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

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Thatcher’s own security team put her in a submarine of sorts, and it was one that dived ever deeper after Brighton.

Less than three months later IRA bombs targeting Falklands veterans killed 11 soldiers in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s Park on the same day. There Will Be Fire is journalistic nonfiction that reads like a thriller, propelled by a countdown to detonation. British police had his fingerprints since his days as a juvenile offender in Norwich, where he spent some of his childhood.Magee avoided extradition from the Netherlands in 1980 and dodged arrest in Blackpool in 1983 before arriving undetected in Brighton and checking into the Grand Hotel on Saturday, September 15th, 1984, the day that Princess Diana gave birth to her second son, Harry. Alan Clark wrote excitedly in his diary that IRA snipers could have picked off ministers – in fact, the IRA had resorted to a bomb partly because they did not have enough good marksmen. He checked in as Roy Walsh, later insisting he was unaware that it was the name of another IRA volunteer who had carried out a bombing in London in 1973, and paid in cash for a three-night stay in room 629, which afforded him an expansive view of the promenade and the sea.

Politicians associated with Northern Ireland, defence, home affairs and justice – and, a fortiori, the prime minister – could no longer walk the streets or strike up casual conversations. Even as a young child and teenager in London during the 80s and 90s IRA bombs were part and parcel of life, a thing that might at worst kill you and at best disrupt your travel plans. Politicised on the streets of Belfast by his first-hand experience of the casual brutality of the British army, the quiet and intense Magee soon became adept at the art of bomb-making. Magee, like so many from his background, had little opportunity at school, or thereafter, to make the most of an intelligent mind.Magee’s ability to slip unnoticed in and out of England, despite being on the radar of British security forces, brought him inevitably to the Grand hotel on the morning of Saturday 15 September 1984. He wrote a book and spoke freely about what he had done – he once lectured to undergraduates in my own department. Tebbitt never recovered from chronic pain and grief for his wife, also named Margaret, who was paralysed by the bomb, while Thatcher developed survivor’s guilt, feeling that she was responsible for his fate. Photograph: Larry Ellis/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, at the Conservative conference in Brighton, the morning after the bombing of the Grand hotel.