Exceeding My Brief : Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant

This is the story of a simple Cornish girl with no contacts or education, who ended up in the corridors of power. It is also a very personal story of her struggle with her sexuality as a bewildered teenager, to her being out and proud when it was terminally unfashionable to be so! Born during the General Strike in 1926 Barbara Hosking swam her way through London typing pools in the 1950s, to executive posts in the Labour Party, then to No. 10 as press officer to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Hers is a journey from Wardour Street through politics, to international law reform, then onto the Board of ITV. It is also the story of a Cornish childhood where life in the diary sometimes included going with her father to collect churns of milk from farms around Land's End, listening to tales of mermaids and giants, lifeboats and pasties. There are descriptions of politicians in the days when they were big - Nye Bevan, Barbara Castle, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath who came to her 75th birthday at the Reform Club. There is also a 3-year detour when she worked on a copper mine in the African bush near Lake Tanganyika and discovered she was good with a gun. Later there are reminders of the great days of the ITV companies. The eggcups of Breakfast TV and Yorkshire TV's Darling Buds of May. It is a page-turner of a long life but, as Barbara says, `I had 91 years of raw material to work on.'