Patrick Magee tried to kill Margaret Thatcher

Everyone was impressed Once upon a time in Northern Ireland (widely regarded as the best documentary series ever made about the Troubles) will have been equally impressed with the production team’s latest film, The Bombing of Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher. The focus clearly needed to be tighter in this one-off 40th anniversary documentary about the October 1984 IRA attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were staying during the Conservative Party conference. Nevertheless, the bombing was carefully placed in the context of the wider problems.

Thatcher survived unscathed, but five people were killed – including the deputy chief whip, Sir Anthony Berry – and 35 seriously injured. Berry’s children Jo and Edward contribute to the documentary, along with former party chairman John Gummer and his wife Penelope. Gummer was helping Thatcher prepare her conference speech in the Prime Minister’s hotel room when the bomb exploded at 2.54am.

The biggest coup among those interviewed here, however, is the bomber himself, Patrick Magee. Now 73 and looking more like a seasoned academic than the hard-eyed IRA refugee from his 1980s police mugshot, Magee spoke clearly and dispassionately about his radicalization and subsequent career as a bomb maker.

Indeed, The bombing of Brighton placed the events of the attack in the historical context of republican hatred of Thatcher following her intransigence over the prison hunger strikes, in which Republican prisoners starved themselves in their bid to be considered political prisoners.

Ten of them died as a result, especially the famous Bobby Sands. “She was a legitimate target,” said Magee, who went on to describe the rudimentary bomb-making process (“an alarm clock attached to a detonator”). The only thing he adamantly did not want to discuss were the operational details of the attack, presumably so as not to implicate any as-yet-unidentified co-conspirators.

The bomb was planted weeks before it exploded, by which time Magee was safely back in the Republic and watching news coverage of the attack in a pub in County Cork. “It went well,” he said.

The Berry children were also glued to their TV screens as news of the bombing was reported – but with acute fear rather than jubilation. After Thatcher declared that the conference would go ahead despite the destruction, they hoped in vain to see their father during the TV broadcasts.

Other interviewees included former mandarin Robin Butler (the Prime Minister’s private secretary, he was in the room with her and Gummer) and former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison. The latter still mourned the dead hunger strikers (“I think of them every day”) and held Thatcher directly responsible for her attempted assassination, calling her “an obstacle to peace.”

Even more surprising, Butler expressed a not entirely opposing view, in that he seemingly viewed her intransigence as a character flaw: “Her total defiance ultimately caused her downfall.”

However, it is the testimonies of Magee and the Gummers that form the heart of the film (at least for the first hour of the 75 minutes). “I thought John and Robin Butler and Mrs Thatcher were in a sticky mess,” Gummer’s wife Penelope said as the couple recalled looking for each other in the wreckage.

Four others were killed in the blast: Tory official Eric Taylor; Jeanne Shattock, the wife of another civil servant, Gordon Shattock; Roberta Wakeham, wife of chief whip John Wakeham; and Muriel Maclean, wife of Sir Donald Maclean, the Scottish Conservative president.

Those injured included Norman Tebbit, the then trade secretary, and his wife Margaret, who suffered a back injury and was left permanently disabled.

Magee was planning a new bombing campaign on the continent when he was arrested in Glasgow in 1985. Sentenced to eight life terms, he was released in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. “He’s free… my father’s not free,” Jo Berry recalled at the time. “How can this be justice?”

If the documentary had ended there, it would still have been an important, expertly crafted piece of oral history. But there was a twist that elevated it to something more than a dig at events from long ago. Because after his release, Jo Berry approached Magee for a meeting, where the bomber initially wanted to justify his actions.

But “something clicked in my head,” Magee recalls. “I killed this man who created this woman. I don’t know who I am anymore.” The pair have since met numerous times to promote reconciliation.

Not everyone is convinced of Magee’s reinvention as a man of peace. “I have nothing to offer on this gentleman,” said Edward Berry. “But if my sister is on this particular trip and things are going well, that’s fine with me.”

For those of us at home, this compelling, balanced documentary challenged us to make up our own minds on that point.

‘Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer