She was up late working on a speech. “At 2:50 a.m. Robin Butler asked me to look at one last official paper—it was about the Liverpool Garden festival.” Four minutes later “a loud thud shook the room. . . . I knew immediately that it was a bomb.” It had been placed above her suite, which was now strewn with glass. She made her way, covered in plaster dust, out of the hotel, met with aides, slept in her clothes for an hour at a police facility, woke to the news reports—five dead, including a cabinet minister’s wife—and turned to her remarks to the Tory party conference. “I was already determined that if it was physically possible to do so I would deliver my speech.” Urged to return to No. 10 Downing, she said, “No: I am staying.”
“I knew that I could not afford to let my emotions get control of me. I had to be mentally and physically fit for the day ahead. I tried not to watch the harrowing pictures. But it did not do any good. I had to know each detail of what had happened—and every detail seemed worse than the last.”
Contemporary politicians, please note: In the rewrite of her speech, Mrs. Thatcher removed “most of the partisan sections.” This “was not a time for Labour-bashing but for unity in defense of democracy.”…
Harold Evans remembered it. “That day she was wonderful. She truly was the iron lady.”
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