On tour with the Iron Lady

I USED to dread Margaret Thatcher coming to the North because it meant 12 hours in the company of the IRA’s No 1 target.

She was pleasant enough, but always businesslike. No small talk. She would smile and nod in acknowledgement as we climbed aboard the helicopter before pulling on a headset to drown out the noise as the big Wessex rose into the darkness above RAF Aldergrove, 25km north of Belfast.

Her arrival from London, usually the day before Christmas Eve, was always unannounced. In the aftermath of the 1981 hunger strike, republicans wanted her dead, and paranoid loyalists claimed the right to distrust her when she signed off the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which they claimed weakened the constitutional link with the rest of Britain.