WHEN John Major began a meeting of his war cabinet one snowy February morning, he was not expecting to end it diving under a table in fear for his life.
But 30 years ago this Sunday, our then Prime Minister would do just that. Moments after he uttered the word “bomb”, a very real one exploded yards from the gathering in the heart of 10 Downing Street, forcing him and his colleagues to take cover.
It was just after 10am on February 7, 1991, when all hell broke loose — minutes after the start of the tense Cabinet Room meeting to talk about the ongoing Gulf War.
As Mr Major and colleagues discussed a possible Iraqi terror attack on London, a mortar shell exploded with a deafening bang in the Downing Street garden.
But this was not an Iraqi bomb — it was the latest attack by the IRA.
Lord Robin Butler, then head of the Civil Service, was sitting near the Prime Minister.
He recalled: “My first reaction was that this was a terrorist attack and some guys with sub-machine guns were going to appear and spray us all with bullets.
John Major had just used the word ‘bomb’ and there was this large explosion.
Lord Robin Butler
“I dived under the table — so, I recall, did John Major — and probably others as well.
“We were talking at the time, curiously enough, about a possible terrorist attack organised by Saddam Hussein in London.
“My recollection was that John Major had just used the word ‘bomb’ and there was this large explosion.
“The windows of the Cabinet Room didn’t shatter because they had a sort of protective film on them, but the French windows at the end of the room blew in.”Members of the Provisional IRA parked a van on Whitehall outside Banqueting House, around 200 yards from Downing Street.
In the back, three home-made mortar cylinders were angled to fire four-foot shells stuffed with plastic explosives through a hole cut in the van’s roof at No 10.
The van was also rigged with an incendiary device to destroy any evidence after the mortars had fired.
Once everything was in place, the terrorists fled and, at 10.08am, the bombs were launched.
Two shells overshot Downing Street and landed on a green by the Foreign Office — one exploding while the other failed to go off.
But the other flew over the rooftops of the Cabinet Office building and into the garden of No 10, where it detonated with an almighty bang.
Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, remembers throwing himself behind a pillar, fearing a second explosion.
Lord Lilley told The Sun: “There’s a pillar in the Cabinet Room. I jumped up and stood with it between me and the window in case another bomb went off.
“When the noise subsided, I turned round and saw the room was completely empty. I thought, ‘How did they all get out and leave me here?’. Then they all began to emerge from under the table.”
