She faced down the IRA’s murderous Brighton bomb attack in 1984, insisting the Tory party conference continue just hours after the terrorists’ assassination bid.
Now, The Mail on Sunday can reveal an extraordinary cover-up when Margaret Thatcher – fondly known as The Iron Lady – survived another apparent attempt on her life five years later.
According to formerly secret files obtained by this newspaper, the-then prime minister’s plane was targeted in a massive missile bombardment while flying over Mozambique.
Lady Thatcher was visiting Africa on a six-day diplomatic mission, seeking to win the release of Nelson Mandela and signal the end of apartheid in South Africa.
She was flying in a RAF Vickers VC-10 across the civil war-torn region when several powerful surface-to-air missiles were launched towards the aircraft.
Although they missed, the Foreign Office has kept the incident under wraps for decades, for fear it would destabilise relations.
Now, newly declassified documents lay bare the fury of the British government at their Mozambique counterparts who, it later emerged, claimed a drunken commander was responsible.
Lady Thatcher was flying from Zimbabwe to Malawi on the evening of March 30, 1989, when her aircraft came under fire over Mozambique.
At the time, it was engulfed in a savage civil war between the ruling Marxist FRELIMO party and the Right-wing RENAMO guerrilla movement.
The aircraft went on to land safely at its intended destination, Blantyre airport in Malawi, and Lady Thatcher referred to the near-miss with typical insouciance, dismissing it in a single line in her autobiography, The Downing Street Years.
Mistakenly thinking the missiles were fired by the rebels, she wrote: ‘The journey was short and so my VC10 was flying lower than usual – too low for comfort, since at one point we were fired on with missiles by RENAMO. Fortunately they missed.’
According to Charles Moore, her official biographer, the attack was later blamed on ‘a drunk FRELIMO air battery commander’.
The National Archive documents show that once Lady Thatcher was safe, British officials demanded to know what had happened. Under pressure from Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano promised a full investigation.
But after two months had passed without response, the British ambassador to Mozambique James Allan raised the matter again. ‘I asked President Chissano on June 7 what the results were of his investigation. He confessed that he did not know. I said that it was very important that this should be pursued,’ Mr Allan reported back to Mr Howe.
On September 23, 1989 – five months after the attack – the head of the Foreign Office’s Central African Department Charles Cullimore wrote to Patrick Fairweather, the Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Africa, and said: ‘It is more than time that we returned to the charge with the Mozambicans over their continuing failure to produce an adequate explanation.’
But the Foreign Office was anxious to downplay the matter, the documents show, and Mr Cullimore added that ‘if they confirm that there was an incident, we should regard the matter as closed’.
The Mozambicans finally admitted privately to the British government in November 1989 that Lady Thatcher’s plane had been accidentally fired upon, blaming it on a drunken commander of an anti-aircraft battery.
The Foreign Office did not release any details of the missile attack at the time, and the official Mozambican report remains classified until 2030.
