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

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Others in Thatcher’s extended retinue, who had gathered for the Conservatives’ annual conference, were not so lucky.

Thatcher’s personal conduct, even to her many enemies, was remarkable: she seemed neither shaken nor stirred. Bestseller'As 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. Understandably, Norman Tebbit never forgave the IRA but he was, beneath the carefully cultivated displays of thuggery, a subtle man and he did not try to impede the moves that the Thatcher government made towards an Anglo-Irish agreement, which, in turn, laid the way for a kind of peace settlement in the 1990s. Biography: Rory Carroll, currently the Guardian's chief Ireland correspondent, was a 12-year-old living in Dublin at the time and remembers the scenes in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing. Had the Provos got their target, the trajectory of history could have been altered to a degree beyond rational speculation.He begins with the infamous execution of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 – for which the IRA took full responsibility – before tracing the rise of Margaret Thatcher, her response to the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland and the chain of events that culminated in the hunger strikes of 1981 and the death of 10 republican prisoners, including Bobby Sands. Two quotes stand out: In 1983, after the Harrod’s bombing, during a visit to the North, Thatcher said: “I want the people of Northern Ireland to know that they will remain part of the United Kingdom as long as the population here wants. There Will Be Fire is the gripping story of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Thatcher, in the most spectacular attack ever linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles.

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. 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. Magee’s counsel, a former Ulster Unionist politician, did his best, trying to persuade the jury that police had faked evidence. Thatcher emerged more or less unscathed but five people were killed and several more were horribly injured. Most true crime writing takes crimes that are obscure or opaque and uses them to illustrate wider points about the society in which they took place.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). This book not only investigates the events around that day in depth, but also evokes the time period of the Troubles very well. As an English guy who would only have been 5 years old when this happened, I think it is so important to understand what was happening in Northern Ireland, and the mainland, during the 'troubles'. 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.

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. It was 1984, the fifteenth year of the Troubles, and London seemed to have endless bomb scares (and bombs, some of which are covered in detail here) during that period. Killing Thatcher is a deftly constructed narrative punctuated by dramatic moments that often seem determined by the fickle hand of fate as much as by rigorous planning, intelligence gathering and dogged adherence to a cause.In the meantime, this book should be read far and wide and particularly by anybody who was not around in those darkest days of human waste. 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. He derived some satisfaction from the fact that his reputation as a skilled bomb maker had been confirmed.

We are told twice that down the corridor from the room in which Magee was setting the bomb, a guest was paying a photographer ‘to take erotic portraits of his female companion’. Her acceptance of ‘police primacy’ informed her intransigence during the IRA hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, making her the IRA’s prime target. Neave had been shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland and had advocated military escalation against the IRA. One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night?Disputing that principle was at the heart of the Provisional IRA’s long campaign, yet all these years later, after thousands of deaths and stuttering peace, it still applies.

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