More surreal still was the snippet of conversation that I overheard in the breakfast room: “He was on the fifth floor but the fifth floor doesn’t exist any more.” Later, when I phoned home, I heard that the IRA had blown up the Grand hotel, Brighton, a few yards from where I was. The minister had lost his suit in the blast.
We are near the 20th anniversary of that event: 20 years since Margaret Tebbit was confined to a wheelchair, 20 years since Sir Anthony Berry MP died because he was in the bathroom cleaning his teeth. He left a vacancy in parliament that I filled.
As Batman scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace last week, as hunt protesters stormed the Commons chamber and a journalist strode into parliament with a model bomb, I was reminded of the farcical lack of security in Brighton before the attack. Just inside the front door of the Grand were pigeonholes holding bedroom keys. They were unattended. I worked then for Nigel Lawson, the chancellor. Whenever I needed to deliver papers to his room I helped myself to his key, unchallenged. Anyone could have scooped up a key to a minister’s room.
A BBC documentary last week reminded us that after the explosion the Sussex police conducted a faultless investigation and soon decided that Patrick Magee was the bomber. When the palace and parliament have been blown up, we can look forward to an effective inquiry leading to an arrest. It is consoling to know.
Five years before Brighton, when Labour was still in power, I had been working in the Conservative party offices when a blast rattled the windows. Airey Neave MP, a confidant of Margaret Thatcher and Northern Ireland spokesman, had been blown up in his car within the precincts of parliament. People recall that Thatcher allowed Bobby Sands and others to starve themselves to death. But remember, the terrorists murdered their first Tory before the party assumed responsibility for Ulster.
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After Brighton, Ian Gow MP, one of Thatcher’s closest friends, was also murdered by a device under his car. To this day I do not think I ever met a better human being than Gow. He had extraordinary integrity, warmth and magnanimity. I still imagine him dying from his hideous wounds in the arms of his wife Jane outside their Sussex home, the Dog House.
We Tories cannot forget, and that can be a problem. Little snapshots come to my mind of the day before the bomb in Brighton. It was warm and at lunchtime I passed Roberta Wakeham and Alison Ward sitting at a cafe table on the seafront. Roberta, married to cabinet minister John Wakeham, perished that night. Alison spent weeks in the hospital at John’s bedside as he recovered, against the odds, from his extensive injuries. Later they married. In the early evening I passed Margaret Tebbit on the stairs of the Grand. I would never see her standing again.
More than a decade later, with John Major as prime minister, the IRA declared a truce and the Tory government began to explore how peace might be established. I was a member of the Northern Ireland cabinet committee. It was astonishing that despite our memories of friends killed and maimed we could contemplate negotiating with the men who had sent the bombers. Major and Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Northern Ireland secretary, were commendably open-minded. Still, I believe that none of us could have gone as far as Tony Blair has in letting Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness become government ministers in the province.
I am not opposed to the peace deal overall, I just could not have been part of it. In democracies you have to change governments from time to time precisely because that makes the unimaginable possible.
The Tory and Labour experiences of Northern Ireland and therefore of terrorism are completely different. Blair’s party was never targeted. It is an asymmetry that sets us apart. Labour always contested the by-elections caused by the IRA. It never showed Thatcher any understanding, let alone any sympathy. At its worst, Labour is a thoroughly spiteful party. Its bile against Thatcher overwhelmed any normal feelings of humanity.
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Last week Lord Bragg mentioned the strains on Blair’s family, and people rightly empathised with their difficulties. With each new scandal over security in parliament, we all naturally worry about the vulnerability of the man elected to lead this country. But back in the 1980s when security advisers decided, by installing gates, to make it harder for a bomber to drive up to the door of No 10, there were howls of derision from Labour and stupid but hurtful accusations that Thatcher was building herself a palace. It was merely an unusual example, for Britain, of tightening security before, rather than after, a catastrophe.
Through history Tories have shown themselves to be politically sophisticated. For example, it was a Conservative government that brought to an end illegal white rule in Rhodesia and set free Zimbabwe under a majority government. Perhaps we could foresee that in Ulster one day and in different circumstances the political masters of the terrorists would need to share power, even if we found it, in Major’s famous phrase, “stomach-turning”.
Thatcher also adjusted to dealing with Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, even though he had instigated an armed revolt against the British in Palestine and had led Irgun, the organisation that blew up 91 people in the King David hotel in Jerusalem.
Last week I watched Magee talking calmly and unapologetically to the BBC about how he planted the bomb that killed Berry and Roberta Wakeham and put Margaret Tebbit in her wheelchair. While I can acquiesce in most of the Good Friday agreement, I find it hard to accept that Magee, sentenced by a court to at least 35 years in prison, was released through a political deal after just 13.
It made me think that Blair shares his party’s lack of imagination, that inability to comprehend what the Tories suffered for the principle that the ballot should triumph over the bullet. Does he really think 13 years a suitable term for the man who tried to kill his predecessor, her cabinet and all their spouses? Is the prime minister content that by releasing Magee through a ministerial fiat he in effect confirms that murdering members of parliament is a political act and not a crime?
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An hour before the Brighton bomb I was standing in the Grand hotel bar, having drunk too much, arguing with a journalist who was swaying and slurring. He asserted that the Tory government’s policy was to create unemployment. I denied it. The jobless numbers were an unhappy temporary consequence of the measures we had taken but certainly not our objective, I said.
“Listen, mate,” he said, pounding one of the columns that adorned the bar. “This is a pillar. That is a fact. Your policy is to create unemployment. That is a fact.”
I had enough of his beery drawling and so I made my way unevenly out of the Grand towards my hotel close by. Maybe that journalist’s boorishness saved my life.
Sixty minutes later the pillar that for him had represented absolute certainty was rubble. Despite that early lesson, it took me a while to learn that dogmatism has its limits.