From Bradford to Brighton I have been looking at British history and culture through significant buildings and structures. I have tried to ‘read’ the bricks, mortar and steel as if they were historical documents or bulletins from the past. But one building in my selection is more than just a gateway into history, more than a relic of another era. The story of the Grand Hotel, on Brighton’s seafront, is raw and close to home.
What happened there, more than thirty years ago, is both a testament to tragedy and a symbol of hope. For the witness I arranged to meet at the Grand Hotel, it is the place where life as she had known it ended forever; and she began, courageously, to make sense of the world anew. Her name is Jo Berry and on 12 October 1984 her father, Sir Anthony Berry, was one of five people killed in the hotel by a bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). One commentator has called the bombing the most audacious attempt at political assassination in this country since the Gunpowder Plot. It was to have the reverse of its intended effect.
The bomb’s targets were the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and members of her government. The country’s political leadership was gathered there, in one place, because it was party conference time. Autumn is traditionally the time of year when the UK’s political parties have held their annual get-togethers. Since the war the most popular destinations have been Blackpool and Brighton. Each town has a large conference hall and ample accommodation for politicians, delegates and journalists following the end of the holiday season. And the resorts themselves welcome the additional business just as the nights are beginning to draw in.
Brighton, back then, was particularly popular. Just an hour from London on the train, it also boasted one of the country’s finest seaside hotels in the Grand Hotel, a dazzling white Italianate confection on the seafront that looks like a slab of wedding cake. This is where the prime minister, her Cabinet and their spouses had booked VIP suites for the duration of the conference. I made do with cheaper accommodation round the corner. Though not yet an MP, I was working as an adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, and had a busy conference schedule.
The Grand had been casting its spell over the better-heeled sort of seaside visitor since its Victorian heyday, when it was one of the first buildings outside London to have lifts (known initially as ‘vertical omnibuses’) to carry guests up to each of its seven floors. The hotel opened in 1864 and was followed two years later by the West Pier, a mere parasol-twirling stroll away across the seafront road. By 1984 the pier had been closed for nine years. British society was much changed. But the hotel still had cachet.
There is something about a seaside hotel of the scale and opulence of the Grand. It has an aura that can make its guests feel carefree and glamorous. At conference time the bar on the ground floor was the place to be to ensure you kept close to the party’s movers and shakers. On the evening of 11 October 1984 it was thronged with government ministers, party grandees and the whole food chain of a political party and its hangers-on – down to lowly advisers like me and the journalist to whom I was talking.
The journalist and I had had a difference of opinion about the government’s economic policy and things had grown rather heated between us. It was the early hours of the morning by this point (conference-goers do tend to burn the candle at both ends). Fed up with the increasingly belligerent tone of the exchanges, I decided to call it a night and head back to my hotel nearby. About an hour later, at 2.54 a.m. on 12 October, the Brighton bomb was detonated by a timer device. It is not lost on me that the row I had had in the bar of the Grand, and my decision to leave the hotel as a result of it, may have saved my life.
The bomb had been hidden in room number 629 by an IRA terrorist, Patrick Magee, when he stayed there under an assumed name in mid-September. It blasted a hole in the front of the hotel, destroying at least seven bedrooms, killed five people, left several with permanent disabilities and injured more than thirty. Among the dead were Roberta Wakeham, the wife of the Parliamentary Treasury Secretary John Wakeham, and Sir Anthony Berry, the MP for Enfield Southgate in north London. The victims with life-changing injuries included Margaret Tebbit, the wife of the Trade and Industry Secretary Norman Tebbit, who has had to use a wheelchair ever since.
The prime minister, who was still up and about having just finished writing her conference speech for the next day, was unhurt. She redrafted the speech and the following afternoon I was in the conference hall to hear her say these words: ‘[The bomb attack] 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.’
The firefighters who attended the bombing, and the architect who supervised the £10 million repair and refurbishment of the hotel, remarked that the Grand’s sturdy Victorian construction had helped to contain the blast and limit the loss of life. When the Grand reopened on 28 August 1986, with the prime minister in attendance, it was a symbolic moment of renewal and defiance. The hotel itself now stands as a monument to the defeat of terrorism. Meanwhile, in June 1985, the IRA terrorist who planted the bomb had been arrested in Glasgow. At his trial at the Old Bailey in September 1986, Patrick Magee received eight life sentences and the judge recommended that he spend a minimum of thirty-five years in jail.
These are the bald facts. But the Brighton bombing is an event that nobody who was in any way involved with it will ever forget. As I stood in front of the hotel later on the morning of the blast, I was in a state of total shock. The centre of the building had been torn out from top to bottom. On television, we had seen Norman Tebbit, his face contorted with pain, being extricated from the wreckage. His wife Margaret would never walk again. People I counted as friends were among the dead. I hardly knew Sir Anthony Berry, but since he had been a government whip, and was often to be seen rushing around the House of Commons, he was a very familiar figure.
His constituency Conservative Association in Enfield Southgate was forced to find a candidate for the by-election that resulted. At the time I was on the party’s national candidates list, and had put my name in for a number of seats. Born and raised in a nearby London suburb not unlike Enfield Southgate, I may have seemed like a good fit. In any case, I was selected and in December 1984 I took Tony Berry’s seat in the Commons.
I asked his secretary, Clemency Ames, whether she would do me the honour of serving with me and she did so for the twelve-and-a-half years that I held the seat. I became friendly with Tony’s widow, Sarah, who had miraculously survived the bomb despite being with him when it exploded. A year later, we planted a tree in the constituency in Tony’s memory and I met their children, including their daughter Jo.
At the 1997 General Election I lost the Enfield Southgate seat, but I returned to parliament two years later as the MP for Kensington and Chelsea. That same year the Brighton Bomber, Patrick Magee, was released from jail as part of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. He had served fourteen years. In 2000 he met, for the first time, the person with whom he would establish a most unlikely association. This was Jo Berry.
I was immensely grateful that Jo had agreed to meet me at the Grand and I admired her courage in visiting the place where her father was murdered. But what really impressed me was her air of profound stillness and dignity as she talked of pain, reconciliation and new ways of thinking and acting. ‘It’s always going to be a powerful thing for me to come back here because it brings back all the memories,’ she admitted as we took our seats on the covered terrace with views of the seafront beyond the windows.
Jo Berry was twenty-seven at the time of the bombing. We started by talking about her reaction in its immediate aftermath. ‘Just so shocked,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it. And then the pain came. And when the pain came it was very overwhelming. This was life-changing in many many ways. I knew I couldn’t go back to the person I had been. I thought, “I have to bring something positive out of this.”’
She had no idea how to go about it, but her instinct was to find out more about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and investigate the causes of a conflict that had driven a man to commit multiple murder in the name of ‘justice’. From this starting point she realized that in order to achieve real understanding she would have to meet her father’s killer. She would have to sit down with Patrick Magee in a spirit of openness. ‘I wanted to build a bridge with him,’ she explained. ‘I wanted to see him as a human being rather than a faceless enemy. Not to change him but for my own healing.’
The initial meeting, in the Republic of Ireland, confounded her expectations and set her on an extraordinary course. ‘I listened a lot and I reached a point where I’d seen that he was someone who cared for his community, he was a deep thinker,’ she told me. ‘He’d got a PhD in prison. And I remember looking into his eyes and seeing something of him that meant he wasn’t just the man who killed my dad. I shared how wonderful my dad had been. And what happened to Patrick was that he reached a point where he just stopped talking and he looked at me and he said, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”’
Perhaps for Magee this was the moment when he began to understand the impact of what he had done, to see the atrocity from a point of view other than his own. For, as he told Jo, when he planted the bomb he had demonized the likely victims as less than human. For Jo, Magee’s reaction was a breakthrough that she hadn’t expected: ‘So I said, “Thank you, I’m going to go now,” and he said, “I’m really sorry I killed your dad.” And what that meant to me was his awareness that he’d actually killed a wonderful human being.’
From this meeting a remarkable partnership grew between Jo Berry and Patrick Magee. For over twenty years they have appeared together at many meetings and on discussion forums as a means of promoting the ideals of peace and reconciliation. ‘I decided to go ahead and go public because I thought with the peace process still in the very early stages, if this can bring more peace to Northern Ireland then it’s worth it,’ she said. ‘If it means fewer people are going to be hurt. You can’t change the past. Nothing is going to bring my dad back, or the others – so it’s about creating a different future for my children and their children.’ In October 2009, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Brighton Bombing, they chose Brighton as the place to launch their charity, Building Bridges for Peace, which is dedicated to healing divided communities and promoting better understanding of the roots of conflict.
At one point, as we talked, Jo broke off and looked around in amazement. ‘I can’t believe we’re here,’ she said. I was no less amazed to hear her story. I knew, of course, about Jo’s contact with her father’s killer in the name of peace and reconciliation. And I’m afraid I originally believed it to be wrong-headed, naive even. But time has passed, bitterness subsides. And Jo’s integrity, her commitment to healing, shone through when we met. It is not just Jo who has gone on a journey but others, like me, who did not have her fortitude or vision. When I told her I now completely understood, and admired, her path and achievements she replied that this was ‘moving’ to hear. ‘If my dad was here he’d say he understood, and be proud of me,’ she said. I have no doubt that’s true.
When I left the Grand Hotel that afternoon I looked back at its splendidly restored façade, with not a crack in it to indicate the terrible blow it suffered in 1984, and reflected on the morning I had stood there contemplating the gaping hole, and the horror and misery it betokened. And then I turned away along the seafront – still feeling sad and angry, but also uplifted for having met Jo Berry again.