At about 10:08 on a snowy Thursday morning, a Ford Transit van parked at the junction of Whitehall and Horse Guards Avenue fired three mortars through a hole cut in its roof. One exploded in the garden behind Number 10, about 45 feet from the Cabinet Room. The other two landed near the Foreign Office and did not detonate. None of the ministers was hurt, and four people suffered minor injuries. The IRA had started planning the attack to kill Margaret Thatcher. John Major replaced her before it was carried out.
In the Cabinet Room, Major, his foreign and defence secretaries and senior officials were discussing the war against Iraq when the blast shattered the windows. Heavy net curtains caught the flying glass, and the men took cover under the table. When the noise died down, Major said: "I think we had better start again, somewhere else." Within ten minutes the meeting had resumed in the COBRA briefing room, and the Prime Minister kept to his schedule for the rest of the day.
The attack had taken months to prepare. In mid-1990 two IRA members travelled to London, one an expert on mortar trajectories and the other a bomb-maker from the Belfast Brigade. They bought the van, rented a garage and built the launch tubes. Security had been tightened because of the Gulf War, yet the van still got to within about 200 yards of the Prime Minister's office.
The IRA's statement, issued from Dublin, said that while nationalists lived under British rule, "the British Cabinet will be forced to meet in bunkers." It was the IRA's second attempt to kill a British prime minister in less than seven years. The Brighton hotel bombing in 1984 had narrowly missed Margaret Thatcher.
Key people: John Major, Douglas Hurd, Tom King