IRA try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher

Daily Mirror dated Saturday October 13th 1984

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An unusual wrap-around front/back cover in portrait orientation for this 1984 edition of the Daily Mirror.

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Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were staying at the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the 1984 Conservative Party conference when a bomb, planted by IRA member Patrick Magee, exploded.  It killed 5 people including Anthony Berry M P and badly damaged the front of the hotel.

Patrick Magee was found guilty on eight counts including the five murders and was sentenced to a minimum of 35 years in prison. Controversially he was released in 1999 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

There is little or no other ‘hard’ news, except for sport, in this edition.

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‘Good Morning Britain’ was presented by Anne, Nick Owen and puppet Roland Rat. Far more interesting is that I too had a kidney stone removed in Bournemouth Hospital.

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Home computers really came to the notice of the general public in the UK in 1981 with the release of the Sinclair ZX81 and the BBC Micro, so this advert is from the early days.  And what days – software input from cassette tape, 32 x 1024 bytes of memory and 80-column text-only visual display output. And no internet.  It’s a wonder the things caught on at all.

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Saturday night TV and, with the exception of the contestants on 3-2-1, not a single member of the public being humiliated, fed false promises of stardom or being used to make money from phone-in voting.  Just plenty of professionals - comedians, presenters, actors and Noel Edmonds - doing their jobs.

One of the oddest headlines I have encountered and not a pun in sight.  What I can't believe is that he 'booted her into the air'.

Probably invented in the early 1970’s in Japan, karaoke didn’t become popular in the West until the 1990’s. 

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So this is where the makers of the recent ‘innovation’ slankets got their inspiration.

Knowing nothing about football I thought Gary Lineker was just that jug-eared clown who advertised crisps, but it seems he played for England 80 times scoring 48 goals in the process, as well as scoring 281 goals in other matches for various clubs and all without once being shown a yellow or red card.  You live and learn - and at my age, forget.


A Merry Christmas to one and all.