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

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Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? 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. 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. The assassinations shortly before and after the 1979 general election of Airey Neave, probably her closest political friend, and of the war hero and British royal family relative Lord Mountbatten forced her to address for the first time the decade-old Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. 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.

For the most part, though, he concentrates on the period after 1979 – the year in which Thatcher was elected and the IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten (a great-grandson of Queen Victoria who had been viceroy of India) with a bomb placed on his fishing boat, which also killed three other people, two of them children. He deftly maps out the wider context of the dogged and bloody conflict, as well as bringing to life the high stakes cat-and-mouse game between the IRA and British security forces.To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. I was no fan of ‘Maggie’ but whatever your views of her she did have a democratic right to be PM, at least under the election laws of our great UK.

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. 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. I felt I got a far better understanding of the points of view from all sides and was able to connect together a lot of related events that I perhaps viewed as separate incidents when I was younger. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive View image in fullscreen The Grand Hotel in Brighton after the 1984 bombing. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

He covers the political background of Northern Ireland’s Troubles with brisk efficiency, but the real fascination lies in the countdown to the assassination attempt, the tension building with every page. 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.