The Brighton bombing and Britain’s secret conduit to the Provisional IRA
KILLING THATCHER The IRA, the manhunt and the long war on the Crown
RORY CARROLL 416pp. Mudlark. £25.
OPERATION CHIFFON The secret story of MI5 and MI6 and the road to peace in Ireland
PETER TAYLOR 400pp. Bloomsbury. £22.
KILLING THATCHER is a book about “making war” – the assassination attempt at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984, which nearly killed the then prime minister. Operation Chiffon is a book about “making peace” – the secret MI5/MI6 back channel to the IRA that is held to be central to bringing the Troubles in Northern Ireland to an end in the 1990s.
The key figure in Rory’s Carroll’s Killing Thatcher is the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee – sentenced to eight life terms for five counts of murder – who became one of the most controversial beneficiaries of the early-release scheme for terrorist prisoners under the terms of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. The key figure in Peter Taylor’s Operation Chiffon is “Robert”, a senior MI6 officer who in 1988 transferred to MI5 and took over stewardship of a highly sensitive covert dialogue with the Provisional IRA. He had to fall on his sword and leave the service when it emerged that he had continued to talk to the paramilitaries after ministers ordered this back channel to be terminated.
Although Magee and Robert represented opposing sides, both men nonetheless signed off on important encounters in the same way. As Magee was taken down to his cell after sentencing he defiantly shouted out the Irish Republican slogan Tiocfaidh ár lá (“Our day will come”). Curiously, Robert also employed this phrase as the pay-off to the coded message that he sent back to the Republican movement in May 1993 – after two boys were murdered by an IRA blast in Warrington and the John Major government found itself temporarily reluctant to proceed with the secret talks with the Provisionals. Robert was reassuring the Republican movement that this was just a blip. The very use of this slogan says something about Irish nationalism’s enduring linguistic hegemony in Troubles discourse – including among significant quarters of British officialdom. Language matters, and the Brighton bomb also gave rise to one of the best-known soundbites of the Troubles, in the form of the IRA’s communiqué claiming responsibility for the attack: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always”.
Neither author shies away from the horror of the violence. Like Tony Blair, they are “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Nonetheless, both books – and Taylor’s in particular – further reflect the linguistic predominance of nationalism and even of Provisionalism
