Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  Those involved did not, at the time, fully understand what had happened. When she left the hotel, Mrs Thatcher was not aware that anyone had died.69 In the days before mobile phones, emails and twenty-four-hour news, there was an acute shortage of information. It was only when being bussed back to the conference centre after daybreak that morning and hearing the news on the driver’s radio that ‘An attempt has been made to murder the Prime Minister and her Cabinet’ that Stephen Sherbourne realized the full dimensions of what he had just been through.70 In the police station, rumours started to come in about who might or might not have been hurt. The best-informed person was the US Ambassador, Charlie Price, who sat behind the Chief Constable’s desk and got on the phone to his Embassy.71 On the seafront, ministers, MPs and party representatives wandered around in a shocked state, some still in dinner jackets from the ball, others in their pyjamas. Sir Keith Joseph, resplendent in a Noël-Coward-style silk dressing-gown, conscientiously took his ministerial red box with him. Alistair McAlpine, the Tory Treasurer, rang the chairman of Marks and Spencer and persuaded him to open his Brighton branch early in the morning so that the victims could reclothe themselves in time for the conference. While at the police station, Mrs Thatcher spoke briefly to the BBC. ‘The conference will go on,’ she said. ‘The conference will go on, as usual,’ emphasizing those last two words.72

  At 4.40, much against the will of John Gummer, who realized that Mrs Thatcher would be ‘out of touch, which she hated’,73 the police drove the Thatchers to Lewes Police College several miles out of Brighton. There they spent the remainder of the night. After saying prayers with Crawfie, who shared her makeshift room, Mrs Thatcher slept for about an hour and a half in her clothes. While she was asleep, Gummer rang the college with the news that the consequences of the bomb were much more serious than had first been supposed. Some people were dead, and the firemen were digging people out of the rubble. Robin Butler decided not to wake her.74 When she did wake, and appeared, dressed in new clothes for the conference, Butler gave her the news, including the fact that rescuers were still trying to extricate the Chief Whip, John Wakeham, from the debris: they could hear him calling beneath it. Crawfie turned on BBC breakfast television and called out to Mrs Thatcher, ‘Look! They’re getting Norman Tebbit out.’75 Tebbit, in his pyjamas, was trapped under rubble, and firemen were trying to work him free. For once in her life, Mrs Thatcher was grateful for the television cameras: their bright lights were trained on the ruins to help the firemen operate.76 Mrs Thatcher was shocked by what she heard and saw, but would not contemplate the suggestion that, in view of the deaths, the conference should not go ahead. ‘We must be in the conference centre in time to start the conference on time,’ she said. ‘We must show that terrorism cannot defeat democracy. It’s what they [the victims] would have wanted.’ ‘I was hugely moved,’ Butler recalled.77

  The conference did start on time, and Mrs Thatcher walked on to the platform with the party Chairman. The only departure from the schedule caused by the bomb was a short service and a two-minute silence in memory of the victims.* Then the debate – which, by chance, was on Northern Ireland – proceeded as usual.

  Meanwhile, a makeshift office for Mrs Thatcher was set up in the conference centre, and her team got to work altering the speech. It was airless, and there was so little room that the secretaries had their typewriters on their knees.78 All the party-political knockabout which normally formed a portion of the conference speech had to be jettisoned, and a new introduction, about the bomb, had to be composed, with most of the work done by Michael Alison and Ronnie Millar. At about eleven, the flow of composition was broken by the arrival of the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Arundel and Brighton (the future Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor), who conducted a private service of prayers in the temporary room, which Mrs Thatcher attended. In the course of the morning, rumours ebbed and flowed, with hopes raised and dashed. Those in the room were told, for example, that Roberta Wakeham, wife of John, was recovering.79 In fact, she died. Mrs Thatcher, famous in her inner circle for her pre-speech nerves, was almost serene, distracted from her usual worries by the sufferings of others: ‘She was much calmer and less agitated than she normally was before a big speech.’80

  Mrs Thatcher delivered her speech after lunch, as was customary. Dressed neatly and with her hair as well in place as ever, though not, as would normally have been the case, attended to by the hairdresser that morning, she was calm. She said that the ‘inhuman’ bomb had been ‘an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government … 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.’81 Then, after thanking the police, emergency services and party workers, she turned to what she called ‘business as usual’. After addressing the ongoing miners’ strike,† Mrs Thatcher reached her peroration. ‘The nation faces what is probably the most testing crisis of our time, the battle between the extremists and the rest … This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.’82 While her standing ovation was deafening, not everyone felt her speech rose to the occasion. ‘Not particularly good,’ Douglas Hurd wrote in his diary, ‘but she had had no sleep and is tearfully applauded for what she is.’83

  After her speech, Mrs Thatcher and Denis visited the injured in the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton, passing on to the patients the flowers that had been sent to her by well-wishers. John Wakeham was unconscious and Norman Tebbit scarcely able to speak, with ‘his face so swollen that I could barely recognise him’.84 She could see Wakeham only through the internal windows of the hospital. But she did speak to Tebbit’s wife, Margaret, who told her, ‘Margaret, I can’t feel a thing below my neck.’85 Mrs Thatcher also chatted to Harvey Thomas, the conference organizer, who had fallen two floors and been trapped for a couple of hours up to his waist in water from burst tanks. In Thomas’s view, Mrs Thatcher felt guilt: ‘She felt huge responsibility for all the deaths and injuries. It was this sense of loyalty.’86

  The Thatchers were then driven, at speed, to Chequers, in time for her fifty-ninth birthday the next day. It was only at church near by, two days after leaving Brighton, that Mrs Thatcher gave way to tears: ‘as the sun came through the stained glass windows, I thought – “this is the day I was not meant to see” – And then I remembered my friends who cannot see it. I have never known such a blend of gratitude and sorrow.’87 ‘Not long after the bomb, Denis bought his wife a watch and gave it to her with a note which said “Every minute is precious”.’88

  The final statistics were that five people died* in the Brighton bomb and thirty-one people were treated for injury.† Norman Tebbit made a slow, and in the view of some, incomplete recovery from his injuries. John Wakeham’s legs were saved after prolonged treatment. Margaret Tebbit never escaped her paralysis and was to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Those close to Mrs Thatcher believed that, as well as being physically unscathed, she suffered no serious mental problems either. There were a few small changes – from then on, ‘I always kept a torch beside my bed in a strange house,’89 and at her summit with Garret FitzGerald at Chequers the following month, she insisted on leaving her bedroom door open to avoid the Howes’ fate of being trapped inside.90 The main practical consequence for her was a much greater isolation from the public, as she was even more intensely protected than in the past.* She may also have felt ‘like the Royal family in the Blitz, that she and those around her were now part of the national struggle’.91 ‘We shall remember – not the bomb or the ruined building – but your courage, calm and nobility in the aftermath,’ wrote John Coles. ‘Not for the first time Britain has come to be deeply grateful to you.’92 The IRA statement claiming responsibility for the bombing contained the famous and chilling phrases: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’

/>   A day before the Brighton bomb, Robert Armstrong had sent Mrs Thatcher his proposed speaking notes for her planned November meeting with FitzGerald. She did not read the notes until after the bomb. When she did, she did not like what they contained. They included a draft joint declaration on Northern Ireland which stated that both communities should be entitled to give their identities ‘appropriate public, political and social expression’.93 ‘?? What is this meant to mean?’ Mrs Thatcher wrote. On the top of the page on which the draft declaration appeared, she added: ‘I could not possibly agree to this. It would strike fear into the Unionists.’ On Charles Powell’s covering note, she wrote: ‘The events of Thursday night at Brighton mean that we must go very slow on these talks if not stop them. It could look as if we were bombed into making concessions to the Republic.’ A few days later, she noted, for Powell’s eyes only, that ‘ “The bomb” … may in the end kill any new initiative because I suspect it will be the first of a series.’94

  What seems extraordinary in retrospect, however, is how little the policy on Northern Ireland actually changed in the light of the Brighton bomb. Despite a very nearly successful attempt by the IRA to destroy the entire British government, and the moral prestige which attached to Mrs Thatcher for her courageous behaviour in the face of the attack, no attempt was made to take political advantage of the situation. Unionists hoped that Mrs Thatcher would call off the upcoming summit with the Taoiseach and that talks between the two governments would be ended. No one in government took this view. There is no evidence that anyone suggested to Mrs Thatcher that she seize the moment to insist on stronger security measures. There was no campaign to use the bomb to show the world that the IRA was the common enemy. Instead, after the slightest of pauses, the machine of negotiation rolled on as before, almost as if nothing had happened. The only person trying seriously to slow it down was Mrs Thatcher herself. She felt that she was confronted with extremism on two fronts: on 28 October came the revelation that Arthur Scargill’s NUM had been getting money from the Libyan dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, to help finance the miners’ strike (see Chapter 6). She was in no mood to concede to either enemy.

  Less than three weeks after the attempt on Mrs Thatcher’s life, assassins succeeded in murdering Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India. Although she was not close to Mrs Gandhi in political views, Mrs Thatcher had always liked and respected her as a leader. Both women were graduates of Somerville College, Oxford (though they were not contemporaries), and each had a fellow feeling for the only other woman in executive charge of an important country. They used to take comfort in private conversations about their difficulties with their children.95 Mrs Thatcher was shocked by Mrs Gandhi’s death, and duly flew out to her funeral in Delhi. There she received from Geoffrey Howe passages of the draft communiqué for her forthcoming summit with Garret FitzGerald. In deference to the patently high threat to Mrs Thatcher from another terrorist attack, the venue of the summit had been moved from Dublin to Chequers,* but the date – 18 November – was unchanged.

  Fired up by her ordeal, Mrs Thatcher wrote ‘No’ beside several of the proposed passages which Howe had sent her. She did not like the suggestion that a British government would endorse a pro-united Ireland vote in the North, or that the different communities in the province should be ‘reflected’ in the institutions.96 Charles Powell noticed her different mood after the bomb: ‘It was no good talking to her about Ireland for quite a long time afterwards. She would say, “If we appease them, it will be worse.” ’97 When the British Ambassador in Dublin, Alan Goodison, reported that ‘Dr FitzGerald cannot afford to come away from the summit empty handed,’ she wrote coldly, ‘That is not my problem.’98

  October 1984. After the Brighton bomb, Mrs Thatcher calls a pause in Anglo-Irish negotiation. She does not want it to look ‘as if we were bombed into making concessions to the Republic’.

  At a meeting with officials before she left for India, Mrs Thatcher had thrown up all sorts of reasons against continuing the negotiations. She objected strongly to the idea that the Republic should have a representative in Belfast. ‘Why should the Irish have such a thing?’ she challenged David Goodall. ‘How would you like it if there was a Russian representative in London who had to be consulted about everything?’ To this Goodall replied: ‘Well, Prime Minister, 30 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom aren’t Russians. ‘I see,’ retorted Mrs Thatcher. ‘It’s like the Sudeten problem.’99*

  On 14 November, with only four days left before the summit, Mrs Thatcher gathered officials, including Armstrong and Goodall, and told them that the Irish speaking note for the summit was making ‘a number of unacceptable demands’,100 and showed that Dublin still did not understand that it could not have joint authority. She even raised the question of ‘whether the present talks could usefully continue’.101 After the meeting, Armstrong telephoned the Irish Ambassador, Noel Dorr, and asked him to call on the Cabinet Office the following day. Dorr found Armstrong ‘quite gloomy’. He reported Mrs Thatcher’s misgivings to Dublin: ‘There is a good deal of concern (translation: Mrs Thatcher didn’t like it at all) and we shall have to do some fence mending.’102 Armstrong told Mrs Thatcher that Dorr had reassured him that the Irish speaking note was ‘not intended to represent a hardening of the Irish position or preparation for failure’ at the summit. It was not a ‘bottom line’.103 This made Mrs Thatcher suspicious. ‘A strange visit,’ she wrote on top of Armstrong’s message, ‘– how did he know?’ She guessed correctly that Armstrong had contrived for Dorr to convey his conciliatory message to Mrs Thatcher via him. Although it could be argued that Armstrong was helping clear up misunderstandings, it could also be said that he was trying to frustrate Mrs Thatcher’s intentions. In Charles Powell’s view, ‘She did not have great faith in Robert on this. He was a Heath man.’104 Similar doubts applied to Goodall: ‘David she always suspected because he was a Roman Catholic.’105 Yet she never, throughout the process, made any attempt to wrest the negotiations out of the hands of Armstrong and Goodall, and she generally expressed a high opinion of their abilities.† One of her skills, though she never admitted it, was to permit others to do things of which she in theory disapproved.

  Rather surprisingly, Mrs Thatcher found something of an ally in her doubts in Douglas Hurd whom, in September 1984, she had made Northern Ireland secretary. Despite his Foreign Office background and views, Hurd was, by conviction, a moderate Unionist, and was more attentive than Howe or Armstrong to the fears of the Unionist majority in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Office (NIO), now brought into the British negotiating team, had a realistic view of the problems on the ground, and Hurd, on his first visit to Dublin on 25 October, floated the idea of a more modest set of measures to improve security co-operation rather than a constitutional referendum.*

  As the Chequers summit approached, Dublin expected trouble: ‘We are aware of the enormous impact of both Brighton and the assassination of Mrs Gandhi … The Prime Minister’s cast of mind is strongly negative and this could create a real difficulty for the Taoiseach.’106

  Garret FitzGerald and his party arrived at Chequers before dinner on Sunday 18 November 1984. It was one of those cold and foggy days in which that part of England, at that time of year, specializes. Mrs Thatcher and FitzGerald began with a tête-à-tête in which they argued, without much meeting of minds. Mrs Thatcher asked FitzGerald why Catholics in the North were still disaffected although they were no longer persecuted. He replied that it was because the minority had no part in decisions. This was ‘not uncommon internationally’, Mrs Thatcher pointed out. She compared it with the Ndebele in Zimbabwe or Muslims in India: sadly, ‘it was inevitable when political parties were based on confessional or racial groups.’ It would be better for voters ‘to join more widely based parties’.107† FitzGerald countered by arguing for power-sharing, but Mrs Thatcher did not take up the suggestion. Both leaders briefed their teams afterwards. Mrs Thatcher’s briefing, Goodall recalled, was ‘aggres
sively negative’.108

  The following morning, the battle continued. Mrs Thatcher questioned whether there was a realistic chance of amending the Irish Constitution to recognize the border. If not, it would be better to work for less ambitious objectives, especially security co-operation. FitzGerald disagreed: without greater political progress, Sinn Fein would overtake the SDLP at the local elections the following May. He even warned of the possibility of civil war if the chance were missed. Mrs Thatcher got increasingly irritated by what she saw as the problem of loyalty: ‘what the Taoiseach seemed to be saying was that the minority in Northern Ireland wanted to make its living there but owe its allegiance to the Republic’:109 ‘what was being sought was to achieve the effect of repartition without actually doing it in geographical terms.’ When FitzGerald argued that the minority could not identify with the local police, she responded that she was ‘worried by the trend of the conversation. The Taoiseach seemed to be saying that he wanted a Republican enclave in Northern Ireland.’110 He replied angrily that 85,000 Catholics had been driven out of their homes in mixed areas – ‘the biggest forced population move in Europe since World War Two’. Might not the IRA infiltrate the police if more Roman Catholics joined? asked Mrs Thatcher.