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.
