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.