Murder of the war hero who brought Thatcher to power
pied Europe, he was firmly inside military intelligence. He never really left.
With the war over, Neave’s legal training took him to the Nuremberg Trials, where he read the indictments to Nazi top brass, most of whom went to the gallows.
Neave remained an officer in the TA/SAS until the early 50s, when he realised his ambition of becoming a Conservative MP at a by-election in 1952, beating Labour’s Ted Castle (husband of firebrand Barbara).
He maintained close links with the security services, in dining groups in London clubs, and secretive groups of businessmen and old sweats who thought Britain was going to the dogs, or communism, which was worse.
Neave was not a natural politician or speaker, more a conspirator behind the scenes. His brief, low-level ministerial career was cut short by a heart attack in 1959, after which Ted Heath reportedly told him he was “finished”, making an enemy for life. When Heath lost a second general election in October 1974, Neave became Thatcher’s campaign manager in the ensuing leadership contest. He treated it like a military operation – “psy-ops” – bamboozling fellow MPs (the only electors) into believing she had no chance and they were voting for her to get better-known figures like William Whitelaw into the fray.
The Iron Lady’s Iron Man even persuaded Thatcher to make a proEurope statement to pick off Heath supporters. Supposedly the most sophisticated electorate imaginable, the MPs fell for his professional guile, and the victorious Maggie made him head of her private office.
From there, it was an easy move to the job he coveted: Northern Ireland. Traditionally viewed as a political dead end, this was his chosen battlefield. Here, he could achieve his longstanding ambition to take on an enemy and win, through a combination of arms and military intelligence.
The Provisional IRA and INLA feared him, in no small measure because Neave had been a PoW, like their “men behind the wire” in Long Kesh, who played a key role in the war against British troops. He understood their weaknesses, their way of thinking. He had to go.
The soldier-politician knew he was in mortal danger, and almost how the hit would come. “If they come for me, the one thing we can be sure of is they will not face me. They’re not soldier enough,” he told a friend. And that was how it was.
The INLA, a small
WIDOW Diana Neave
but Neave with Thatcher vicious breakaway from the IRA, despatched “clean skins” – volunteers with no record – to do this one job. Thatcher was devastated by the killing, but soldiered on, quoting Neave: “There is work to be done.” Despite a hue and cry on both sides of the Irish Sea, intensive police inquiries failed to find the culprit(s). British police issued various photofits of villanous-looking suspects. Some were taken into custody, and released. It was enough for one man to speak with an Irish accent and drink Guinness in the Westminster Arms to arouse suspicion. But the trail went cold, and then the serial murders of prominent republicans, leaders of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the political wing of INLA, began. This was retribution. The first to die was John Turnley, a 44-year-old former SOLEMN Pallbearers carry his coffin
on the settee, the other, in a ski mask, claimed to have been part of the plot.
The killers, he disclosed, were a three-man team of “sleepers”, only marginally involved in Republicanism and unknown to the authorities.
The anonymous trio was drawn from north and south of the border. One was a college graduate, all were in their 30s. Armed with intelligence on Neave’s movements collected by a British sympathiser, they entered the UK via a third country, carrying explosives in a Perspex box.
Contrary to colourful reports of breaching Westminster security, the bomb had been attached by a magnet, underneath the driver’s seat of Neave’s Cavalier, outside his home. It was a mercury-tilt device, primed to explode when the car went uphill.
By the time it went off the bombers “were well gone” and returned to conventional lives in Ireland, according to the man in the mask.
“Anonymity was the only safety they had, and that was the only reason they could live normal lives,” he said. If that is true, they would still be alive, pensioners well into their 70s.
Airey Neave may largely be forgotten, but the circumstances that gave rise to his assassination are still with us, vividly manifest in the Irish Backstop dispute. To update Thatcher, there is still work to be done, which is presumably why MI5 has 700 officers stationed in Belfast even today.