Eamonn Butler

It's the most exciting time of my life.

When Mrs. Thatcher took office, what you had was an ideological administration.

Before then, politicians had all been managerialists.

They were just trying to keep the show on the road.

Whereas Mrs. Thatcher, daughter of a shopkeeper, she was determined to run the economy like you would run a shop very prudently.

and to experiment with all sorts of new ideas that had been off the agenda for such a long time because there was this sort of centrist, left of center consensus.

So that was quite thrilling that it was an administration which was genuinely interested in ideas.

Well, one of our first publications was on what we call quangos, quasi-autonomous non-government organizations.

They're sort of boards and committees around Whitehall that ministers appoint people to, but there's some very weird ones like the Hadrian's Wall Advisory Committee, which

and the Detergents and Allied Products Voluntary Notification Scheme Scrutiny Group.

And we discovered in the UK there were 3,068 of these.

And we said, that's far too many.

This is just bureaucracy.

Let's get rid of it.

And we published that in a book, but it was a strange book because it only had one page, but that page was 12 feet long.

which was a list of all of these quangos.

So Mrs. Thatcher saw that and she got the head of the civil service to meet up with us.

And he said, well, the prime minister's told me I've got to cut quangos.

Which ones should I start with?

So there was that.