‘Patrick Magee remained awake in his Cork hideaway, glued to the transistor radio, willing the pirate station to update its hourly news bulletin.’ When the station broadcast the news that the timebomb Magee had set in Brighton three-and-a-half weeks earlier had indeed gone off - not all IRA bombs did - he was flooded with relief. Having been ‘drained by [the] tension, Magee sank into bed and fell asleep.’

Those quotes are from a typically vivid scene in the recent book Killing Thatcher, by the long-serving Guardian journalist Rory Carroll. The book is notable for its novelistic detail, and for its insight into the IRA’s planning and execution of the bombing, a part of the story about which very little had previously been published. To mark the 40th anniversary today, Carroll spoke to The Argus about the IRA’s audacious plot, and its legacy.

At first, the IRA’s idea of assassinating the Prime Minister was, in your words, ‘a fantasy on par with the neon cinema signs advertising Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’. How did it go from being an unachievable fantasy to seeming plausible?

Rory Carroll: It was incremental. It was handed to the so-called ‘England Department’, which was this small unit, secretive even by the IRA’s standards, within the IRA. Which was tasked with ‘exporting the war’, as they would put it, to England. They had been doing so since the early 1970s, planting bombs in London and other parts of England. They were tasked with the idea: how feasible might it be to try and target Thatcher? It would have seemed like science fiction at the outset, because they had never attempted anything on this scale, or anything as difficult as this. They had targeted some politicians before, but no-one at this level of protection. But they confirmed two places that they knew in advance that she was going to be: one was at the Tory party conference, the other was on election night, at the count centre in Finchley. And I think they quickly determined that the Tory party conference was a much more reliable and feasible target. She tended to stay at the same hotel when it was in Brighton, and they could start planning around that. That’s when it started becoming real.

Margaret Thatcher's bathroom in the Napoleon suite at The Grand hotel after the bomb hjhj Your book suggests that the Brighton Bomb was partly an act of revenge over the hunger strikers’ deaths, but also an attempt to ‘break the stalemate’ of the Troubles. Which was more important, in terms of the IRA’s motives?

I think revenge was perhaps the more important. The death of Bobby Sands and the other nine prisoners, the impact of that is difficult to overstate: there was a sense that they had become martyrs. The grassroots of republicans was so appalled, that avenging their deaths, or being seen to strike back, was going to be a very popular move. And that had a lot of value, attraction for the IRA, because all the time you’re struggling to keep your followers engaged, animated, hopeful, in the teeth of setbacks - people being arrested, arms caches being discovered… you’re facing into the headwinds of a hostile mainstream press, in England and Ireland, and Northern Ireland. All the time you’re trying to keep morale going. So a strike against the British government, and against Thatcher of all people, was going to be very popular. Then, the second thing, trying to break the stalemate - that was more like a strategic calculus. They realised that they were not going to be pushing the Brits back into the sea, and so, where was the conflict going to go? This was one potential way to try to break the stalemate, without really knowing what the consequences would be. The status quo wasn’t really in their favour, so it was an attempt to scramble the status quo and see what came from that.

The government’s response to the bombing has come to be seen as a great example of how to marginalise terrorists by defiance - by carrying on. What’s your perspective on that?

On one level, the fact that the bomb did go off, right there was a big success for the IRA. The British state, British security forces, were trying to contain the Troubles within Northern Ireland and to show that, gradually IRA violence was being curbed, corralled and contained. It had kind of slid off the front pages of newspapers... For the IRA, this was a problem. The Brighton bomb showed that the IRA capacity was greater than people imagined; it showed that they had outfoxed the British security system, and layers of security, to be able to reach right into the inner sanctum of the British state. And so, even though Thatcher survived, the mere fact of the bomb was a propaganda coup for the IRA. So, from the British state’s point of view, the response was to try to minimise its significance. One way to do that was by carrying on. This reflected the stiff upper lip, the Blitz spirit of an older generation of British people. But it was also a way to turn an IRA propaganda victory into a propaganda victory for Thatcher herself, by showing defiance and courage, showing that she was not intimidated, and was not going to be cowed or frightened or terrorised into submission or into panicking. It was Margaret Thatcher, in some ways, at her best. By being quite controlled, and yet defiant, turning the tables on the IRA is what she aimed to do, and I think in some ways she succeeded.

The caftermath at The Grand

Thatcher could have given in, or done the opposite and gone for extreme reprisals, as I think many wanted or expected her to do. But she seemed to not do either of those.

Giving in, what would that have looked like? ‘You know what, IRA, you win, I’m going to withdraw from Northern Ireland’. That was a complete fantasy and was never going to happen. But, the second scenario, whereby the British state could be panicked into a backlash… we could have seen a return to the internment policy of the 1970s, when security forces went around arresting and detaining hundreds of suspects, who would then be corralled into the Maze prison or other locations without due process, without being charged. This had been a disastrous policy: it stoked anger in the republican community, it was a very bad look in terms of human rights. It became a kind of recruiting tool, in nationalist communities, for the IRA. In the Troubles, every action would cause a counter-reaction. And so, had Thatcher’s government done this in 1984, it could well have benefited the IRA and the wider republican movement, and re-legitimised the IRA’s campaign. Thatcher didn’t fall into that trap.

What lessons can people nowadays facing political violence take from the story of the Brighton bombing?

Don’t overreact! I ended up reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq - those wars were the Bush administration’s blundering overreaction to 9/11. And now we see in Israel… I think what’s been happening in Gaza is a lopsided response to a terrorist attack. It just perpetuates a cycle of killing. I’m not saying states don’t have a right or the necessity to respond to attacks and atrocities, but there’s a need to be smart about it. Having seen what’s happened in so many conflicts since Brighton, we can look back at the relative restraint of the British government with a sense of ‘that’s how to do it’.

Rory Carroll was interviewed by fellow author Steve Ramsey, for The Argus.