The Brighton hotel bombing was a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassination attempt against the top tier of the British government that occurred on 12 October 1984 at the Grand Brighton Hotel in Brighton, England. A long-delay time bomb was planted in the hotel by IRA member Patrick Magee, with the purpose of killing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, who were staying at the hotel for the Conservative Party conference. Although Margaret Thatcher narrowly escaped the blast, five people connected with the Conservative Party were killed, including a sitting Conservative MP, and 31 were injured.
Preparation
The Brighton Grand Hotel: Checking into History - UK TV documentary. Dr Matthew Sweet explores the history of a seaside institution - including its frequent appearance in divorce cases, the cross-dressing ...
Patrick Magee stayed in the hotel under the pseudonym Roy Walsh during the weekend of 14â€"17 September 1984. During his stay, he planted the bomb under the bath in his room, number 629, one floor above Thatcher's suite for the conference. The device was fitted with a long-delay timer made from videocassette recorder components and a Memo Park Timer safety device. IRA mole Sean O'Callaghan claimed that 20 lb (9 kg) of Frangex (gelignite) was used. The device was described as a "small bomb by IRA standards" by a contemporary news report and may have avoided detection by sniffer dogs by being wrapped in cling film to mask the smell.
Bombing
The bomb detonated at approximately 2:54Â am (BST) on 12 October. The midsection of the building collapsed into the basement, leaving a gaping hole in the hotel's facade. Firemen said that many lives were likely saved because the well-built Victorian hotel remained standing. Thatcher was still awake at the time working on her conference speech for the next day in her suite. The blast badly damaged her suite's bathroom, but left its sitting room and bedroom untouched. She and her husband Denis escaped injury. She changed her clothes and was led out through the wreckage along with her husband and her friend and aide Cynthia Crawford, and driven to Brighton police station.
At about 4:00Â am, as Thatcher left the police station, she gave an impromptu interview to the BBC's John Cole saying that the conference would go on as usual. Alistair McAlpine persuaded Marks & Spencer to open early at 8:00Â am so those who had lost their clothes in the bombing could purchase replacements. Thatcher went from the conference to visit the injured at the Royal Sussex County Hospital.
Casualties
The bombing killed five people, none of whom were government ministers. However, a Conservative MP, Sir Anthony Berry, was killed, along with Eric Taylor (North-West Area Chairman of the Conservative Party), Lady (Jeanne) Shattock (wife of Sir Gordon Shattock, Western Area Chairman of the Conservative Party), Lady (Muriel) Maclean (wife of Sir Donald Maclean, President of the Scottish Conservatives), and Roberta Wakeham (wife of Parliamentary Treasury Secretary John Wakeham). Donald and Muriel Maclean were in the room in which the bomb exploded, but Sir Donald survived.
Several more were permanently disabled, including Walter Clegg, whose bedroom was directly above the blast, and Margaret Tebbit (the wife of Norman Tebbit, who was then President of the Board of Trade). 34 people were taken to hospital and recovered from their injuries. When hospital staff asked Norman Tebbit, who was less seriously injured than his wife, whether he was allergic to anything, he is said to have answered "bombs".
Aftermath
IRA statement
The IRA claimed responsibility the next day, and said that it would try again. Its statement read:
Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
Thatcher's response
Thatcher began the next session of the conference at 9:30Â am the following morning, as scheduled. She dropped from her speech most of her planned attacks on the Labour Party and said the bombing was "an attempt to cripple Her Majesty's democratically elected Government":
That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact that we are gathered here nowâ€"shocked, but composed and determinedâ€"is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.
One of her biographers wrote that Thatcher's "coolness, in the immediate aftermath of the attack and in the hours after it, won universal admiration. Her defiance was another Churchillian moment in her premiership which seemed to encapsulate both her own steely character and the British public's stoical refusal to submit to terrorism." Immediately afterwards, her popularity soared almost to the level it had been during the Falklands War. The Saturday after the bombing, Thatcher said to her constituents: "We suffered a tragedy not one of us could have thought would happen in our country. And we picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good British people do, and I thought, let us stand together for we are British! They were trying to destroy the fundamental freedom that is the birth-right of every British citizen, freedom, justice and democracy."
Approval in Britain
At the time of the bombing, the miners' strike was underway. Morrissey, frontman of the English alternative rock band the Smiths, joked shortly after: "The only sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher escaped unscathed." David Bret wrote in the book Morrissey: Scandal & Passion that "The tabloids were full of such remarks; jokes about the tragedy were cracked on radio and television programmes. A working-men's club in South Yorkshire seriously considered a whip-round "to pay for the bomber to have another go". In 1986, English punk band the Angelic Upstarts celebrated the IRA's assassination attempt with their single "Brighton Bomb". They released an album of the same name in 1987.
Patrick Magee
Once investigators had narrowed the seat of the blast to the bathroom of Room 629, police began to track down everyone who had stayed in the room. This eventually led them to "Roy Walsh", a pseudonym used by IRA member Patrick Magee. On 24 June 1985, he was arrested in Glasgow with other members of an IRA active service unit while planning further bombings.
In September 1985, Magee (then aged 35) was found guilty of planting the bomb, detonating it, and of five counts of murder. Magee received eight life sentences: seven for offences relating to the Brighton bombing, and the eighth for another bomb plot. The judge recommended that he serve at least 35 years. Later Home Secretary Michael Howard lengthened this to "whole life". However, Magee was released from prison in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, having served 14 years (including the time before his sentencing). A British Government spokesman said that his release "was hard to stomach" and an appeal by then Home Secretary Jack Straw to forestall it was turned down by the Northern Ireland High Court.
Four members of an IRA unit were also imprisoned for involvement in the plot. Magee, while admitting being part of the IRA unit responsible, maintains that the fingerprint evidence on a registration card from the hotel was faked.
In 2000, Magee spoke about the bombing in an interview with The Sunday Business Post. He told interviewer Tom McGurk that the British government's strategy at the time was to depict the IRA as mere criminals while containing the Troubles within Northern Ireland:
As long as the war was kept in that context, they could sustain the years of attrition. But in the early 1980s we succeeded in destroying both strategies. The hunger strike destroyed the notion of criminalisation and the Brighton bombing destroyed the notion of containment [...] After Brighton, anything was possible and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us; even the IRA itself, I believe, began to fully accept the priority of the campaign in England.
Of those killed in the bombing, Magee said: "I deeply regret that anybody had to lose their lives, but at the time did the Tory ruling class expect to remain immune from what their frontline troops were doing to us?"
Attitudes towards security
Daily Telegraph journalist David Hughes called the bombing "the most audacious attack on a British government since the Gunpowder Plot" and wrote that it "marked the end of an age of comparative innocence. From that day forward, all party conferences in this country have become heavily defended citadels".
In popular culture
The bombing is depicted in the 2011 biographical film The Iron Lady.
Jonathan Lee's 2015 novel High Dive is a fictionalised account of the bombing, written largely from the alternating perspectives of the hotel manager, his teenage daughter, and an IRA bombmaker who helps Magee. Rights to the book were purchased and it is in development as a potential feature film.
The third novel in Adrian McKinty's "Troubles Trilogy", In the Morning I'll be Gone, features his RUC detective hero Sean Duffy trying to prevent the Brighton bombing.
The bombing is a key event in G F Newman’s drama series ‘’The Corrupted’’, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 2018, starring Toby Jones as criminal businessman Joseph Olinska.
See also
- Carlton Club bombing
- 1981 Irish hunger strike
- Assassination of Spencer Perceval
- Chronology of Provisional Irish Republican Army actions (1980â€"89)
- Downing Street mortar attack
References
Sources
- Text of the BBC television news report on the morning of the attack
- BBC News photo journal of the attack
- BBC News report on Straw's attempt to prevent the early release of Magee
- Guardian story on the release of Magee in 1999
- An Phoblacht: Interview with Pat Magee regarding the Brighton bombing
- BBC report on Magee being convicted of the bombing
Further reading
- Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith (2016) 2: 309-16.
- Kieran Hughes, Terror Attack Brighton - Blowing up the Iron Lady (2014).
- Steve Ramsey, Something Has Gone Wrong - Dealing with the Brighton Bomb (2018).
