The last few days, I was thinking not only of what has happened in Boston, but of the Iron Lady, who was in her time as British PM, one tough lady.
RE: The last few days, I was thinking not only of what has happened in Boston, but of the Iron Lady, who was in her time as British PM, one tough lady.
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Thatcher survived a bomb assassination attempt herself. The Brighton hotel bombing occurred on 12 October 1984 at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England. A long-delay time bomb was planted in the hotel by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) member Patrick Magee, with the intention of assassinating Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, who were staying at the hotel for the Conservative Party conference.
Although Thatcher narrowly escaped injury, five people were killed (including two high-profile members of the Conservative Party) and 31 were injured.
The bomb detonated at 2:54 a.m. on 12 October. The midsection of the building collapsed into the basement, leaving a gaping hole in the hotel’s façade. Firemen said that many lives were likely saved because the well-built Victorian hotel remained standing.
Margaret Thatcher was still awake at the time, working on her conference speech for the next day in her suite. The blast badly damaged her bathroom, but left her sitting room and bedroom unscathed. Both she and her husband Denis escaped injury. She changed her clothes and was led out through the wreckage along with her husband and Cynthia Crawford (her friend and aide) and driven to Brighton police station.
Margaret Thatcher began the next session of the conference at 9:30 a.m. the following morning, as scheduled.
She dropped from her speech most of her planned attacks on the Labour Party and said the bombing was “an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government”:
“That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact that we are gathered here now—shocked, but composed and determined—is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”
One of her biographers wrote that Thatcher’s “coolness, in the immediate aftermath of the attack and in the hours after it, won universal admiration. Her defiance was another Churchillian moment in her premiership which seemed to encapsulate both her own steely character and the British public’s stoical refusal to submit to terrorism”.
Immediately afterwards, her popularity soared almost to the level it had been during the Falklands War.
The Saturday after the bombing, Thatcher said to her constituents: “We suffered a tragedy not one of us could have thought would happen in our country. And we picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good British people do, and I thought, let us stand together for we are British! They were trying to destroy the fundamental freedom that is the birth-right of every British citizen, freedom, justice and democracy”.