'I actually heard the blast': Remembering the Brighton bomb 40 years on

Ex-ITN reporter Paul Davies, one of the first journalists on the scene, reflects on the 1984 IRA attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher and how it changed politics.

By Paul Davies, Former ITV News Correspondent

It was a day that would forever change the way party conferences are held and the security around them.

We didn't know that however, as we joined politicians and their supporters enjoying one of the social highlights of the political calendar.

The Thursday night of a Tory party conference, with all the business done and just the leader's speech to come in the morning, was traditionally a time to let your hair down.

There were several receptions with lots of free booze and an opportunity for journalists like me to mingle and network with senior members of the government and officials who could be useful to know.

So that is how I came to still be up and in a bar a few doors from the Grand Hotel when an IRA bomb, planted a few weeks earlier, was detonated at 2.54am.

It was the hotel where then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her government colleagues were staying.

I actually heard the blast and walked out onto the seafront to see their hotel under a cloud of dust and falling masonry.

Persuading colleagues still in the bar that I had witnessed an attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher was the first challenge, but I was fortunate that the group included a cameraman, sound recordist and lighting man.

The tools of their trade were locked away and there was no time to go looking for keys, so we broke into ITN cars and a secure portacabin to grab the camera and recording equipment we would need.

Within minutes of the explosion - and before the police had time to respond by throwing a cordon around the scene of the crime - we were in the hotel entrance seeing dust covered survivors including senior ministers stagger out onto the seafront.

Most were clearly in a state of shock.

We were then able to enter the devastated building, ITV News cameraman Nigel Thomson joining the first fire crews as they climbed up through the hotel floors searching for victims and survivors.

The images he captured that morning of the devastation caused by the bomb and the rescue of people who had been buried beneath the collapsed floors must rate as some of the most remarkable footage filmed in Britain since the Second World War.

Margaret Thatcher was applying finishing touches to her end of conference speech when the explosion happened. If she had been in the bathroom of her suite she may have been killed.

Instead she appeared in the early hours defiantly telling us the conference would go on, despite the loss of five lives with many more injured.

In those dramatic and confused hours we were told that all members of the cabinet had been accounted for and were safe. That turned out not to be true.

Norman Tebbit and his wife were later found buried but alive. They survived but Margaret Tebbit was paralysed from the neck down.

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Subsequent investigations would discover that IRA bomber Patrick Magee had checked into the Grand Hotel three and a half weeks earlier and left a bomb with a delay timer beneath the bath in a sixth floor room. Conference security had been superficial.

That would never happen again, since 1984 the place where a party leader, especially a Prime Minister, stays and works during conference will be a fortress bristling with armed police and security.

The Brighton bombing ended what many see as a time of naivety and innocence.

You can watch a special programme on the Brighton Bombing - 'Bombing Thatcher: Brighton's night of terror' - on ITVX from 4pm Thursday.