Before long she was working in the No 10 press office, first for Labour PM Harold Wilson and then for Tory Ted Heath. The upshot was that she opted for political neutrality and joined the civil service. She withdrew her application – only to be told that she had been chosen as the candidate.

“I now was aware for the first time in my life that I thoroughly disliked political compromise,” she said. A successful MP had to support party policies and that meant compromise – but not for Barbara. “Going over their questions and my answers again and again, one certainty emerged: I was not really suited to party politics,” she says. How would she vote if a Labour government entered into a war with which she did not agree? Would she be loyal to her government? It was a bruising experience. When shortlisted by the Stroud constituency, she faced rigorous cross-questioning. The trouble was that she believed passionately in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “‘I’ve been bullied by bigger men than ,’ I thought: ‘Nye Bevan for a start’' – Barbara Hosking

She joined the Labour party, became a press officer at its Transport House HQ, was elected as a local councillor and set her sights on being an MP. At a time when the world of work was weighted against women she was determined to reach the top. It is all the more startling when it happens without fanfare halfway through an autobiography which had me rooting for the author from the outset.īarbara Hosking’s book, Exceeding My Brief, Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant, tells how she came to London as a Cornish scholarship girl just after the second world war. Perhaps it is the cynical age in which we live but there is something rather shocking about an ambitious individual who rises steadily up the greasy pole of politics and then leaps off at a critical moment on a point of pure principle.

Not just a civil servant book