For Margaret Thatcher, Northern Ireland wasn’t just a political minefield but a personal tragedy. Just months before she took office in 1979, her close friend and ally, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary Airey Neave, who led her campaign for the Conservative Party Leadership, was killed when a bomb, planted by republican terrorists, went off from under his car as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster.
For Margaret Thatcher, Northern Ireland wasn’t just a political minefield but a personal tragedy. Just months before she took office in 1979, her close friend and ally, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary Airey Neave, who led her campaign for the Conservative Party Leadership, was killed when a bomb, planted by republican terrorists, went off from under his car as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster.
In 2008, the Plaid Cymru AM Bethan Jenkns declared that plans for a portrait of Margaret Thatcher to hang in the Welsh Assembly was an “insult to the people of Wales". At the same time, the then Conservative AM and now MP for the Vale of Galmorgan Alun Cairns praised the ex PM for having “transformed the Welsh economy.”
