On September 14 1984, 33-year-old Roy Walsh booked into Brighton's Grand hotel for a stay of three days. There was nothing suspicious. Walsh was well groomed and had a southern English accent (he had grown up in Norwich). A businessman - perhaps with the proverbial dirty weekend in mind.
Walsh was indeed planning something dirty. He secreted 30lb of Semtex in the bathroom wall, timed to explode weeks later. Which it did, at 2.55am on October 12, at the height of the Tory party conference. Five died. The PM herself was badly shaken. Norman Tebbit and his wife were buried in rubble. She would be paralysed for life.
Walsh was, it emerged, Patrick Magee. He had left England in 1969, inspired to volunteer for the Provisional IRA by TV coverage of B Specials rampaging in Ulster. Young Magee was indoctrinated during a spell of internment at Long Kesh in 1974 and trained at one of Gadafy's terrorist camps in Libya. His English upbringing, technical skill and loyalty to the cause made him an ideal undercover agent on the mainland.
Magee was arrested eight months later in Glasgow, planning further dastardly attacks. He was identified by a palm print on his Grand hotel registration card, which matched one taken from him as a juvenile offender, years before, in Norwich.
"Mad Dog Magee" got eight life sentences at the Old Bailey. The judge recommended that he serve a minimum of 35 years as "a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity" who "enjoyed" his terrorist activities.
Whether or not he enjoyed terrorism, he enjoyed novels. The 1984 Brighton "spectacular" was clearly inspired by Frederick Forsyth's 1984 thriller The Fourth Protocol, in which a Russian agent who can pass for English plants a nuke in a rented house alongside an American base, timed to go off in a few days.
In 1974, in Long Kesh, Magee had picked up a copy of The Savage Day by Jack Higgins - a romanticised depiction of the Troubles. It irritated and fascinated him. During his 14 years' imprisonment (first in the UK, after 1994 in Long Kesh) Magee consumed all the popular novels about his war that he could come by - some 480 of them. He wrote an Open University doctoral thesis on the subject. He was awarded the degree on his release from prison (21 years early) in 1999. The dissertation has recently been published as an academic monograph, Gangsters or Guerrillas?
Magee's thesis is simple. The vast bulk of novels inspired by the Troubles, for the delectation of the British reading public, are propaganda, some of them (Forsyth's The Deceiver is the worst offender) "scabrously so". The British fiction industry, Magee argues, operates in an atmosphere of self-imposed censorship.
It's the conclusion George Orwell came to, in 1944, when he couldn't get a taker for Animal Farm. British publishers thought the satirical fable offensive to our gallant ally, the Soviet Union. The government wouldn't like it. They were a "gutless" lot, Orwell concluded. They did what they were told - without having to be told. The British disease.
I find Magee's thesis convincing. I would, of course, since I am a literary critic whom he frequently (and approvingly) quotes. Would that my own PhD students were as flatteringly loyal.
The books of mine which he cites were published in the 70s and I have since done other things. Had I stuck to that line, I might have written my own Gangsters or Guerrillas? Not necessarily as well-researched or as partisan in its approach, but, with a bit of squinting, I can see a ghostly "John Sutherland" on the title page.
Dr Magee has come a long, Damascene route since October 1984. His appearance on Everyman a few weeks ago suggested profound moral as well as intellectual growth. Could I make the reverse journey? Could this scholar become "Mad Don Sutherland" if, for example, I saw "my ain folk", the Scots, being firebombed; if I were beaten up and ethnically abused (as was Magee) by "occupying" English soldiers; if I were cunningly indoctrinated and ingeniously trained in the arts of terrorism?
I could. That programme was well named Everyman. The moral? I don't know. But it might help to leave a few Jack Higgins novels lying around the cells at Parkhurst.
