We messed up and it should be revealed

It was a bleak winter's night, but he slept easily, secure in the knowledge the months of preparation for the Conservative Party conference seemed to be paying off.

There were no demonstrations by the striking miners as anticipated. In fact, the whole event had passed off remarkably peacefully.

The only voices of dissent outside the Brighton Conference Centre were some good-natured students from the polytechnic complaining about funding.

The easy slumber was shattered moments before 3am when the phone rang. It was one of his commanding officers from the John Street Police Station who said: "A bomb has gone off at the Grand, get down here right now."

The events of that night are well-recorded - it was the Provisional IRA's biggest ever propaganda victory - the night when they almost wiped out the British Cabinet and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Five people were killed and 31 were injured, including minister Norman Tebbit and his wife, Margaret.

But in the months and years to follow there were other, less high-profile victims of the blast. Robert Dipper was one of them.

In October, 1984, he was a police sergeant in his mid-

forties who had worked in Brighton for eight years. He lived in Saltdean with his wife and two children. Six years later he would have suffered a mental breakdown and his career and marriage would be in tatters.

Sgt Dipper, a former guard sergeant, was at the hotel twenty minutes after the bomb exploded.

The scene at the five-star hotel was of utter devastation. The bomb had been placed on the sixth floor and when it went off, a chimney collapsed and smashed straight through the hotel to the ground.

Dazed survivors were walking around the wreckage in their dressing gowns, most of them unable to comprehend what had happened.

"There was a stillness after an explosion you can almost feel. The air was full of chalk and dust and the front door was completely caved in," said Mr Dipper.

"William Whitelaw was walking along like a lost soul, he didn't know where to go. There was a feeling of where do you start.

"I can remember Sir Keith Joseph being carried out without any shoes on. He was piggy backed over the broken glass and rubble.

"Mrs Thatcher came down the stairs and went out through the back door. She went to the John Street Police Station and then to headquarters at Lewes where she spent the night in a training room."

Recriminations about who was to blame for the blast

led to the setting up of the Hoddinott inquiry which absolved Sussex Police of any wrongdoing.

"They just wanted to keep the air sweet.

"My point of view is Patrick Magee, who put the bomb in there, was a known member of the Provisional IRA.

"He checked into the Grand Hotel less than a month before it was to be occupied by the British Prime Minister and most of the Cabinet .

"It shouldn't have happened and it wouldn't have happened anywhere else. They should have checked the lists.

"Just over three weeks before the bomb went off, he stayed there five days and took the bath panels off in room 609.

"Nobody believed the Provisional IRA had the technology to put a timer on three or four weeks before. But they did and the device went off.

"The bomb was never found. There were daily searches of the conference centre by officers, including me, but they never went beyond the first floor of the Grand Hotel where Thatcher was staying.

"Security lapsed on those two cases alone; the dogs never went beyond the first floor, I know that for a fact. I'm not pointing fingers at the police because I was one of them.

"We messed up and we fouled up and it should have been revealed."

Mr Dipper had spent the run-up to the conference preparing for an appearance by miners who were striking against planned pit closures.

"The security at the Grand Hotel was geared towards public order.

"In 1974, the miners had brought down the Heath Government. We had all been trained in public order and the security was geared towards mass demonstrations by the miners. There were police horses there from the Met.

"During this, the ever present IRA threat, in my opinion, went on the backburner - the fact the bomb was in there shows that."

In the aftermath of the blast, Mr Dipper believes there was a clearout of officers who had worked on the conference's security.

His time came when he was told he would be taken off the beat to become a custody sergeant, working in the bowels of Brighton Police Station.

"After the end of a year I was pretty tight and people were telling me to ease off a bit. I was told I was going to be moved.

"When they said I was going below I could stomach it, but not being away from the guys I had been with. I had a reputation for being a bit of a hard case and it caused me such embarrassment and the bitterness will never go away.

"I'm an ex-guard sergeant and had a reputation for being able to handle myself in any dirty job.

I was down there in the custody block and I suddenly started crying - in the end I slid the keys down and went out. On the stairs an officer asked me what was the matter. When he saw the state I was in he told me to go home. I did and just didn't know what to do.

"It was bloody awful, but I didn't realise what was

happening, I was so depressed. They took me away from the section I was with for years and within a month I just cracked up. I was very, very bitter about that."

Although he didn't know it at the time, he was starting the slide into a nervous breakdown, which would take him six months to get over.

"I saw a police surgeon and he said I was shot to pieces and told me to take three months off and I cried and cried and cried.

"The anger is still in me for what they did to me. After six months I was OK, I went back to John Street on April 11, 1986. I didn't see a lot of the

guys I worked with ever again because they were moved on."

On May 1, 1987, Sgt Dipper took early retirement and went to work as an anti-terrorism expert at Gatwick Airport. Three years later he moved to the United States with the woman he was to marry and in 1994 he became an American citizen.

It was in 1997 that the horrors of the past bubbled to the surface again and he attempted an exorcism, of sorts, by writing them down.

The result is So Far From God, a novel partially based on his experiences.

The manuscript centres on two men, an IRA member who was involved in the Brighton bombing and a retired police officer who was part of the security detail.

The two meet ten years after the blast by chance and the former officer hunts the terrorist down before a bloody climax on the steps of the Grand Hotel.

Mr Dipper, 57, said: "The book has been professionally edited by my former US agent. He has done similar work for another English author, Jack Higgins."

For a year, the book was rejected by the behemoths of the American publishing world.

Mr Dipper said: "They simply did not want to publish Provisional IRA stories. All the English literary agents I have tried have rejected the book. To date, my rejection file holds almost 100 rejection letters from US agents, English agents and six publishers.

"But I am not going to give

up with this, because I think it is worthy of publication."

Today, Mr Dipper lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and their eight-year-old daughter.

Former colleagues and anyone interested in reading the book can contact him on his e-mail address at sffg@worldnet.att.net

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