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

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They feared that it might just be some adulterer on a dirty weekend, but eventually lifted a fingerprint from it and matched it to Magee. He gives a fascinating account of the investigation into the bombing, an extraordinarily painstaking operation that he narrates with all the pace of a good thriller. Thatcher’s personal conduct, even to her many enemies, was remarkable: she seemed neither shaken nor stirred.

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. In 1981, it was Thatcher’s absolute intransigence on the issue of political status for IRA prisoners that had led Sands and nine others to start the hunger strikes that led to their deaths. The target narrowly missed being injured, if not killed, when the bomb went off on the sixth floor and sent all manner of debris cascading through the hotel. At its centre are three figures: the bomber, Patrick Magee; his target, the British prime minister; and, looming in the background, the ghostly figure of the republican icon , Bobby Sands.He heard that he had failed to kill Thatcher but was relieved that his handiwork had been up to the job. This may seem crushingly obvious, but has to be emphasised because the great drama of the event lay in what did not happen. One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night?

She even changed her speech to tone down attacks on Neil Kinnock and the Labour party, cutting references to the “enemy within” and making her seem, if anything, more serene than usual. He describes the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, as IRA prisoners starved themselves to death in protest at the conditions in which they were held, and the bombing campaign both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. Given the subject matter, perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is not the correct word to use - but certainly engaging and beyond interesting. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher looking pensive at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool.Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). An exciting narrative that blends true crime with political history, this is the first major book to investigate the Brighton attack. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. 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. The path he had chosen ensured that he would have an itinerant lifestyle, and that his marriage and family would suffer.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Bomb-disposal expert Peter Gurney walked in to find his best friend lying dead in the basement of a fast-food outlet in London in 1981, after an IRA booby trap was triggered.

It was the last day of the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in the coastal town of Brighton, England. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.