Margaret Thatcher and the Grand Hotel bombing

The second Significant Visitor to be discussed on this blog will be a character from the opposite end of the scale to the previously featured Princess Diana (what scale I am referring to I’ll leave to the conclusion of the reader). When thinking of the so-called ‘Iron Lady’ in Brighton, there is likely one specific historic event that comes to mind for most: the infamous IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel. One could hardly tell these days, when walking along King’s Road and looking up at the iconic Victorian hotel, that it had ever been completely blasted open down its centre, with iron frame and debris jutting and dangling out in all directions, exposing the obliterated suites within.

 Nor is it easy to wrap one’s head around either the forethought and cunning that went into the IRA’s plot, nor the uncanny timing of events that resulted in Thatcher surviving the attempted assassination.

The Grand Hotel after the bomb. Picture source: Wikipedia

Thatcher became a significant target for the IRA’s wrath following the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, during which time she refused to grant the Irish Republican prisoners ‘political’ rather than criminal status, prolonging the strike and resulting in the deaths of 10 Irish prisoners. The IRA’s targeting of the Establishment predated Thatcher’s time in office, but her fervent, sometimes undiplomatic refusal to ‘negotiate with terrorists’, and her handling of the hunger strike, made her one of their most adamantly targeted enemies. 

 Having settled on the plan to assassinate her, several years of planning ensued, including IRA members reconnoitering the 1982 and 1983 Conservative Party Conferences. Over three weeks before the day of the conference, IRA member Patrick Magee checked into room 629 of the Grand Hotel under the pseudonym Roy Walsh, assuming Thatcher would be placed on a higher floor for security reasons. He placed the long-delay bomb behind the panelling of the bathtub, wrapped in plastic to disguise the scent of the explosives, and there it remained until 2:54am on the 12th of October 1984. It can be assumed that he thought even if she were not put in room 629, she would likely be in one close enough that she would still not survive the blast and, if not the blast directly, the collapsing floors because of it.

In the end she was not placed in room 629, nor a particularly high floor at all for that matter. In fact she was placed in the Napoleon Suite on the first floor: a suite with three rooms and a sea view. Before she arrived, the room was inspected by a police dog and a handler, though only for thirty minutes, and none of the nearby rooms were inspected. Her security team and the police force unsurprisingly faced much scrutiny after the bombing: questions were raised as to how Magee could have bypassed security in the first place, how a bomb could be built and planted in the hotel, and why, before her stay, only a cursory, half-hour inspection was carried out. It is suggested the main fear preceding the conference was that of public disruption and protests by the striking miners, not a long-delay planted bomb intended to obliterate both Thatcher and most of the British Cabinet.

At the time of the explosion Margaret Thatcher was still awake: she was amending her conference speech that she was set to deliver the following day. She finished work on the speech around a quarter to three in the morning (being somebody who prided herself on her ability to function on only four or five hours sleep a night), and then decided to carry out some work on government business with her private secretary, Robin Butler. According to reports she went into the bathroom and returned to her desk at 2:52am, just two minutes before the bomb went off five floors above, leaving her bathroom destroyed and all the windows in the room blown outwards.

 The explosion was enormous, blowing upwards and dislodging a five tonne Victorian chimney stack which then came crashing down through several floors. Five people were killed, over thirty were injured - one man even fell through several collapsing floors to the basement (and survived), but by some bizarre odds, Thatcher herself was entirely uninjured. There is hardly a doubt that had she still been in the bathroom just two minutes longer she would have been brutally injured, if not certainly killed. Her husband Denis and her private secretary were also completely unharmed.

Today you can see the replica chimney stack that replaced the one missing here, just off the building's centre.

Picture source: John Minihan; Getty images

Immediately afterwards she, her husband, and the other living Cabinet ministers, made their own way downstairs and out through the hotel’s rear entrance. They were taken to the Brighton Police Station where Thatcher was interviewed and stated that ‘life must go on as usual’ and, though she had only narrowly avoided annihilation, insisted that the conference, less than six hours later, would be going ahead as planned. At the conference, a two minute silence was held for those that died in the explosion, she performed her speech, and afterwards was swiftly escorted out of the hotel, and straight out of Brighton, to which she did not return for four years - though when she did, with a million-pound security operation in place, just in case. 

It is mind-bending to consider the amount of luck Thatcher must have had to survive such a series of events. The consideration and forethought required to have the bomb in place was already extreme; the lapse in security judgement to not sweep the other rooms for threats was unusual; and the size of the blast, along with the collapsing chimney, should all have meant there was an extremely small chance of her escaping unharmed. Combine those details with the fact that not only was she awake in the room at the time of the blast, but directly beneath it only moments before, leaves one marvelling at the narrowness of her escape. The concept of her incredible luck prompted the notoriously chilling statement issued the next day by the IRA: “today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once - you have to be lucky always.”

Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis leaving the hotel after the bombing.

Picture source: John Downing; Getty images

Thinking back to this event now, decades after her time in office, begs the questions: what might have turned out differently had the IRA succeeded? Who would have replaced her? Would the economy have suffered more or less, both short and long term, without her commitment to ambitious and severe fiscal policies? There isn’t room in this piece for such economical philosophising, but considering the impact she had on Britain, both economically and sociologically, it is worth wondering how different things would look today, had she never seen the sunrise on the 12th of October, 1984.