The Brighton Bombing
By 
One thing I’ve always wondered about is why “would you have killed Hitler as a baby?” hypotheticals are so much more common than “what if Georg Elser has set the bomb at Bürgerbräukeller to detonate at 8:55?” counterfactuals. (20 minutes away from being one of the greatest heroes in world history, even if the full magnitude of this result would not have been known had the assassination succeeded.)
There’s a new book about another assassination attempt that is curiously under-discussed:
On the evening of October 11, 1984, Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had her picture taken with a giant blue Teddy bear. It was the prize in a raffle at a gala being held at a club called Top Rank, in the resort town of Brighton, as part of the annual Conservative Party Conference. (Thatcher liked Teddy bears; she had two of her own, Humphrey and Mrs. Teddy, which she sometimes lent out for charitable events.) Thatcher, dressed in an evening gown with an enormous floral ruff, then returned to the Brighton Grand Hotel, where she and her husband, Denis, were staying, in Room 129-130—the Napoleon Suite. Denis went to sleep, but Thatcher, as was her habit, kept working, along with members of her staff. They were going over some papers related to the municipal affairs of Liverpool when, at 2:54 a.m., there was a boom, and then a crash. Plaster began to fall from the ceiling.
Five stories above them, in Room 629, Donald Maclean, the president of the Scottish Conservatives, and his wife, Muriel, were thrown out of their bed and through the air by the force of an explosion close by. He survived, but she died of her injuries weeks later. A bomb had been hidden behind a panel, under the bathtub, in Room 629, a spot that had been carefully chosen to compromise the hotel’s large Victorian chimney stack. In the seconds after the bomb detonated, the stack imploded, and was transformed into a funnel through which bricks, granite, and roof tiles rushed down, like a giant knife cutting through each floor.
A fifty-five-year-old woman in Room 628 was decapitated almost instantly. She was Jeanne Shattock, the wife of a local Party chairman. Three more guests were killed in the avalanche of masonry: in Room 528, Eric Taylor, another local official; in 428, Roberta Wakeham, the wife of the Tory chief whip; and, in 328, Sir Anthony Berry, the deputy chief whip. Berry had just returned from walking the two dogs he’d brought with him to Brighton. (Their barking would lead rescuers to Lady Sarah Berry, who was found beneath debris with a broken pelvis.) In Room 228, Norman Tebbit, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and a top hard-line lieutenant in her bitter confrontation with the miners’ union, was buried in rubble along with his wife, also named Margaret; they both survived, though she would be partly paralyzed.
Had Thatcher been in the bathroom of the Napoleon Suite—and she was, two minutes before the bomb went off—there’s a good chance that she would have died. Instead, still in her evening dress, she got Denis out of bed and walked placidly from the room. The lobby was crowded with Tory grandees, some in dinner jackets and others in pajamas, many coated in dust. “I think that was an assassination attempt, don’t you?” Thatcher said. At that point, there was no clear picture of what had happened, or of whether there might be another bomb. But there were some guesses, as Rory Carroll, an Irish journalist, writes in “There Will Be Fire” (Putnam), a new account of the bombing. (In the U.K., the book is called “Killing Thatcher.”) When the Thatchers were put into a car to the Brighton police station, twenty minutes after the bomb went off, Denis, his hair uncombed, was already raging: “The I.R.A., those bastards!”
Carroll can’t quite believe that the Brighton bombing, “an attack that had almost wiped out the British government,” isn’t better commemorated, or more famous. He considers it, reasonably, to be “one of the great what-ifs” of modern history. There are multiple what-ifs built in. What if Thatcher, or other members of the Cabinet, had died? Pretty much all of them were there. Surviving, she had six more years in office, including the run-up to the first Gulf War. What if Norman Tebbit had stayed on the path he was on before the bombing and become, as was expected, Thatcher’s successor? Instead, he absented himself from electoral politics in order to care for his badly injured wife, and emerged, from the sidelines, as an increasingly shrill critic of the European Union, helping to drag the country to Brexit. Perhaps most provocative, what if the Provisional Irish Republican Army hadn’t chosen to go after the Prime Minister by blowing up a hotel filled with hundreds of people? What if it had forgone an armed struggle altogether? Decades later, the bombing still poses questions about terrorism, politics as violence, and the value of remembering (or of forgetting). The what-ifs persist because the significance of an event like this one isn’t fixed in the first moment; in Brighton’s case, the meaning is still being fashioned.
Historical contingencies like this are always an endless rabbit hole, but it’s a fascinating discussion.