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What if the IRA successfully assassinated John Major?

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Polyphemus

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A simple premise, really. Basically curious what would be the immediate aftereffects if the IRA got in a lucky shot during their mortar attack on 10 Downing Street in 1991 and successfully killed not only the PM but most of the Cabinet.

What immediate effects can we see for Northern Ireland and the Gulf War? How does this change the British political landscape?
 
I'd imagine the immediate effect for Northern Ireland is very, very bad as the government retaliates - Good Friday's out, or at least massively displaced. Not sure what it does for American involvement in the peace process if the IRA killed Major when he's backing them up in a war with Saddam.
 
So you'd be looking at more than 20 dead if there was a direct hit.

In terms of MPs the casualties would be Major, Lamont, Hurd, King, Liley, Wakeham, Mellor, and Mayhew.

So an emergency cabinet would have to be a mixture of the young and relatively unexperienced (Heseltine, Clarke, Howard etc) and bringing back the recently retired. At this point remember Thatcher and Tebbit are still MPs, they'd be some pressure on them to serve I think.

The most senior person left would be the home secretary, Kenneth Baker, who'd probably be caretaker until the funeral and then a leadership election.

Kinnock will almost certainly call a truce on partisan attacks in the commons and Baker would have a blank cheque to crackdown on the IRA.

The more interesting effect would by the 1993 election, if the tories do win as in OTL, you might well see different lessons being learned by labour if it's seen more as a consequence of a rally around the flag effect.
 
Not a direct reflection on the 'what ifs', but I was about half a mile from the bomb at the time, at work in a side-street office close to Wellington Barracks, and heard it distinctly; it rattled our windows. I guessed it had been a bomb, but it sounded so close that we thought it had been an attack on the other side of the Barracks, from the Mall or Birdcage Walk; rather scary.

Mind you, it does seem a bit odd given the supposed level of security in Whitehall that someone could park a van in a street off Whitehall (close to the Ministry of Defence too) and run off without the CCTV being able to pick up their features well enough to make identification and arrest possible later (presumably in N Ireland), or if they had a scarf or pulled-down hat on for a security guard watching the TV to be alerted immediately. Was anyone actually watching the cameras 24/7, if not why not, and why was there not more of a fuss afterwards about dozy security plus some high-level sackings ? Any PM who was prepared to stand up to his advisers should have been more openly angry at being let down and not just 'closing ranks' as no doubt advised to do by the Sir Humphreys. One of the questions that has never been satisfactorily answered: this was far more of a lapse than the failed security at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.
 
heraclius said:
Mind you, it does seem a bit odd given the supposed level of security in Whitehall that someone could park a van in a street off Whitehall (close to the Ministry of Defence too) and run off without the CCTV being able to pick up their features well enough to make identification and arrest possible later (presumably in N Ireland), or if they had a scarf or pulled-down hat on for a security guard watching the TV to be alerted immediately. Was anyone actually watching the cameras 24/7, if not why not, and why was there not more of a fuss afterwards about dozy security plus some high-level sackings ?
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Apparently a policeman did go to investigate after the driver scarpered on a bike, which was pretty quickly after they'd parked, but by that point the mortar's started firing. How nobody got seen on CCTV around the centre of government is a good question.
 
Geordie said:
@Thande has the attack succeed in The Curse of Maggie, although it's not Major who cops it.

Aftermath makes it a bit grim to be Irish. Iirc, a couple of young lads get killed by mobs.
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Given a young foreign student was killed by mobs in otl in the aftermath of erm Germany beating England at the footie in 96, you would think so.
 
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