David Montgomery: Thatcher the bomb expert cheated death at Conservative Party Conference in Brighton

Some journalist colleagues and several of her advisors, around ten of us in all, stood in the drawing room with its symmetrical design persian carpet and Thatcher reflected on the RAF raids on Stanley airport.

With a glass of whisky in her hand, and her handbag cradled on her other arm, she described the bombing. She used her foot, with dangling stiletto, to trace the landing strip using a straight line on the carpet. Then she shifted her position to demonstrate the flight path the RAF bombers took to successively crater the runway.

Yes, the prime minister knew a bit about bombing.

Little did she imagine then that two years later she herself would have an encounter with a bomb that almost took her life.

Late on the evening of October 11, 1984, Mrs Thatcher and I were in the same place in Brighton. She was staying in the Grand Hotel for the Conservative Party conference, working in her first floor room, The Napoleon Suite. I was working, after a fashion, in the ground floor bar ‘meeting contacts.’

Among other things my role then was to oversee political coverage in the News of the World. Perhaps not the most onerous role, some might suggest, but with five million copies sold each Sunday the paper was influential with voters.

My real objective at the conference was in pursuit of my other responsibility, investigations, then focused on the alleged behaviour of another senior Tory that would come out several years later.

That evening I needed to return to London and I was on my way by midnight and slept peacefully in my own bed.

So it was 7am when like millions of others I woke to the news of the Brighton bombing. I watched the broadcast by TV-am, the breakfast news franchise that had been launched a year before (belatedly catching up with the US as previously the UK had deemed it not respectable to watch TV in the morning).

The damage to the facade of the Grand told the story. The bomb had dislodged a chimney and the debris cascaded through seven floors, passing through the Thatcher bathroom that she had left just two minutes before the explosion.

If I had remained in the bar - regardless of the likelihood that by 2.54 I might have been immune to any disturbance - I would have suffered only a coating of dust as both it and the reception areas escaped the devastation.

I knew some of the injured, including Norman Tebbit, now 93, and at the time the most controversial Tory minister. His wife was badly injured and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

Sarah, the wife of Sir Anthony Berry, who died in the blast, has become a good friend and some 25 years later she married Lord Bernard Donoughue, a Labour peer who worked to support the Good Friday peace negotiations.

Thatcher survived, but she had been the target of the most audacious assassination attempt since the gunpowder plot.

The Iron Lady once said that Northern Ireland is ‘as British as Finchley’ - hardly the most perceptive of comments whatever way you look at it as a minority of Finchley’s residents are white British.

Her early approach as PM was to clamp down on terrorism and she was hated for the deaths of the hunger strikers. Later the Anglo-Irish Agreement giving a say to the Republic in Northern Irish affairs was condemned by both Ulster Unionists and many closest to her in the Conservative Party.

In her memoirs Thatcher wrote that no British politician truly understood Northern Ireland. However the Brighton bomb made certain she could not ignore it.

David Montgomery is head of NationalWorld, which owns the News Letter