Saturday 12 October marks 40 years since a bomb planted by the IRA exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton during Conservative Party conference – killing five people, injuring more than 30, and missing the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, by a matter of minutes. It’s an act of terrorism etched into modern British history, right down to Thatcher’s defiant conference speech hours after the blast, and the IRA’s chilling statement in response to the news their main target had survived: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
But that’s not the start of the story. And in this series of The History Podcast, writer Glenn Patterson takes us back. First to September 1984, when Patrick Magee checked in to the Grand Hotel to hide a device set to explode in three weeks, three days, six hours, and 36 minutes’ time. Then further back, to May 1981, when Bobby Sands died in prison after 66 days on hunger strike – a death for which the IRA blamed Thatcher personally, triggering the plan to assassinate her. Then further still, all the way to the mid 19th-century and the Irish republican movement’s first experiments with explosives.
Patterson is a novelist, and this series is as much about storytelling as updating the historical record. The cold, deadly sequence of events is punctuated with comments from Magee – as Patterson tries to get into the mind of the bomber – as well as with unsettled reflections on his own memories of the time. “It had been by Northern Ireland standards a quiet enough summer, a quiet enough year,” he recalls. “Just over 50 conflict-related deaths to the start of October, well down on the last really bad year I could remember.” In the background throughout is the tick, tick, tick of the timer, a reminder of the “literal bath bomb there in the en suite”. The most brazen attack on British politics since the Gunpowder Plot. It’s not a comfortable listen, especially for anyone who has just returned from party conference season.
The History Podcast: The Brighton Bomb
BBC Sounds
[See also: “Giant” is a generous and pitiless portrait of Roald Dahl]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour