There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History

by Rory Carroll

Some members worried killing Thatcher would leave them forever hunted—prey for the British agents and Special Air Service squads tasked with finding and possibly executing them. “Shot while resisting arrest,” as the official report would put it. Of course, there were even worse fates. Leaders of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot were hanged, cut down while still conscious, castrated, disemboweled, and quartered, with their heads put on spikes outside the House of Lords. And their bomb didn’t even go off. But if the IRA’s bomb exploded, if the operation succeeded, the reward would be incalculable: Maggie Thatcher, dead beneath a thousand tons of rubble. The British state punished for its crimes. The hunger strikers avenged. The world’s gaze fixed on the six counties. Ballads and poems about the men who dared.

She “doubted now if she would die in her bed,” an official later confided. It wasn’t just the bomb, it was the taunting message. Remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always. “The quote stuck with her. It was a quote you wouldn’t forget,” recalled Powell.