This deftly constructed account of the IRA’s 1984 attempt to kill the prime minister leaves us with one insistent question: what would have happened if they had succeeded?
In this extract from his new book, Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, Rory Carroll recounts the moment the bomb went off, the devastation it caused and the prime minister’s immediate reaction
Patrick Magee (pictured), one of the IRA s most notorious operatives, planted a bomb behind a bath panel and primed it to explode on the last day of the Conservative Party Conference in 1984.