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

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Others in Thatcher’s extended retinue, who had gathered for the Conservatives’ annual conference, were not so lucky.

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. Rory has had a long and highly successful career as a foreign correspondent reporting from Belfast in the 1990s, London, Baghdad during and after the American invasion, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Los Angeles. Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton the day after the bombing in 1984. Almost four thousand rubbish bins were used to take the wreckage of the hotel away for examination by forensic scientists. 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.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. Certainly, Thatcher and the British military bear a share of responsibility for that cost, but it remains the fact that the IRA killed more human beings and more civilians than any other armed actor in the conflict. The author then goes back, looking at the history of the Troubles and other assassinations, including that of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, and Airey Neave the same year.

He gives a fascinating account of the investigation into the bombing, an extraordinarily painstaking operation that he narrates with all the pace of a good thriller.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. He wrote a book and spoke freely about what he had done – he once lectured to undergraduates in my own department.

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. She was resolute, bullheaded, fully confident that what she was doing was in the interest of the vast majority, and with no compassion for the victims of her policies. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. There Will Be Fire is journalistic nonfiction that reads like a thriller, propelled by a countdown to detonation. The bomb also fractured irreparably the bond between Thatcher and her closest cabinet colleague (and, at the time, most likely successor), Norman Tebbitt.Carroll has conducted over a hundred interviews but he does not really have much to add to what we already know about the Northern Ireland Troubles.

Carroll interviewed more than a hundred former IRA members, police detectives, bomb disposal experts, politicians, officials and friends and relatives of key players for this book. 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. But Carroll goes beyond that, providing broad context to the operation at Brighton and a potted history of the Troubles, reaching back through the years, and even centuries, to point out the actions and grievances in the “ancient quarrel” between, and within, these two islands off the coast of Europe. British police had his fingerprints since his days as a juvenile offender in Norwich, where he spent some of his childhood. 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 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. One of the injured, Donald McClean, related how when he went for an X-ray, the radiographer had an Irish accent. One sometimes senses that an author desperate to reach his daily quota of words is raising his eyes to heaven: ‘an azure sky unfurled over the Atlantic’; ‘the sun hung in a cloudless sky over London’; ‘a patch of sky [was] paling over the Palace Pier. In the meantime, this book should be read far and wide and particularly by anybody who was not around in those darkest days of human waste. She even changed her speech to tone down attacks on Neil Kinnock and the Labour party, cutting references to the “enemy within” and making her seem, if anything, more serene than usual.