Sir John Hoskyns: the Margaret Thatcher I knew

Sir John Hoskyns was head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1979 to 1982. In a Q&A with The Spectator, he describes what it was really like to work with her, and how David Cameron could learn from the late Prime Minister.

In 1977, you wrote the Stepping Stones Report, which looked at the fundamental problems holding Britain back in the pre-Thatcher era. If you were to write a sequel, what would you focus on?

There’s no snap answer – at least from a bystander. Stepping Stones, and our ‘Wiring Diagram’ were written for  a particular crisis for the British economy. I had been working on an analysis of the problem since since the mid-seventies with the nuclear physicist and one-time head of the MoD think-tank, Terry Price. Between us, we drew up a map –  the ’wiring diagram’ – to show how, in Lenin’s words, ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Margaret giggled when she saw this fearsome road map, but with her chemistry background it intrigued rather than alarmed her.