrocity, the body count of the bombing campaign carried out by Magee and his IRA comrades exacting the highest toll, not among members of the security forces, but civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Elsewhere, Carroll’s prose possesses the steady, accumulative thrust of a police procedural drama, particularly as the investigation into the bombing gathers pace and the search for the perpetrator intensifies. Magee was caught after a frantic pursuit through Glasgow and served 14 years in prison before being released under the terms of the Good Friday agreement. In an interview in 2002, he said: “I regret that people were killed; I don’t regret the fact that I was involved in a struggle.”
Two years before, he had met with Jo Berry, daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, at her request. Her extraordinary act of reconciliation wrongfooted him. “I was prepared for anger; I could have dealt with that,” he told her in a subsequent meeting. “What I wasn’t prepared for was someone to listen to me. Or even forgive me for killing your father.”
One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night? As I write, the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland in 1998 is being memorialised and celebrated, but would the clandestine government talks with the IRA that precipitated it have happened in the wake of such a deadly assault on the very heart of the British state? If the debris of that Victorian chimney stack had taken a slightly different downward trajectory, we can only guess what the real and enduring cost of killing Thatcher might have been.
• Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt, and the Long War on the Crown by Rory Carroll is published by Mudlark (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
