Patrick Bishop - The Man Who Was Saturday

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.

The publicity generated by the book has placed his name in the public domain, as well as helping to prompt a police decision, forty years after the event, to reopen the murder investigation. So it may just be that after all this time, the many unanswered questions about the event will be answered and peace will finally settle on Airey Neave’s unquiet grave.

The mystery around Airey Neave’s death is perhaps in keeping with the air of secrecy that attached to him in life and would continue to hang around for decades after he departed it. Forty years on, it is time he stepped out of the penumbra and into the light.

*Richard Ryder (1949–), educated Radley and Magdalene College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk, 1983–97; Government Chief Whip, 1990–95; created Lord Ryder of Wensum, 1997.

†Jonathan Aitken (1942–), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; Conservative MP for Thanet East, 1974–83; Minister for Defence Procurement, 1992–94; Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 1994–95; imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice, 1999.

‡Tom King (1933–), educated Rugby and Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Bridgwater, 1970–2001; from 1983, successively Secretary of State for Environment, Transport, Employment, Northern Ireland and Defence; created Lord King of Bridgwater, 2001.

1

British boys at school in the 1920s grew up in the shadow of death. This is not a metaphor but a fact. During the decade, memorials went up at every school, ancient or modern, bearing the details of former pupils who had gone off to the Great War and not come back. Eton already had a major memorial, built to honour the fallen of the ‘Second Boer War’ of 1899–1902. It was on a grand scale and included a library and an assembly hall. One hundred and twenty-nine names were listed on stone tablets. When the time came to consider another memorial, the scale of the loss was very different.

Between 1914 and 1918, the trenches of the Western Front, the grey wastes of the North Sea, the heights of Gallipoli and the baked earth of Palestine and Mesopotamia swallowed 1,157 Old Etonians. Various grand schemes were examined, including a tower in the style of the era of the school’s founder, Henry VI. In the end, the enormity of the loss defeated imagination. The death toll amounted to more than the number of boys at the school when war broke out (in 1914 there were 1,028 pupils). The authorities settled on a frieze of plain bronze plaques listing name, rank and date of departure. It runs the entire length of the cloisters along the western wall of School Yard.

When Airey Neave arrived at Eton in 1929 the bronze tablets were still shiny. In addition, grieving parents had commissioned their own small plaques commemorating their lost sons. So it was that Neave and his classmates passed their days moving between house, classroom, library and refectory, constantly overlooked by reminders of war and death, sacrifice and duty.