Four weeks later the process was derailed when the IRA exploded a massive bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Prime Minister and most of the Conservative hierarchy were staying during the party conference. She was very lucky to survive unscathed. The bomb ripped out the whole central section of the hotel and badly damaged her bathroom. When it went off, just before three in the morning, she had just been putting the finishing touches to her speech for the next day with Ronnie Millar and John Gummer. As they left, Robin Butler came in with a last letter for her to sign before she got ready for bed. But for that, she would have been in the bathroom at the critical moment and, though she might not have been killed, she would certainly have suffered serious injury from flying glass. Her sitting room, however, and the bedroom where Denis was asleep, were undamaged. Her first thought was that it was a car bomb outside; her next was to make sure that Denis was all right. ‘It touched me,’ Butler recalled, ‘because it was one of those moments where there could be no play- acting.’19 As Denis quickly pulled on some trousers over his pyjamas, she crossed the corridor to the room where the secretaries had been typing the speech. Only now did the scale of what had happened become clear.
Amazingly, the lights had stayed on. Millar, who had been thrown against a wall by the explosion as he walked away from her room, described the scene. ‘There were no cries for help, no sound at all, just dust, clouds of dust, followed by the occasional crunch of falling masonry from somewhere above. Otherwise silence. It was eerie.’ Pausing only to gather up the scattered pages of the precious speech which had burst from his briefcase, he hobbled back the way he had come and found Mrs Thatcher in the secretaries’ room ‘sitting on an upright chair, very still. The girls were standing on chairs peering out of a side window, bubbling with excitement… At length she murmured, “I think that was an assassination attempt, don’t you?”’20 Geoffrey and Elspeth Howe, the Gummers, David Wolfson and others who had been sleeping on the same corridor gathered in various states of undress, speculating about the possibility of a second device. They still did not know whether anyone had been hurt. It was a quarter of an hour before firemen arrived to escort them to safety down the main staircase and out through the kitchens, to be driven to Brighton police station. There they were gradually joined by other members of the Cabinet. Mrs Thatcher was still wearing the evening gown she had worn to the Conservative Agents’ Ball a few hours earlier. Following a quick consultation with Willie Whitelaw, Leon Brittan and John Gummer, she insisted that the final day of the conference must go on as planned. She refused to return to Downing Street but – with her security men anxious to hustle her away – changed into a blue suit and gave a calmly determined interview on camera to the BBC’s John Cole. ‘Even under the most appalling personal strain,’ he noted, ‘Margaret Thatcher… was a supreme political professional.’21 She was then driven to Lewes Police College, where she snatched a couple of hours’ sleep.
She woke to see the television pictures of Norman Tebbit being pulled agonisingly out of the rubble and hear the news that five people had been killed and Margaret Tebbit badly injured. She was shocked but still determined that the conference should go ahead. At 9.30 a.m. precisely Mrs Thatcher walked into the conference centre to emotional applause to give her speech, shorn of the normal party point-scoring but prefaced by a defiant denunciation of the bombers. The bomb, she said, was not only ‘an inhuman and undiscriminating attempt to massacre innocent, unsuspecting men and women’. It was also ‘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.22
Mrs 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. ‘We suffered a tragedy not one of us could have thought would happen in our country,’ she told her constituents in Finchley the following weekend. ‘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.’23 Her popularity rating temporarily recovered to near-Falklands levels. In public she appeared unruffled by the attack. But the psychological damage may have been greater than she showed. Carol immediately flew back from Korea and found her mother at Chequers on the Sunday morning ‘calm but… still shaken’. For ever afterwards she felt that Margaret Tebbit’s fate – confined to a wheelchair for life – had been intended for her.24 Though the lights had not gone out at Brighton, she always carried a torch in her handbag thereafter. The assassination of Indira Gandhi two weeks after Brighton underlined how vulnerable she was. Denis bought her a watch and wrote her a rare note: ‘Every minute is precious.’25
Brighton had a political effect as well. ‘Though it killed only a few unfortunate people,’ Alistair McAlpine suggested some years later, ‘it had a profound effect on the Tory party.’26 The annual conference, hitherto remarkably open, was henceforth ringed by tight security. Many felt that not only Norman Tebbit, but Mrs Thatcher too, was never the same again. She seemed to lose some of her self-confidence and her political touch.
In the short run Mrs Thatcher’s enthusiasm for talks with Dublin was understandably dented. The next month Garret FitzGerald came to Chequers to try to make progress on the lines explored by the New Ireland Forum, whose report had been published in May. This set out three possible solutions: a united Ireland, a federal or confederal Ireland, or some form of joint sovereignty. FitzGerald recognised that the first two were out of the question; but he hoped to win Mrs Thatcher’s support for some version of the third option. If she would agree to give Dublin a role in the government of Northern Ireland – he was happy to call it ‘joint authority’ rather than joint sovereignty if that helped – he thought he could win a referendum in the south to scrap clauses 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution which laid claim to the whole island. Mrs Thatcher, however, doubted whether he could deliver this, except in return for an unacceptable degree of southern interference in the north. She was not prepared to pay a high price to be rid of clauses which she did not think should have been in the Irish constitution in the first place. She only wanted to commit the Irish to closer security cooperation across the border, ideally by means of a security zone on the Irish side where British troops would be allowed to operate. Alternatively she was prepared to consider redrawing the border and repatriating nationalists to the Republic.27 FitzGerald was disappointed, but still unprepared for the devastating post-summit press conference in which Mrs Thatcher dismissed all three of the Forum’s options out of hand. She started positively, but right at the end, when asked about the Forum’s proposals, she slipped her leash:
I have made it quite clear… that a unified Ireland was one solution that is
It was not so much what she said but the withering tone in which she said it. Her uncompromising triple repetition ‘out… out… out’ was taken as a gratuitous slap in the face for FitzGerald and seemed to slam the door on all the hopes that had been raised by their relationship. The Irish press next day was seething with fury, and London – Dublin relations seemed to be back to square one. But in fact this diplomatic disaster turned out to be the low point from which the 1985 Agreement emerged. Mrs Thatcher herself realised that she had gone too far and recognised that she would have to give some ground to repair the damage. Above all, her provocative language persuaded Reagan that it was time to get involved. Not only was the White House bombarded with the usual wild communications from Irish pressure groups like the Ancient Order of Hibernians;29 but, more constructively, O’Neill, Kennedy, Moynihan and forty-two other Senators and Congressmen wrote to him that ‘Mrs Thatcher’s peremptory dismissal of the reasonable alternatives put forth by the Forum’ had dashed the most hopeful opportunity for peace since the Sunningdale accord of 1973.30 They urged Reagan to press her to reconsider when she came to Camp David in December; and he did exactly as they asked.
The record confirms that Northern Ireland was discussed over lunch. Mrs Thatcher assured the President that, ‘despite reports to the contrary, she and Garret FitzGerald were on good terms and we are working toward making progress on this difficult question’. He replied that ‘making progress is important, and observed that there is great Congressional interest in the matter’, specifically mentioning O’Neill’s request that he appeal to her to be ‘reasonable and forthcoming’.31 To the Speaker himself Reagan wrote that he had ‘made a special effort to bring your letter to her personal attention…I also personally emphasised the need for progress in resolving the complex situation in Northern Ireland and the desirability for flexibility on the part of all the involved
