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

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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. 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. Norman Tebbit and his wife, Margaret, hid the scale of their injuries from each other as they grasped hands under the rubble – though Margaret, a nurse, had probably guessed that she would be paralysed for life even before rescuers dug her out. They got their chance in 1985 when Magee was sent to the mainland with an IRA unit planning to bomb seaside resorts. Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.

Neither, as Carroll points out in this outstanding book, have any of the 30-or-so people who helped Magee to plan, manufacture and plant the bomb that came within metres of murdering Mrs Thatcher when she was “the most powerful woman in the world”. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive View image in fullscreen The Grand Hotel in Brighton after the 1984 bombing. 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. The number of British politicians who were killed by republican groups was small, but British politics was changed for the worse. 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.

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.

He was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army, but Thatcher, understandably, saw little difference between the two organisations. BestsellerAs taut as a fictional thriller Mail on Sunday Gripping, detailed and richly layered GuardianKILLING THATCHER is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.Magee did everything possible to complete the mission and, to the greatest extent, to cover his tracks. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in her suite when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry would have sliced her to ribbons. In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 – an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come. 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. 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.

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. Magee’s counsel, a former Ulster Unionist politician, did his best, trying to persuade the jury that police had faked evidence. 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. Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, at the Conservative conference in Brighton, the morning after the bombing of the Grand hotel. It was, as ever, the easily forgotten people, those whose lives were obliterated or shattered, who were sacrificed for this nothingness.Magee and his comrades described the high-security units in which they were imprisoned as ‘submarines’, because they were so cut off from contact with the outside world. A real example of how a seemingly unsolvable problem can be solved if there is enough will on both sides. In There Will Be Fire, Carroll draws on his own interviews and original reporting, reveals new information, and weaves together previously unconnected threads. He looks at the origins of the Troubles and the difficult background of Magee himself, who was largely brought up in England. KILLING THATCHER is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet - an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.

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. In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 – an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come. Given the subject matter, perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is not the correct word to use - but certainly engaging and beyond interesting. 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.One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night? A few hours later he sat with a pint of Guinness, feigning indifference as he watched reports on cable TV in a pub. One of the injured, Donald McClean, related how when he went for an X-ray, the radiographer had an Irish accent.