Killing Thatcher: ‘I think that was an assassination attempt, don’t you?’

Fifty seconds from detonation, the only sound on the Brighton promenade came from the English Channel. The tide was high, waves thudding ashore, a few fishermen standing in the surf like moonlit sentinels.

Forty seconds. Barely a breeze to ruffle the night. The biting wind and rain that had seemed to presage winter earlier in the week had given way to stillness. It was not even cold. Darkness draped the Grand’s eight-story facade, its windows black squares save for a few scattered glows, like a giant crossword.

Thirty seconds. Two pedestrians – a DJ and a manager from the Pink Coconut nightclub making their way home – turned from West Street on to the promenade. A police transit van, a rattling old Bedford, trundled past them toward the Grand. In the car park behind the hotel, weary constables clambered into another van, their shift over.

Twenty seconds. In the Victoria bar, the night’s last revellers clinked glasses. A contingent of councillors and party officials from Bradford, in tuxedos and gowns, wheedled another three bottles of champagne from the closed bar for a farewell toast to the 101st conference. A cabinet minister’s secretary discussed sharing a taxi back to the hotel of Richard Whitely, host of a TV show called Countdown.

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Ten seconds. In his safe house, Patrick Magee stared at the clock.

In the Napoleon Suite, the world’s most powerful woman worked her way through the day’s final dregs of government business.

Five seconds. A surveillance camera positioned on the conference centre scanned the prime minister’s balcony. Imprinted on the top right-hand corner was the date and time: 12-10-84.

At 02:54:01, the bomb in the bathroom of room 629 detonated. A brilliant, blinding white light pierced the walls and corridors and brick facade. It exploded into the night air, dazzling and blurring the surveillance camera.

A fireball whooshed through the sixth floor, driven by the exponentially expanding force of the explosives’ compressed power. Blast waves radiated outward through brick and stone, unleashing a roar like thunder. In 629, Donald and Muriel Maclean flew out of bed and spun through the air. Muriel, age 54, hurtled sideways. Her husband seemed to go upward. The wall separating the bathrooms of 629 and 628 dissolved just as Jeanne Shattock, age 55, was in her bathroom bending over the bath. The bomb’s heat seared her flesh. Fragments of metal, ceramic, wood, and a green plastic lipstick holder stabbed her with the force of rifle bullets. The blast propelled her body across the corridor into a cupboard in room 638. She was decapitated. Gordon Shattock glimpsed the flash in the bathroom and felt a burning sensation before being hurled out of bed. The surge of heat appeared to pursue him through the air.

In the room above, 729, Harvey Thomas found himself flying through space. He thought he was dreaming about asteroids.

The blast wave continued upward through the eighth floor and exploded through the roof, shooting tiles into a starlit sky. A flagpole snapped off and arced over the promenade on to the beach.

The eruption engulfed one of the two great chimney stacks with velocity greater than a typhoon’s. For generations, these 11-foot stacks, each with five stone funnels, had belched smoke from hundreds of fireplaces. Central heating had made them redundant, but still they soared with symmetrical precision over the centre of the Grand. Now the western stack, a five-ton exemplar of Victorian engineering, encountered the full force of late-twentieth-century terrorist technology. An unequal match. The stack fell.

[ Killing Thatcher: An outstanding and essential examination of a moment that changed history ]

With a rumble never forgotten by those who heard it, the masonry cracked and smashed through the roof, gathering speed and violence as it plunged downward, room by room, impelled not by explosives but that other unforgiving force: gravity.

Harvey Thomas realised he was not dreaming but flailing through a void filled with bashing objects. Gordon Shattock experienced a slow-motion descent into Hades. “There was no floor and I started to fall into a pit,” he recalled. Girders, concrete, and bricks crashed down with him. “I seemed to be falling faster than the debris and I had the feeling if I hit anything solid the debris would catch me up.”

The avalanche punched through the ceiling of 528 and collected Eric and Jennifer Taylor and everything else in their room as it hurtled down into 428, where it swept up John and Roberta Wakeham. Then 328 was obliterated, casting Anthony and Sarah Berry and their dogs into the vortex.

In 228, Norman Tebbit, lying in bed, eyes wide open since the blast a few moments earlier, saw the chandelier sway above him. “It’s a bomb,” he shouted to his wife. Then came a deafening roar, and the maelstrom swallowed them.

When the bomb detonated, Margaret Thatcher heard a muffled crash and felt the room shake. Plaster dropped from the ceiling. A slab of glass from a shattered window splintered into shards on the green carpet. She knew immediately it was a bomb. There were a few seconds of silence, then a rumble of falling masonry. The prime minister stood up and went to the window, suspecting a car bomb on the promenade.

Robin Butler said: “I think you ought to come away from the window.” Thatcher ignored him. Then, oblivious to the homicidal cascade falling above, she darted for the bedroom. “I must see if Denis is all right.” She opened the door and vanished into darkness. Butler watched in horror. He could hear the Napoleon Suite’s bathroom collapsing. A thought honed by decades in government assailed the prime minister’s chief civil servant. “If she’s gone to her death, what am I going to tell the commission of inquiry?”

A moment later, to Butler’s immense relief, Thatcher reappeared with Denis, who was pulling clothes over his pyjamas and digesting the destruction to the bathroom. “I’ve never seen so much glass in my life.”

They went out to the corridor and saw a police bodyguard trying to kick open a door to a suite occupied by Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, and his wife, Elspeth. The Thatchers and Butler scrambled into the secretaries’ office opposite the Napoleon Suite. The Garden Girls were unharmed, but shaken. Thatcher consoled one of them. “It’s probably a bomb, but don’t worry, dear.”

With the Grand Hotel still groaning and cracking, the prime minister sat in a chair and murmured to no one in particular: “I think that was an assassination attempt, don’t you?”

[ Archive: aftermath of 1984 Brighton bombing ]

· · ·

The bomb missed the Iron Lady. It did not even scratch her. But it came very, very close.

Through planning – not least, dispatching a construction engineer to study the Grand – the IRA multiplied the device’s destructive force by toppling the chimney stack. Like a monstrous guillotine, it sliced through concrete, steel, and wood, all the way to the ground floor. What saved Thatcher was the path it took. It toppled through the blast hole, then veered sideways and plunged down a vertical stack of rooms with numbers ending in 8. It merely clipped those rooms, including Thatcher’s Napoleon Suite, with numbers ending in 9.

Had Thatcher still been in her bathroom she would have been cut to ribbons, perhaps fatally. The briefest extension of the speechwriting marathon – a final musing over a certain adjective, or haggling over a particular verb – could have placed her in the bathroom precisely at the moment of detonation, leaving her sprayed by a blizzard of broken glass, ceramic, and concrete. Instead, she emerged with two minutes to spare and was in the lounge, about a dozen feet from the bathroom, when the carnage began. Even there, she might have perished. Had the chimney stack toppled a slightly different way, the tons of debris could have smashed into her suite and flattened the lounge. Revenge for the dead hunger strikers would have been served, and a major Western democracy would have convulsed. Thatcherism might have died with her. The attorney general would probably have designated Willie Whitelaw, a traditional Tory grandee, as caretaker prime minister while the Conservatives chose a successor. History pirouetted on a twist of geometry.

With alarm bells hammering and a great cloud of thick, choking dust enveloping the hotel, Thatcher had no time to mull over what might have been. Chaos reigned. The attempt to murder her and wipe out her government was a defining moment that stripped personal and political instincts to their essence. Hunkered in the secretaries’ office, Thatcher did not know the extent of the damage, or that friends and colleagues were buried in rubble fighting for oxygen, for life. She knew she had to escape the bedlam in the Grand and take charge of the crisis.

The lights stayed on in Thatcher’s part of the hotel, permitting an air of deceptive normality. Cabinet ministers and officials emerged from nearby rooms, some in dressing gowns and pyjamas, and huddled with the prime minister. Aides packed her documents and clothes, while bodyguards discussed an exit plan. Michael Alison, Thatcher’s devout Christian parliamentary private secretary, said to her quietly: “Thank God you’re all right, Margaret.” “I do,” she replied. “I do thank him.”

· · ·

Several blocks away, three fire engines raced through Brighton’s deserted streets. Fred Bishop swayed in the lead vehicle, untroubled. The Grand’s alarm system had automatically triggered a tape-recorded voice to the fire brigade: “Fire, Grand Hotel, Brighton.” The message had been relayed to Preston Circus station, two miles from the hotel, where eleven men from Green Watch were on duty. Bishop was in charge. His team scrambled within 28 seconds, blue lights flashing, with little expectation of action. Hotel calls were usually false alarms, or trivial, like a smoking toaster. “Someone’s broken a fire alarm to get Maggie out of bed,” said a fireman.

A small, compact man with a thick moustache, Bishop loved his job. Being trained and paid to save people, what was better? His blunt honesty sometimes discommoded the higher-ups, but his men did not complain. Fred never asked anything he would not do himself. He did not really follow politics, but knew about the Tory conference and agreed with his colleague: probably a hoax call.

The trucks turned on to the promenade. “Here, it’s suddenly got misty,” said someone. Bishop peered ahead. Indeed, a grey miasma coated King’s Road. Then he saw sheets and pillowcases and curtains hanging from lamp-posts and lanterns. He realised the mist was dust, a billowing, smothering plume that obscured the hotel and seafront. “The dust was so thick it looked like Sleeping Beauty, as if the place had been asleep for 100 years,” one witness later said. Stumbling through it were ghostly apparitions, policemen and people in ball gowns and tuxedos, dazed and ragged, some bleeding, like otherworldly survivors tottering ashore from an ancient shipwreck.

“There was screaming, you could hear crashes of masonry and metal,” said Lesley Brett, a passerby. She never forgot the arrival of the fire trucks. “There was no nee-naw, just blue lights coming out of this huge cloud of dust. They arrived absolutely silently, like angels from heaven.”

Bishop ordered Green Watch to park in front of the stricken Grand and asked a policeman what had happened. “Um, it just went bang,” came the bewildered reply.

Broken bricks, glass, and fragments of railings littered the ground. Bishop surveyed the hotel facade. A huge V- shaped gash ran from top to centre, with more destruction visible on lower floors. Possible causes included a bomb, a gas leak, or a roof collapse. Over the blare of fire alarms, he could hear shouts for help. A hotel employee told him there were about 300 inside. Under brigade rules, if there was a bomb or suspected bomb, the crew was to park two streets away, maintain radio silence, and wait for the police bomb squad, unless there was a fire. There appeared to be no fire. Bishop gathered his men. “Something dreadful’s happened here. It may well have been a bomb ... so I can’t officially order you to go in, because we don’t know. There are going to be dangers inside the building. I’m going in, to find out what the problem is, as much as I can, and sort out the rescues.” To a man, Green Watch volunteered to go in.

“Everyone said, ‘Well if you’re going in, governor, we’re going in with you.’ And that was the end of it,” Bishop recalled. He radioed headquarters that 300 were unaccounted for, requested 10 more fire engines and multiple ambulances, then led his crew into the Grand.

· · ·

Thatcher’s bodyguards feared a secondary device – a lesson from the Narrow Water ambush – and wanted to move her to another location. They also feared the possibility of a sniper waiting outside to finish the job. There was also a transport problem; no one could access the prime minister’s car, which was locked up for the night. By chance, one of the first rescue ladders was laid against the Napoleon Suite balcony, but bodyguards vetoed the idea of the prime minister clambering down to the promenade in full glare of street lights. They checked the rear exit for rogue gunmen – it seemed to be clear – and rustled up another car. At 3:10am, they led the prime minister down the first-floor corridor and encountered Fred Bishop’s team.

Thatcher, impeccable in her ball gown, not a hair out of place, greeted the rescuers with a courtesy so formal it bordered on surreal, given the chaos. “Good morning, I’m delighted to see you. Thank you for coming.” If the firemen were flummoxed, they did not show it. “You’ve got to think, ‘Well, didn’t have a lot of choice really,’” Bishop said. “But you didn’t say it back to her, obviously.”

After leading the group down a dead end, a fireman led Thatcher, her husband, and a few officials down the main staircase to the lobby, where Patrick Magee had checked in three weeks earlier. Cement dust coated their clothes and hair and filled their mouths, making Thatcher cough. She saw rubble in the entrance and foyer – her first inkling of the carnage. Outside, beyond her line of sight, scores of guests huddled on the promenade. They had escaped through windows, broken doors, and dust-filled corridors. Those with shoes carried the barefooted over the debris. Off-duty nurses who had been at a dinner tore their evening dresses to bandage the wounded. There was no screaming, no panic, just numb shock. “They were shaking and kept saying, ‘We’re cold, we’re cold,’” recalled Ivor Gaber, a BBC producer who had been staying at the neighbouring Metropole hotel when the explosion jolted him out of bed. “It’s shock, because it wasn’t that cold, it was quite a warm evening.”

People wandered in a daze. Keith Joseph, the education minister, in slippers and a paisley dressing gown, perched on his “red boxes”– ministerial briefcases with official papers. Lord Jock Bruce-Gardyne wore a three-piece suit and club tie, a vision of elegance sabotaged by a missing sock, subsequently earning him the nickname One Sock Jock. Lord Gowrie, a former Northern Ireland minister, fetched dozens of deck chairs from the beach. Gaber itched to film everything, but to save money the BBC, and ITV, had lodged cameramen and their kit at cheaper hotels outside Brighton. As fire engines and ambulances filled King’s Road, the survivors gazed at the ruined hotel, dumbstruck. Anguish deepened when a rumour spread that Thatcher was dead.

In fact, she was in the lobby, delaying her exit to ask about reception staff. Assured they were all right, she followed the firemen and bodyguards toward the rear exit, clambering over discarded belongings and broken furniture. “It still never occurred to me that anyone would have died,” she later said. Dead, dying, and desperate colleagues were just yards away, invisible, entombed in rubble that stretched from the basement to the first floor. Norman and Margaret Tebbit were actually suspended above Thatcher, encased in debris about twelve feet over the reception area. Both were grievously injured and contorted, unable to move, locked in a black, muffled hell. They could not hear sirens or alarms, only the groans and chokes of others trapped nearby. Norman called for his wife and she replied from somewhere close. She was just inches away. He moved his left arm slightly, and their fingers touched.

Oblivious to such agonies, Thatcher was shepherded outside. Gulping in night air, she climbed into the back seat of a waiting car with Denis and Cynthia Crawford, her personal aide. A photographer captured the moment. Crawford, gaping; Denis, dishevelled; the Iron Lady, jaw firmly set, gaze fixed ahead, like a figurehead on the bow of a ship. Shortly after 3:15am, police escorts led the way to a designated safe haven, the Brighton police station, a mile away. En route, Denis raged. “The IRA, those bastards.” His wife remained calm, inscrutable.

The five-story police station on John Street briefly became the power centre of Britain. Thatcher sailed in, one officer commented, “like a battleship.” After changing into a navy-blue suit, the prime minister and her inner circle sipped sweet, strong tea in the office of Superintendent Dennis Williams. Other ministers and officials arrived, filling corridors, some in pyjamas, like a bizarre VIP sleepover. The US ambassador, Charles Price, was shoeless. Thatcher noticed police struggling to squeeze past the throng. She stepped out. “You people, come in here out of the way,” she ordered. The corridor duly unblocked. With a glint in her eye, she told a police officer: “I’m playing the schoolmarm today, aren’t I?”

While senior officers and officials discussed her accommodation, and how to get her back to London, Thatcher tapped her fingers on the desk. Then she snapped. “Gentlemen, I have sat here listening to this discussion for some time and a decision needs to be made. I do not mind where you take me but there is one clear instruction. You must have me back at the conference centre by 9am. Is that understood?”

A ghastly realisation struck her listeners. The woman intended to go on. An unprecedented attack on the British government, casualties unknown, the promenade a war zone, and she wanted to resume the conference.

Just before 4am, Thatcher emerged from the police station to a media scrum. Ignoring bodyguards’ attempts to shoo her into a car, she gave an impromptu press conference, TV camera lights illuminating the darkness. She described hearing the bomb and her escape from the Grand. “You hear about these atrocities, these bombs, you don’t expect them to happen to you. But life must go on, as usual,” she said.

“And the conference will go on?” asked the BBC’s political correspondent, John Cole. “The conference will go on,” Thatcher said.

“The conference will go on, as usual.”

The bodyguards exhaled when she climbed into the car, only to see her climb out again to ask Cole if he needed another take. An hour after being almost being murdered, Thatcher wanted to get the soundbite just right. Her survival was not enough. She wanted to deny the IRA even the satisfaction of halting the conference. Her speech was to go ahead, on schedule.

[ Thatcher said after Brighton bombing she ‘doubted she would die in her bed’ ]

· · ·

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown by Rory Carroll is published by Mudlark