It was October 1984, and Curry had returned to the Conservative Party fold. He was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and the drive for entrepreneurship that she championed. And the Tories were rather brazen about asking for his money: ‘It was quite blatant in those days,’ he remembers. ‘They said the Tory party is the party of sponsorship – you tell us what you want, you give us money, and we’ll make it happen.’ So he had been invited to the party conference in Brighton, and was staying in room 426 of the Grand Hotel, four rooms away from the Prime Minister, on the night that the IRA bomb exploded. When he failed to appear on the registers of the rescue teams the news caused a panic in the company. ‘I didn’t turn up for counting so I was reported as missing in the rubble,’ he says. In fact, he had witnessed the devastation of the blast and then, with startling blitheness, barely taken any notice of it. He was enjoying a very drunken party in the ground floor bar when, at just before 3am, the bomb went off.
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