Memory Lane

Forty years ago, on 30th March 1979, a loud explosion shattered the peace of a spring-like afternoon outside the House of Commons.

Emergency responders found the horribly burned body of a man trapped in the wreckage of a car. It had been booby-trapped by the Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group of the IRA. The victim, who died an hour later in hospital, was 63-year-old war hero and Tory MP Airey Neave.

I first met Neave in 1973, when he visited my boarding school, Radley, which was in his constituency. I was delegated to show him round. It was the start of a modest friendship which lasted the rest of his life. I remember a trim, tweed-suited figure of military bearing, quietly spoken but with a salty turn of phrase. After I described a typical school meal for him, he wrinkled up his nose and said, ‘Sounds even worse than the arse-drivel they served at Colditz.’

Thirty-one years earlier, he’d been the first British Neave’s car – Parliament, 1979 soldier to escape from the ‘escape-proof’ prison.

Neave (codename Saturday) joined the hushhush military outfit MI9, which advised on escape and insurrection in occupied Europe. Officially, he stayed in intelligence until 1952, shortly before his election to Parliament, although some think he never left. One rumour is that he explored the possibility of engineering a right-wing coup in the years before the Thatcher revolution.

Not long before he died, Neave told me what he planned to do in the event he was appointed Thatcher’s Northern Ireland Secretary (she won the election on 3rd May 1979). ‘First,’ he said, ‘the IRA will be invited to decommission their weapons. And following that, they will be encouraged to embrace democratic politics.’ Neave pointedly left unsaid what he meant by the words ‘invited’ and ‘encouraged’. I also heard him say, ‘The British Army could clean up the whole problem in a fortnight if the politicians let them get on with it.’ It seems a safe bet that he would have taken the most robust possible approach to the job.

By Christopher Sandford, who receives £50. Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Patrick Bishop’s The Man Who Was Saturday: The Extraordinary Life of Airey Neave is published on 7th March (William Collins).