“Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” 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. It took responsibility off the shoulders of the killers and placed it on those of Dame Fortune.
This way of framing the horror that descended in the middle of the night during the Tory party conference was cruelly dismissive of the terrible harm done to real human beings. The “you” being addressed was, of course, the primary target of the bomb, Margaret Thatcher, who escaped unharmed. But what about the “unlucky” people that the IRA’s bomber Patrick Magee actually killed, maimed or bereaved or permanently disabled? Were the dead – Jeanne Shattock, Anthony Berry, Eric Taylor, Muriel Maclean and Roberta Wakeham – victims merely of ill fortune?
Rory Carroll – the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent– has written a gripping, detailed and richly layered account of the bombing and its consequences. 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. A realisation struck him: I had killed a fine human being.”
It is important, in recalling the bombing, to remember what actually happened. This may seem crushingly obvious, but has to be emphasised because the great drama of the event lay in what did not happen. Contrary to Carroll’s title, Thatcher was not killed. She was not even scratched. And this was indeed a matter of luck.
The IRA had attained a striking degree of sophistication in its use of explosives. Magee placed his bomb on a long-delay timer, meaning that he was well away before it detonated. Moreover, on the advice of a sympathetic engineer who studied the hotel, the bomb was placed so as to bring the chimney stack down on those below, effectively using the building itself as the real weapon. What could not be known, however, was exactly what path this deadly debris would take on its descent. As Carroll so vividly describes it, “Like a monstrous guillotine, it sliced through concrete, steel, and wood, all the way to the ground floor. What saved Thatcher was the path it took. It toppled through the blast hole, then veered sideways and plunged down a vertical stack of rooms with numbers ending in 8. It merely clipped those rooms, including Thatcher’s Napoleon Suite, with numbers ending in 9.”
Thatcher was saved by a digit. Her immediate response, moreover, also emphasised this sense of wonder at what failed to occur. She insisted that the Tory party conference would go ahead as planned. Marks and Spencer opened early so that delegates, who had been evacuated in their pyjamas, could buy suits, dresses and shoes. Thatcher’s personal conduct, even to her many enemies, was remarkable: she seemed neither shaken nor stirred. 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.
She behaved, in other words, as if horror had not been visited on her friends and colleagues. And to this “as if” would be added over time a “what if?”. 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.
The great virtue of Carroll’s excellent book is that it takes the Brighton bombing back out of these parallel universes and into the real world of conflict in which it happened. He explores, as dispassionately as possible, the mentality that shaped killers like Magee. He roots the attack in the pre-history of the IRA’s bombing campaigns (with particular attention to its slaughter of Lord Mountbatten five years earlier) and the personal hatred of Thatcher that built up during the emotive hunger strikes of 1981.
He shows how the organisation’s operatives developed a callous disregard for the innocent civilians (like the two children blown up alongside Mountbatten) who were the mere collateral damage of its armed propaganda. 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.
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. All the IRA succeeded in doing was to allow its arch-enemy, Thatcher, to stage an immensely effective show of defiance and to underline the reality that it could not kill its way to a united Ireland. Even if it had managed to murder her, that reality would not have changed.
It was, as ever, the easily forgotten people, those whose lives were obliterated or shattered, who were sacrificed for this nothingness. In all the thrills and theatre of what the IRA called a “spectacular” operation, Carroll never allows their cries to be mere noises off.
• 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.
