The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Product Information

This is not a short story with a twist: the culmination of events is signalled by the title, and if you thought it might not be literal, it’s confirmed in the poetic first line: ‘Picture first the street where she breathed her last.’ Discussion about the story has focussed more on the appropriateness of the subject matter than around the artistic merits, which is a shame because it’s a deft piece of storytelling – almost tipping into a comedy of manners – that successfully considers what motivates hatred of public figures in general, and specifically hatred of Thatcher:

Mantel is no stranger to controversy, having hit the headlines last year when a London Review of Books lecture she gave called "Royal Bodies" was misinterpreted by some sections of the press. What better plan could I have?'' There was only a touch of sarcasm. ''It's a godsend, this. The hospital. Your attic. Your window. You. It's cheap. It's clean. It gets the job done, and it costs one man.'' My bedroom had a perfect view of the hospital garden; anyone, by walking around the side of the house, could guess this. Two years before, he had met with Jo Berry, daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, at her request. Her extraordinary act of reconciliation wrongfooted him. “I was prepared for anger; I could have dealt with that,” he told her in a subsequent meeting. “What I wasn’t prepared for was someone to listen to me. Or even forgive me for killing your father.”One of the subplots in Carroll’s book is the role that Americans played in all this. The United States was one of the places that the I.R.A. turned to for money and guns. (It also hit up Muammar Qaddafi.) At the same time that Magee was busy in Room 629, other I.R.A. operatives were arranging an arms shipment with the help of the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger. The plan went awry when the Marita Ann, one of the boats carrying the weapons, was seized by Ireland’s Navy. If it weren’t for the persistence of this story about Sheila Joplin and the stew, I would have thought, in later life, that I had dreamed Mary.’

I'll leave you gagged and taped,''he says. ''In the kitchen. You can tell them I did it the minute I burst in.'' He smirked. I saw he had relaxed, knowing that because of the friggin' delay he wouldn't have to murder yet. ''Mind you,'' I said, ''she'd probably laugh if she were here. She'd laugh because she despises us. Look at your anorak. She despises your anorak. Look at my hair. She despises my hair.'' Mail columnist Stephen Glover dismissed the story as “dangerous nonsense”. Writing on Monday he said: “What I object to is not Hilary Mantel’s detestation of Thatcher, warped though I believe it to be. It is the suggestion that she could, and should, have been bumped off as though she were some deranged South American dictator … 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.''Lord Mountbatten was obviously high profile but was also a very soft target. There was some suspicion that the IRA felt somewhat upstaged by the INLA who assassinated (Conservative MP) Airey Neave at Westminster in 1979.” 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.’ Speech to Finchley Conservatives (25th anniversary as MP) | Margaret Thatcher Foundation". www.margaretthatcher.org. 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. I thought of the tourist scrums pushing each other off the pavements, jostling for souvenir humbugs and wind-up Beefeaters. It could have been another country. No voices carried from the street below. Our man was humming, absorbed. I wondered if his song had a second verse. As he lifted each component from his bag he wiped it with a cloth that was cleaner than his handkerchief, handling it with gentle reverence, like an altar boy polishing the vessels for mass.

The following year Magee walked out of the Maze prison having served 14 years. In one of the ironies of the Troubles, the woman he had tried to kill inadvertently helped his early release. This acid humour, which runs through a number of short stories, is often tied up within character descriptions that have a sting in them somewhere. One man has a ‘weak mouth… Almost a handsome man, but not: sallow, easily thrown.’ A woman is described as ‘round, kind, downmarket for the area and easy to like.’ Best of all is a taxi driver who: But when Mrs Thatcher came to visit, the dissidents took to the streets. They gathered in knots, inspecting the press corps and turning their shoul- ders to the hospital gates, where a row of precious parking bays were marked out and designated DOCTORS ONLY. The surreal experience is the inspiration for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: August 6th 1983, published exclusively on Friday.The aftermath of the IRA bombing at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, on October 12 1984. Picture: PA Wire. What’s missing from that formulation is how the Irish experience of mass emigration shaped not only the demographic but the emotional and cultural landscape of the United States—including for those who aren’t Irish. The trauma of the famine is a touchstone, but so is the green-joy part. Americans, to an unusually bipartisan degree, wish Ireland well. That engagement has been enhanced, in recent decades, by the fact that Ireland has become the European base for many tech and pharma companies (Apple and Intel have had a presence there since the nineteen-eighties; Pfizer and Bristol Myers since the sixties), a phenomenon, encouraged by the low corporate tax rate, that Brexit is bound to advance. The view of the conflict from this side of the Atlantic may be misty, but it can be a lot clearer than that from across the Irish Sea. A telling detail Carroll notes is that the speech Thatcher intended to give at the Brighton conference barely mentioned Northern Ireland at all.

I wanted you to imagine you were Margaret Thatcher at Chequers or the cabinet table taking decisions, she was doing her best as she saw it. He takes up the widowmaker, lays her tenderly across his knees. He tips his chair forward, and because I see his hands are once more slippery with sweat I bring him a towel and he takes it without speaking, and wipes his palms. Once more I am reminded of something priestly: a sacrifice. A wasp dawdles over the sill. The scent of the gardens is watery, green. The tepid sunshine wobbles in, polishes his shabby brogues, moves shyly across the surface of the dressing table. I want to ask: when what is to happen, happens, will it be noisy? From where I sit? If I sit? Or stand? Stand where? At his shoulder? Perhaps I should kneel and pray. Oh, for God's sake.'' He snorted. ''Why would we do anything? No need. He got the nod. We have pals all over the place.'' 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. Creativity in politics is rare but I think she had it," Mantel admits. "Cromwell did too. But he was a negotiator and she detested consensus – she saw herself as an Old Testament prophet delivering the truth from on high. Cromwell used history to pretend the new things he was doing were old, and thus to soothe the English temperament. Mrs Thatcher despised history as a constraint."

PM 'lucky' to survive unscathed

You know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller when, as here, some curious yet minor verbal oddity, some seeming rhetorical blip, turns out to be so cunningly related to a story’s metaphoric unfolding. True, there’s much more to “Comma” than I’ve let on: Mantel’s subtle depiction of the juvenile narrator’s relationship with sexy, wayward Mary; a couple of brilliant scenes involving the girls’ mothers; the chilling punctuation joke with which the story concludes. But, as with Edgar Allan Poe’s trademark tarns— those dark stagnant bodies of water mentioned in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and so many other Poe tales — the brown, lolling blebs of the Hathaways’ house might stand as an emblem of Mantel’s distinctive expertise: her ability to amplify mood and meaning through an eerie ramification of terms, her fine-tuned sensitivity (at times almost occult) to things sleek and dark and off-kilter. Yes, the images she deploys have a fairy-tale rightness about them in the moment (not that this makes them any less creepy), but they also have their roles to play, ineluctably, in some larger and unusually mordant verbal fantasia.