“Killing Thatcher” tells the full story of the Brighton bombing

Just after midday on September 15th 1984, a neatly dressed young man carrying an unusually heavy suitcase walked up to the reception desk of the Grand Hotel in Brighton and asked for an upper-floor room with a sea view. The smiling receptionist offered him room 629. All he had to do now was fill in the registration card with his false name and an address in London, and avoid leaving any fingerprints. By a stroke of luck, 629 was one of the rooms that best suited his plan: to plant a bomb with a long-delay timer that would detonate in the early hours of the morning 27 days later—and kill Britain’s prime minister and much of the cabinet.

The engineers of the Irish Republican Army (ira) had calculated that, if positioned correctly, the bomb would bring down the giant chimney stack of the Victorian hotel, so that it would topple through the blast hole and slice through the building. The chimney would take with it a vertical stack of rooms with numbers ending in 9—including the Napoleon Suite, in which Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, would be staying as she prepared to address the Conservative Party conference that same day.