The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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He crumpled up the kitchen roll and looked around for the bin. I took the paper from him, he grunted, then applied himself to unstrapping his bag, a canvas holdall that I supposed would be as suitable for a photographer as for any tradesman. But one by one he took out metal parts, which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer's kit. He began to assemble them; his fingertips were delicate. As he worked he sang, almost under his breath, a little song from the football terraces: No,'' he said, ''I don't get very far with the lasses.'' He passed a hand over his hair to flatten it, as if the adjustment might change his fortunes. ''No kids, well, none I know of.'' It’s tempting, at this point in the narrative, to insert Americans as the heroic deus ex machina, in the rare postwar deployment of U.S. power abroad that went pretty well: we came, this time, bearing a plan for peace. That fable is not entirely false. O’Toole writes that what President Bill Clinton, in particular, brought to the process was “drama”—a sense that stalemate was not inevitable, that the cycle could be broken, and that the world was watching. Clinton worked room after room in Belfast and Derry, quoting lines from Seamus Heaney. There was more at work, of course, including the influence of the E.U., which offered venues for Anglo-Irish diplomacy. A focus on Adams’s scheming can obscure the crucial work of other nationalist groups, such as Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party and the S.D.L.P. leader John Hume, who agitated for Irish unification without killing people. (Hume shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with the unionist David Trimble.) The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party, Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, ISBN 1-84488-120-2 Look at me and [classics professor] Mary Beard, and all the other women whose arguments are not engaged with or are dismissed because of fixations with appearance."

It was hard for me to imagine the busy network of activity that lay behind the day's plans. ''Wait,'' I'd said to him, as I asked him, ''Tea or coffee?'' as I switched the kettle on. ''You know I was expecting the boiler man? I'm sure he'll be here soon.'' As a result of Neave's assassination the INLA was declared illegal across the whole of the United Kingdom on 2 July 1979. [13] Memorial plaque to Airey Neave at his alma mater, Merton College, Oxford This short story is bitterly funny, and is at much a paean to grotty accommodation as it is to the struggles of writing. She notes that:I indicated, with my head, the lawns outside the window, where the prime minister was shortly to die. The story has already proved controversial, with the Daily Telegraph this week pulling out of a deal to publish the story first, despite reportedly paying tens of thousands of pounds – a figure denied by the Telegraph – to secure exclusive rights. I stood by the kettle while it boiled. I wondered: has the eye surgery been a success? When she comes out, will she be able to see as normal? Will they have to lead her? Will her eyes be bandaged?

One of the central principles of the Good Friday Agreement is that there is no single way to be Irish. It was treated as a turning point when the 2021 Northern Ireland census showed, for the first time, that more people had been brought up in Catholic than in Protestant households, but a fair number said that they weren’t religious at all. And the percentage of Catholics in the Republic has fallen to seventy-eight, a number that includes many whose first language is Polish or Portuguese. The I.R.A., for that matter, was never as Catholic, in a religious sense, as its martyrology might suggest, in part because it also had a Marxist streak. Today, Sinn Féin is the largest party in the North, and one of the largest in the Republic, not because of its militancy but because of its Bernie Sanders-like social program. Mary Lou McDonald, who succeeded Adams as the Party’s leader, has a decent chance of becoming the next Taoiseach, or Prime Minister. The second half of Thatcher’s tenure was marked by an inextinguishable controversy over Britain’s relationship with the European Community (EC). In 1984 she succeeded, amid fierce opposition, in drastically reducing Britain’s contribution to the EC budget. After her third electoral victory in 1987, she adopted a steadily more hostile attitude toward European integration. She resisted “federalist” continental trends toward both a single currency and a deeper political union. Her traditionally pro-European party became divided, and a string of senior ministers left the Cabinet over the issue.He continued: “Likewise, with Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit (whose wife Margaret was left permanently disabled by the blast), and Scotland Yard’s Terrorist detectives, I wanted the reader to get into their worlds and heads as much as possible. I thought, there's not a tear in her. Not for the mother in the rain at the bus stop, or the sailor burning in the sea. She sleeps four hours a night. She lives on the fumes of whisky and the iron in the blood of her prey.

He lurched forward, hand groping for the gun. It wasn't to shoot me, though my heart leapt. He glared down into the gardens, tensing as if he were going to butt his head through the glass. He made a small, dissatisfied grunt, and sat down again. ''A bloody cat on the fence.'' Just masonry, what felt to be tons of masonry falling on you," he told reporters from his hospital bed. tar of a thousand cigarettes, fat of ten thousand breakfasts, the leaking metal seep of a thousand shaving cuts, and the horse-chestnut whiff of nocturnal emissions.’Mantel, who was made a dame in this year's birthday honours, said Thatcher was a "fantastic character" for a writer, "the very stuff of drama". The two-time Man Booker prizewinner's short story tells of a well-off woman waiting in her Windsor flat for a plumber. And in the title story, a chilling, fable-like “counterfactual” set in 1983 — in which a sniper plans to assassinate Margaret Thatcher from a window as she leaves a private hospital where she’s just had eye surgery (the real Thatcher did have exactly such surgery in 1983, but died of natural causes in 2013) — it will be hard for younger non-Brits to work out why references to Thatcher’s “handbag” can still sound so noirishly hilarious, or why the nameless assassin’s contemptuous mention of the way the Iron Lady “toddles” about in public should so immediately and ghoulishly conjure the lady, in all her steely, handbag-gripping, lower-middle-class glory.

Despite its subject, the short story is funny and thought-provoking, based on the real event when Mantel actually spotted Thatcher "toddling" around the hospital gardens of the Windsor flat she lived in. The Daily Telegraph had refused to publish the story even after it paid a substantial sum to secure the exclusive rights. I felt the conflict was such a waste. You can ask, “After nearly 30 years of the Troubles, what did everyone get with the Good Friday agreements?” After all the horrendous violence it was something similar to what was offered by the British government in the Sunningdale agreement from 1973. But that was rejected by pretty much everyone in Northern Ireland on both sides.I could give you a string of names,'' he said. ''They were in the paper. Two years, is that too long to remember?'' On the half-landing there is a door. It looks like the door to a broom cupboard. But it is heavy. Heavy to pull, hand slipping on the brass knob.



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