Read the book: «The Man Who Was Saturday»

Prologue

‘Some Devils Got Him’

On Friday, 30 March 1979, change was in the air. For much of the month the weather had been cold and wet, but lately it had warmed up and in London the trees were in bud. The change of season matched a great political climacteric. Two days before, the Labour administration of James Callaghan had finally stumbled to an end after months of public-service strikes, already notorious as the ‘Winter of Discontent’. In five weeks, a general election would in all probability elect a Conservative government with, for the first time in British history, a woman at its head.

When Airey Neave woke up that morning he had every reason to savour the atmosphere of promise and renewal. As the man who had engineered Margaret Thatcher’s accession to the Conservative leadership, he had played a crucial part in great events. At the age of sixty-three, after a long wait and many disappointments, he was about to taste real power.

As a reward for his services, Mrs Thatcher had offered him any shadow portfolio he wanted. To the bafflement of many, he picked Northern Ireland. Political progress in Ulster was at a standstill and political violence a fact of everyday life. It seemed a masochistic choice. Neave saw it as a challenge – a last chance to bring off an achievement that would leave his mark in history. Since adolescence he had been opposing those he saw as the enemies of democracy – as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a Colditz escapee and an intelligence officer. The position of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland would put him in command of the latest phase of the struggle – Britain’s war against Irish terrorism. The thought gave him great satisfaction.

A pleasant weekend lay ahead. He would be spending it in his Abingdon constituency with his wife Diana in the Oxfordshire village of Hinton Waldrist, where they rented a wing of the Old Rectory. Before leaving, he had some business to attend to at his office in the House of Commons. At 9.30 a.m., he left the family flat at 32 Westminster Gardens, in Marsham Street SW1, telling Diana he would be back to collect her at 3.30 p.m. The big nine-storey block was built in the 1930s and the apartments were spacious and comfortable, an ideal London base for politicians and senior civil servants.

It was half a mile from the House, but Neave chose to drive. He had long since given up smoking and drinking, following a heart attack, but was notoriously averse to exercise and his health had given his wife and children frequent cause for concern. The car, a modest Vauxhall Cavalier supplied by the engineering firm whose interests he represented in parliament, was parked in a lot beside the flats.

The journey took a few minutes. He drove through the gates of New Palace Yard, next to Big Ben, then down the entry ramp to the underground car park. Having found a space, he took the lift to the ground floor and made his way to the offices of the Leader of the Opposition, a collection of cramped rooms in a corridor behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, for a 10 a.m. meeting of the Shadow Cabinet. At 11.40 a.m. he went back to his room together with Richard Ryder, the young de facto head of Mrs Thatcher’s private office, and they spent some time discussing the election campaign.* Ryder left, and for an hour and a half Neave and his secretary, Joy Robilliard, ‘discussed constituency weekend business, Saturday morning surgery, diary dates for the next month’.1 Then Neave asked her to inform the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police that ‘he would be leaving town at 3.30 p.m. for Hinton Waldrist.’ The Special Branch were kept informed of all his movements. However, that was the extent of his personal security arrangements, and he had turned down the offer of a police bodyguard.

At 1.30 he ‘announced that he would have something to eat in the House and then take a cab to his tailor.’ This was Tom Brown in Princes Street, Mayfair, where he had a 2 p.m. appointment. Neave had been getting his suits from the same venerable establishment since his schooldays at Eton, where the original shop sits in the High Street. Today he was having the first fitting for two suits he had ordered a few weeks before.

The measuring over, he took a taxi back to the House, then descended to the underground car park to collect his car. Miss Robilliard’s evidence to the police suggests it was unlikely that he inspected it before getting in, because although he was ‘fairly good about security of the vehicle’, he would ‘not be troubled by anything lying on the floor of the car. He never checked the exterior of the vehicle.’

He climbed behind the wheel of the light-blue company Cavalier, switched on the ignition and moved off towards the ramp that led up to the cobbles of New Palace Yard. At 2.58 p.m., the Palace of Westminster was shaken by a great explosion. Richard Ryder ran to the window of Mrs Thatcher’s office. Immediately below lay the smoking remnants of Neave’s Vauxhall, ‘just blown to smithereens’.2

Policemen and parliamentary journalists ran to the wreckage. Neave was lying back in the driver’s seat. His face was blackened and his clothing charred. The explosion had removed his right leg below the knee and shattered the left leg. His face was well known in the Westminster village. One of the journalists had been with him only the night before. Neave’s injuries were so bad that for a while no one recognised him. It took almost half an hour to free him from the debris and load him into an ambulance, which took him to Westminster Hospital, a mile away. He died eight minutes after getting there, just before Diana arrived.

The other woman in his life was at an event in her Finchley constituency when the bomb went off. It was a while before she learned the identity of the victim. As dusk fell, London looked wintry again. Returning to her home in Flood Street, Chelsea, with grief and shock still etched on her face, she paid her first tributes to her friend. ‘He was one of freedom’s warriors,’ she told one camera crew. ‘No one knew what a great man he was … except those nearest to him. He was staunch, brave, true, strong. But he was very gentle and kind and loyal.’ To another she vented her feelings about those who had killed him. ‘Some devils got him,’ she said. ‘And they must never, never, never be allowed to triumph. They must never prevail. Those of us who believe in the things that Airey fought for must see that our views are the ones which continue to live on in this country.’

For those of a certain age, the death of Airey Neave was a JFK moment. They can remember where they were and how they felt when the news reached them. This author was a young newspaper reporter and heard it on the radio while driving up from the West Country, where he was covering the Jeremy Thorpe affair. At that time political assassinations were scarcely unusual. Killing British public figures was a major part of Irish Republican strategy. There were two reasons, though, why Neave’s death felt different. One was where it had happened. If the House of Commons car park wasn’t safe from Irish terrorists, where was? The other concerned who he was. Neave was known as a right-hand man of the woman who seemed likely to be the next prime minister. The message the killers wanted to send was clear. Nowhere and no one was beyond their reach.

For all the shock of the killing, most people outside politics would have found it difficult to put a personality or even a face to the dead man. His name stuck in the mind because it was unusual. Older people might have remembered him as a war hero, the first British officer to escape from Colditz. Even inside the Westminster stockade, he was seen as rather enigmatic, detached and unknowable.

To Jonathan Aitken,† then a young backbencher, he was ‘the cat who walks alone … a sphinx’.3 Aitken’s first impression of him was of a man who ‘shimmered’ and ‘seemed to hover around the edge of corridors, as though he were trying to vanish. If you tried to guess what his occupation might have been, you might have said “spook” or “ghost”, because he moved in a funny way … He was unobtrusive … I think he cultivated an air of mystery and spookiness … I remember being struck by his air of ghostliness or secretiveness.’

It is a sentiment echoed by several people I interviewed. ‘I can see him walking along,’ recalled Tom King.‡4 ‘He seemed to make no sound and leave no impression as he went by. I always thought he was a natural conspirator … I don’t mean in an unkind sense. But he was quite a schemer, and clever.’

At first glance he looked completely conventional. He was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed fourteen stone. He looked very English. His face was round and rosy, his pouched eyes a hazy blue, his skin smooth and his light hair sparse. The new Tom Brown suits he was measured up for that afternoon were just like those he had always ordered: both grey worsted, one with a faint check, the other with a discreet stripe and each with an extra pair of trousers.5 Even in 1979 such garments looked old-fashioned.

They marked him out as a member of the wartime generation. There were still plenty of them around on both sides of the House, but the world they were familiar with had changed. To some, it seemed that informality was becoming the norm, thrift had fallen to mass consumerism, and lingering wartime-era notions of a communal investment in shared goals and ideals had given way to the pursuit of individual and sectional interests. Older Britons complained that the rising generation seemed to believe that what to them were almost decadent luxuries were a natural right: cars, washing machines, restaurant meals, foreign holidays. And they did not expect to have to work very hard to get them.

Looking back, these aspirations seem modest and notions of what constituted a good time or a treat touchingly simple. In 1979, no one had heard of prosecco. In that morning’s Daily Mail, the Victoria Wine company advertised Easter bargains including Martini Bianco at £1.39 a bottle and Olé medium sherry at £1.47. The television page carried the schedule for the three national channels. At 8 p.m. – prime time – viewers could choose between half an hour of the comedian Les Dawson (BBC1), a documentary on the Bengali community of Brick Lane (BBC2), or Flambards, a country-house mini-series set in the early years of the century (ITV). If you missed a programme, you might capture it on the new video recorders that were now in the shops. It meant a significant investment. A Philips N1700 carried by Currys cost £499, the equivalent of the monthly average wage.

Even for trendy, well-heeled Londoners looking for a sophisticated meal out, choices were, to today’s eyes, either circumscribed or unappetising. At Bumbles, in Buckingham Palace Road, a short stroll from the Neaves’ flat, the choices included cold lettuce soup, kidneys in champagne with saffron rice, and mushrooms stuffed with prawns and grilled with Stilton.

Neave was sometimes irritated by modern life and could get furious at displays of modern bad manners. But he was in many ways a progressive, far from the popular notion of an Eton and Oxford Tory. His voice was not loud and assertive but soft, sometimes almost inaudible. He hated country pursuits and, when compelled to stay with his wife’s family at their Palladian mansion in Staffordshire, preferred to sit in an armchair reading rather than going shooting or riding to hounds.

He went to gentlemen’s clubs but was not ‘clubbable’. He no longer drank, and he breathed the atmosphere of cigar smoke, brandy and leather armchairs out of duty rather than pleasure. He preferred the company of clever women to pompous men. His experience of running female agents in occupied Europe in the war could be said to have turned him into a quasi-feminist, convinced that women were just as quick, resourceful and physically and mentally courageous as males. The one person he was truly himself with was Diana, who came equipped with all that he admired in a woman: intelligence, energy and good looks. Their marriage was a partnership and his story is to a considerable extent also hers.

The circumstances of his death gave a military quality to his funeral. It took place eight days after the explosion, in the church of St Mary at Longworth, near the Neaves’ home in Hinton Waldrist. Margaret and Denis Thatcher led the mourners, hemmed in by a phalanx of armed police. The narrow nave and old oak pews were far too small for the hundreds who had turned up, and the service had to be relayed by loudspeaker to the crowd outside. Standing among the gravestones in the April sunshine, they heard the rector, Jim Smith, praise a ‘supremely loyal subject of the Queen, a true patriot, and a good citizen of the world’.6

Given Neave’s prominence and the shocking way in which he had been killed, interest in the story faded remarkably quickly. The election campaign, followed by Margaret Thatcher’s victory, dominated the media agenda. Coverage of the hunt for his killers soon moved to the inside pages and then disappeared. There was nothing much to report. A number of suspects were rounded up, only to be released. Photofit images of possible perpetrators appeared in the press, but the faces they showed could have fitted half the young males in the British Isles. Over the years, there were a few minor flurries of excitement when arrests seemed to promise a possible prosecution. They came to nothing and, eight years after the killing, a Home Office minister told the House of Commons, ‘I very much regret to say that nobody has been charged in connection with the murder and it would be misleading for me to say that I have any information to suggest that a charge is likely to be made in the immediate or near future.’7

Nothing more was revealed by the authorities about who killed Airey Neave or how they did it. Despite an official policy of peace and reconciliation, the relevant Home Office and Metropolitan Police files remain closed, and all my attempts to gain access to them through the Freedom of Information Act were refused on, among other grounds, those of ‘national security’.

However, using private and unofficial sources I have been able to put together a picture of the circumstances behind the plot as well as learning the identities of two of those suspected of close involvement in its execution. By a curious coincidence, one of them had, like the victim, pulled off a daring and minutely planned escape from captivity, tunnelling out of the Maze prison near Belfast.

The publicity generated by the book has placed his name in the public domain, as well as helping to prompt a police decision, forty years after the event, to reopen the murder investigation. So it may just be that after all this time, the many unanswered questions about the event will be answered and peace will finally settle on Airey Neave’s unquiet grave.

The mystery around Airey Neave’s death is perhaps in keeping with the air of secrecy that attached to him in life and would continue to hang around for decades after he departed it. Forty years on, it is time he stepped out of the penumbra and into the light.

* Richard Ryder (1949–), educated Radley and Magdalene College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk, 1983–97; Government Chief Whip, 1990–95; created Lord Ryder of Wensum, 1997.

† Jonathan Aitken (1942–), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; Conservative MP for Thanet East, 1974–83; Minister for Defence Procurement, 1992–94; Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 1994–95; imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice, 1999.

‡ Tom King (1933–), educated Rugby and Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Bridgwater, 1970–2001; from 1983, successively Secretary of State for Environment, Transport, Employment, Northern Ireland and Defence; created Lord King of Bridgwater, 2001.