Public Servant, Secret Agent: The elusive life and violent death of Airey Neave

by PaulRoutledge (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $14.34

  This work is a comprehensive biography of Airey Neave, Colditz escapee, MI6 officer, mastermind of Margaret Thatcher's leadership campaign and on the verge of being her first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when he was brutally murdered in the palace of Westminster by the INLA. On 30 March 1979, for the first time in more than 100 years, an MP was killed by a car bomb in the precincts of the House of Commons. Airey Neave was a loyal Tory backbencher who had last held ministerial office in 1959. What, then, had he done to deserve such a vicious and bloody attack? Public Servant, Secret Agent tells the tale of Neave's escape from Colditz, his involvement with the secret services and his shadowy role at the right of the Conservative party. With information about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Neave's death, Paul Routledge has written a revealing life of a man who was the ghost in the establishment.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $5.81

  A biography of Airey Neave, Colditz escapee, MI6 officer, mastermind of Margaret Thatcher's leadership campaign and on the verge of being her first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when he was brutally murdered in the palace of Westminster by the INLA. Neave's sensational escape and his equally sensational death are the extent of most people's knowledge and appreciation of one of Britain's most mysterious public figures. The two events, separated by 35 years, are crucially linked: Neave joined a division of MI6 following his wartime bravery to advise other would-be escapees. He was also active in establishing the Gladio network with SOE. Soon after the war, and after working as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, he successfully entered Parliament as Conservative MP for Abingdon, where he sat until his death. Overlooked by Macmillan and Heath for high office, ostensibly on health grounds, Neave pursued a public life of a very unusual kind: he became conspicuously inconspicuous, operating almost entirely outside the public gaze. During the early 1970s Neave was in contact with anti-Wilson plotters and by 1974 he was calling for Edward Heath's resignation too, seeing weakness in the Tory leader's capitulation to the miners. Thatcher was his crusading angel and he ran a brilliant leadership campaign, fooling more experienced candidates into complacency and securing Thatcher's triumph. She offered him any job in her Cabinet in return. Inexplicably to most he chose Northern Ireland and had prepared the most confrontational and explicitly belligerent strategy ever seen there. A matter of weeks before Thatcher's General Election victory began 18 years of Conservative government, Neave's extraordinary life of intrigue and scheming was ended by a plot he had not foreseen.