Bombing Brighton: The Plot To Kill Thatcher

Anthony McIntyre 📺 40 years ago today as the H Blocks were unlocking for the day's routine, we rolled out of the cells and up to the canteen.

BBC @ Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher

Our appetite that morning was less for breakfast, and more for the television - there were none in the cells - so that we could follow the news reports from Brighton where the IRA in the early hours of the morning had literally sent shock waves through the British establishment with its audacious bombing of the Tory Party at its annual conference.

The shine of jubilation was dulled somewhat because while the operation had hit the Tories hard Margaret Thatcher, the main target, had survived. Amongst INLA and IRA prisoners Thatcher was a hate figure because of her key role in the deaths of ten republican hunger strikers. The very same wings where each of the ten had been held across the H Blocks were on October-12-1984 sympathy-free zones.

Forty years later were someone to have asked me for something of significance in relation to October-12, I would have been flummoxed. It is not a date that stands out in my mind like May-5. I guess it is human nature to remember those we lost more than those we killed.

When my wife told me that she had recorded Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher, I thought I'd watch it but there was no urgency to it. Sitting down in front of the television on Thursday evening, in the hope of finding something watchable from Scandinavian or French crime drama, she suggested tuning in to the BBC production. The choice was made.

Settling into it there was a surreal moment when a cartoonish-type character appeared on screen. My first thought Humpty Dumpty WTF. It was in fact Danny Morrison whose presence immediately prompted the comment what is he gonna lie about? I hadn't long to wait. As a young person Morrison had been struck down by a bad dose of Liarette syndrome, from which he never recovered, subsequent to which he has been lying ever since. Big black hats off to him for at least finding a novel way to dissimulate and dissemble: lying by crying. With tears as false as the love of a burn again Christian, Morrison stated that there is not a day that passes where he doesn't think of the hunger strikers. That was the point when my mood shifted from ridicule to anger. Given that he bears substantial culpability for six of their deaths, the words I most associate with Morrison and the hunger strikers are those of Jorge Luis Borges: I betrayed those who believed me their friend.

That blemish on my appreciation aside, I found the documentary riveting. It was a far cry from the days when republican activists were gagged by both the London and Dublin governments. Pat Magee, the IRA volunteer who planted the bomb, was afforded a large amount of speaking time. Of more interest than the operation itself was the evolution of Magee's perspective on war and the taking of life. It seems clear that today he shares none of the jubilation that was so prevalent on the H Block wings or the pub in Cork where he sat watching news of the attack. A deep thinking man, he is philosophical rather than triumphalist. Without turning his back on the operation that propelled him to a public profile at odds with the quietude of his character, he brings nuance to an understanding of the consequences of his actions. In Pat Magee it is easy to detect the paradox presented by Albert Camus on war that Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

While Pat Magee has come a long way in his arduous political odyssey, an even more remarkable distance covered is that made by Jo Berry, daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, the Conservative MP killed by the bomb Pat Magee placed in the Grand Hotel. While both lives were upended by the attack, it had to be much harder for Jo Berry to embrace Pat Magee than it was for him to embrace her.

Forty years on those who looked to us as monsters then look much more human today. John Gummer who was with Thatcher at the time the IRA device detonated, would most likely have died had the attack succeeded. His contribution to the documentary was of service to recreating the mood in the Grand Hotel leading up to the bomb and the shock it produced. While he still professes a lack of comprehension as to why it happened, he was rancour free. In contrast to the fake tears of Danny Morrison, Gummer's wife Penelope shed tears that bore all the traits of authenticity as she recalled the events of the night and spoke with a large measure of understanding of what motivated the man who came very close to killing her.

I very much doubt that the grief leading from the violence of war will ever lead to either widespread forgiveness or forgetting. To expect that it will, is to have an unjustified belief in the capacity of humans to become unhuman by jettisoning the sentiments, instincts and feelings that make them human. What Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher did achieve was to discursively reinforce placing the concept of understanding, that is so necessary to preventing war and political violence, at the centre of the narrative generated by war and violence.

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