Brighton hotel bombing

The bombing killed five, none of whom were Cabinet ministers. A Conservative MP, Sir Anthony Berry (Deputy Chief Whip),[10] was killed, along with Eric Taylor (North-West Area Chairman of the Conservative Party), Lady Shattock (Jeanne, wife of Sir Gordon Shattock, Western Area Chairman of the Conservative Party), Lady Maclean (Muriel, wife of Sir Donald Maclean, President of the Scottish Conservatives), and Roberta Wakeham (wife of Chief Whip John Wakeham). Donald and Muriel Maclean were in the room in which the bomb exploded, but Donald survived.[9]

Several more were permanently disabled, including Walter Clegg, whose bedroom was directly above the blast,[11] and Margaret Tebbit (the wife of Norman Tebbit, who was then President of the Board of Trade). Thirty-four 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".[9]

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.[12]

Thatcher began the next session of the conference at 9:30 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 now—shocked, but composed and determined—is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.[13]

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."[14] Immediately afterwards, her popularity soared almost to the level it had been during the Falklands War.[15] 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."[16]

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."[17] 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[18] "to pay for the bomber to have another go".[19] In 1986, English punk band the Angelic Upstarts celebrated[20] the IRA's assassination attempt with their single "Brighton Bomb". They released an album of the same name in 1987.[21]

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.[3] Magee was tailed for months by MI5 and special branch, and finally arrested in an IRA flat in Glasgow. Despite days of interrogation he refused to answer questions - but a fingerprint on a registration card recovered from the hotel ruins was enough to convict him. He was arrested on 24 June 1985 with other members of an IRA active service unit while planning further bombings in England. Many years later, in August 2000, Magee admitted to The Guardian that he carried out the bombing, but told them he did not accept he left a fingerprint on the registration card, saying "If that was my fingerprint I did not put it there".[22]

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. Justice Sir Leslie Boreham recommended that he serve at least 35 years, describing Magee as "a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity."[23] 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).[8] 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.

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.[24]

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?"[24]

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".[9]