The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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Off with her head? Sue Townsend imagined the Royal Family in a council house in The Queen and I. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle / Rex Features

I indicated, with my head, the lawns outside the window, where the prime minister was shortly to die. Thatcher’s main antagonist in Carroll’s narrative, though, is a different sort of operator: Gerry Adams, who was the head of Sinn Féin from 1983 until 2018. To this day, Adams denies that he was ever a member of the I.R.A., let alone complicit in any violent act, although he is widely known to have been a street-level commander and is believed to have sat on its governing Army Council. In later years, he developed an avuncular image; he, too, claimed to adore Teddy bears. Adams is often described as mysterious—Carroll calls him “sphinxlike”—but the puzzle is not whether he has lied about his past. It is about what he was really up to, and, as with the bombing campaign itself, what his lying has yielded. On the half-landing there is a door. It looks like the door to a broom cupboard. But it is heavy. Heavy to pull, hand slipping on the brass knob.

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With high emotions and competing narratives on all sides, he said his goal was to be fair, accurate and empathetic.

What better plan could I have?'' There was only a touch of sarcasm. ''It's a godsend, this. The hospital. Your attic. Your window. You. It's cheap. It's clean. It gets the job done, and it costs one man.'' As long as the war was kept in that context, they could sustain the years of attrition. But in the early 1980s we succeeded in destroying both strategies. The hunger strike destroyed the notion of criminalisation and the Brighton bombing destroyed the notion of containment [...] After Brighton, anything was possible and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us; even the IRA itself, I believe, began to fully accept the priority of the campaign in England. [24] Mantel is no stranger to controversy, having hit the headlines last year when a London Review of Books lecture she gave called "Royal Bodies" was misinterpreted by some sections of the press.You can surprise a person with affinity, I thought, and then say, ''Where's the lav?'' Not a Windsor expression. It wasn't really a question, either. The flat was so small that its layout was obvious. He took his weapon with him. I listened to him urinate. Run a tap. I heard splashing. I heard him come out, zipping his trousers. His face was red where he'd been towelling it. He sat down hard on the folding chair. There was a bleat from the fragile canework. He said, ''You've got a number written on your arm.''

Stephen Day, a Conservative party member and future MP, described feeling the hotel crashing down from directly above him. No,'' he said, ''I don't get very far with the lasses.'' He passed a hand over his hair to flatten it, as if the adjustment might change his fortunes. ''No kids, well, none I know of.'' You think you're on my side?'' He was sweating again. ''You don't know my side. Believe me, you have no idea.'' He crumpled up the kitchen roll and looked around for the bin. I took the paper from him, he grunted, then applied himself to unstrapping his bag, a canvas holdall that I supposed would be as suitable for a photographer as for any tradesman. But one by one he took out metal parts, which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer's kit. He began to assemble them; his fingertips were delicate. As he worked he sang, almost under his breath, a little song from the football terraces:

The same faint, trapped, accumulating scent, the scent of the margin where the private and public worlds meet: raindrops on contract carpet, wet umbrella, damp shoe-leather, metal tang of keys, the salt of metal in palm. But this is the house next door. Look down into the dim well. It is the same, but not. You can step out of that frame and into this. A killer, you enter No 21. A plumber, you exit No 20. Beyond the fire door there are other households with other lives. Different histories lie close; they are curled like winter animals, breathing shallow, pulse undetected. You wouldn't think of shouting out of the kitchen window, would you?'' he said. ''Or trying to bolt down the stairs?'' When I think of her, I can still feel that boiling detestation. She did longstanding damage in many areas of national life, but I am not either of [the two characters] in that room. I’m not shooting her because she doesn’t like the opera. Or because you don’t care for – what in sod’s name do you call it? – her accessories. It’s not about her handbag. It’s not about her hairdo.”

Was she freed by Thatcher's death? "I am concerned with respect. I'm not concerned with taste. I would have happily concluded the story in her lifetime but couldn't – it was my technical difficulty, not any delicacy. I believe in walking that line. You mustn't be too timid to risk getting it wrong."Mantel, who was made a dame in this year's birthday honours, said Thatcher was a "fantastic character" for a writer, "the very stuff of drama". He glanced up. He'd not looked at me before, not to see me; I was just the tea-maker. ''The way it just hangs there,'' I explained. ''Instead of being in corrugations. I ought to have it washed and set. It ought to go in graduated rollers, she knows where she is with that sort of hair. And I don't like the way she walks. 'Toddles', you said. She'll toddle round. You had it right, there.'' Thatcher is a firm favourite of Telegraph readers. Th Charisma, power and persuasiveness are key qualities of Mantel's main obsession: Thomas Cromwell. Was Thatcher a Cromwellian figure? Think about it for a minute and you realise that those conkers are bonkers. But we don’t care. The storyteller is so devilishly good, we follow her gaily into the steaming loathsomeness of Eccles House with a smile on our face, the very reflection of Hilary Mantel’s own demonic grin.