Quote by John Hoskyns

“The Thatcher government aimed for much more: a reshaping of the country's entire political economy. But there was no organised body of thought or practice about how to do such a thing. British politicians at that time had no successful post-war role models of strategic competence. Whatever their political gifts, ministers had no formal training for executive work. There was no political equivalent of the business school, no literature to help them think about the discontinuity of which even the dimmest politicians and businessmen were becoming aware. There was not even a common language for the task they had undertaken to enable ministers and their advisers to think and communicate with sufficient rigour and without misunderstandings, instead of muddling along with an armoury of empty phrases. And so, to start with, most of them had to rely, like their predecessors, on political history, traditional debating style and a collection of institutional assumptions. I suspect that, now things are more or less normal, all this will remain an immutable feature of British democratic government.”

Quote by John Hoskyns