BY PAUL ROUTLEDGE
AT 2.58pm on March 30, 1979, as MPs were leaving Westminster after a motion of no confidence that ended the premiership of James Callaghan, a dull boom echoed around New Palace Yard, below Big Ben.
The explosion – exactly 40 years ago today – was heard as far away as Trafalgar Square, and officials in the nearby Ministry of Defence exclaimed: “That was a bomb!”
Police found smoke pouring from the blazing wreck of a blue Vauxhall Cavalier, stalled half-way up the ramp from an underground car park.
Inside was the blackened figure of a man, bleeding and unconscious, upright behind the steering wheel. He was unrecognisable, apart from the dark coat and striped trousers that were the dress of an old-fashioned Conservative Member of Parliament.
It was Airey Neave, MP for Abingdon, war hero, Colditz escaper, Nuremberg prosecutor, secret service agent, protoEurophile and the man who gave us Margaret Thatcher.
His “psy-ops” campaign, drawing on intelligence experience, propelled her past hesitant rivals to the Tory Party leadership. On the eve of Thatcher’s general election launch, she had lost her most trusted adviser. The European project had lost a staunch supporter.
Why? Neave, 63, was assassinated by a hit squad from the little-known Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group from the moribund Official IRA.
He was targeted because he was the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, destined to make all-out war against terrorists in Ulster, where the Troubles had been raging for years.
Four decades later no one has been convicted, jailed or even arrested for his murder. There was no White Paper on the affair, no public inquiry, no discreet briefing by spooks about the killers, beyond a forensic description of how they did it, with a mercury tilt-bomb of the kind frequently used by terrorists.
Nor, beyond gushing obituaries, was there a rush to tell the story. Diana, his widow, put out to “the writing classes” the word that she did not want his biography to be written.
Obviously, I do not move in the same classes because no such prohibition reached me. So in the late 1990s I began research on Public Servant, Secret Agent, The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave, while working at Westminster as political commentator for the Daily Mirror. It was a complex, at times scary, inquiry.
Let’s start at the beginning. Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave was born in London’s Knightsbridge, in 1916, the son of a noted insect expert. One grandfather was Governor of the Bank of England.
Young Airey was sent to prep schools and Eton, and went on to New College, Oxford to read law. He joined the Territorials while an undergraduate, enlisted in the Army at the outbreak of the Second World War, and was
Neave with his medals Car after ’hillprimed’ bomb posted as a troop commander to France. Severely wounded and captured in the fall of Calais in 1940, he was taken to Thorn PoW camp in Poland. He escaped, was recaptured and then sent to Oflag IVc, better known as Colditz.
At his second attempt there, he escaped successfully, dressed as a German officer, with Dutch army officer Toni Luteyn, who spoke German well, unlike Neave. The pair travelled by train through Leipzig and Ulm before crossing the border, through thick snow, into neutral Switzerland.
This remarkable effort made Neave something of a celebrity. Promoted in rank and into MI9, covering escape and evasion from OccuNeave fled Colditz in Nazi uniform