IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, but was not injured. In 1990 the IRA bombed West Green House, a mansion in Hartley Wintney, where he had lived just weeks before, and where in the past Thatcher had been a guest. In the mid-1980s, for reasons of safety and tax, McAlpine decided to move to Monaco and Venice. Before his departure he had sold many of his possessions at Sotheby's. McAlpine was deputy chairman of the party from 1979 to 1983. After Thatcher left in 1990, he remained fiercely supportive of her, and dismissive of her successor John Major, particularly his policies on the European Union. McAlpine joined James Goldsmith's Referendum Party six months before the 1997 general election, chairing its October 1996 party conference. He was expelled from the Conservatives in the House of Lords soon thereafter. In 1997 he became the Referendum Party's leader following Goldsmith's death, although the party would soon become defunct. He was very critical of the Conservative Party under William Hague and sat as an Independent Conservative for some time in the House of Lords before rejoining the Conservatives. In 1997 McAlpine was briefly involved in the movement by some British conservatives to help Chechnya, especially by trying to support its oil industry. Alongside former Chechen mafia boss and Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev he created the private holding company Caucasian Common Market. In order to maintain his non-domiciled status and so be able to avoid paying UK residents' taxes, McAlpine stepped down from his seat in the House of Lords in 2010 because of a constitutional amendment to the British tax code. McAlpine liked the Conservative Party chairman Cecil Parkinson, and disliked Parkinson's successor, John Gummer, whom he thought dull. Owing to his influence over Thatcher, McAlpine was said to have ensured Gummer's replacement as party chairman by Norman Tebbit. Australia McAlpine first went to Western Australia around 1960, after hearing that the government was to privatise road-building. In the mid-1960s he went to Perth to work, developing office blocks and the first five-star hotel in the city. In the 1980s McAlpine attempted to invigorate the tourism business in Broome. McAlpine had first been impressed with Broome in the late 1970s. He felt the area had great tourism potential. He invested $500 million on various developments, such as restoring crumbling buildings, fixing up a cinema, and creating the Cable Beach