Page "Brighton hotel bombing" Paragraph 11

One of her biographers wrote that Thatcher's " coolness, in the immediate aftermath of the attack and in the hours after it, won universal admiration.

Her defiance was another Churchillian moment in her premiership which seemed to encapsulate both her own steely character and the British public's stoical refusal to submit to terrorism ".

Immediately afterwards her popularity soared to near-Falklands levels.

On the first Saturday after the attack, Thatcher said to her constituents: " We suffered a tragedy not one of us could have thought would happen in our country.

And we picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good British people do, and I thought, let us stand together for we are British!

They were trying to destroy the fundamental freedom that is the birth-right of every British citizen, freedom, justice and democracy ".