The gripping inside story of the 1984 Brighton bombing, its victims, and its unintended consequences
“Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” The IRA’s statement after its bomb exploded in a bathroom on the sixth floor of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in October 1984, was cleverly sinister but, with its repeated emphasis on luck, oddly airy. It took responsibility off the shoulders of the killers and placed it on those of Dame Fortune.
This way of framing the horror that descended in the middle of the night during the Tory party conference was cruelly dismissive of the terrible harm done to real human beings. The “you” being addressed was, of course, the primary target of the bomb, Margaret Thatcher, who escaped unharmed. But what about the “unlucky” people that the IRA’s bomber Patrick Magee actually killed, maimed or bereaved or permanently disabled? Were the dead – Jeanne Shattock, Anthony Berry, Eric Taylor, Muriel Maclean and Roberta Wakeham – victims merely of ill fortune?
