Mrs Thatcher, oh, what's his name, he later became Lord Mayor of London? What's his name? Levy? Not the current Lord Levy, Tony Blair's friend, another man? He'd been in one of the Ministries and he and Mrs Thatcher introduced... there were various... earlier on we'd had various scrutinies... we were scrutinised by... I've forgotten the name of the people who scrutinised us. Mrs Thatcher was very worried about this large public sector. Because she believed passionately that anything the public sector, as I said, had to be inefficient, and in fact Dai Rees told me, who was the Head of the MRC, he'd been Head of the Unilever Research Laboratory, he told me much later than when he left to become Head of the MRC, she criticised him for leaving a serious and important job in industry for a soft job at the MRC. Those were her words. And she had, of course, heard the news of this... a very doctrinaire business, and so they set out... it went in three stages, the first was the Levy Report and that was sent out... no, I've forgotten the name of the man, there was one which we were scrutinised, I've forgotten the name of the Minister, who was acting for Mrs Thatcher, the minister who... and one of the things they reported, I remember being in the Lab, they reported... we had 19 different kind of test tubes in the stores, why didn't we rationalise this? This was some modest scientist who'd been rolled in and didn't understand that there were many different instruments of different kinds, and so on. So that's was the first... it was called 'the scrutiny'. There was a scrutiny done.

Then after the scrutiny they set up what is called 'prior options', which was much more sensible. Prior options was... is some research worth doing? If it's research worth doing, is it best done in the private sector or in the public sector? And this was prior options. By this time, Mrs Thatcher had been replaced by John Major, and John Major's Ministry of Science kicked it into touch, roughly. It never got very far. He could see... well, before that had happened, I had... you see, there was total lack of understanding... in the Government what the Treasury's job was not to spend money to further research, but to save money. That was the... they still work like that. That's where all the cuts from, the Treasury. And although there'd been in the white heat of the Harold Wilson thing, when the government was going to spend money on technology. Do you remember Tony Benn and all that? That idea was to spend money, but that didn't work very well, because they didn't know how to choose winners, if you remember the politics of the time. No, this was partly, this doctrinaire policy was that people aren't good at spotting winners, that's best left to private industry. So it wasn't, although it was doctrinaire, it had some foundation. It wasn't just purely theoretical. But we already by this time had begun to do transfer of technology, and it was all worked out in the basic establishment. So we were marked, we were on the list, so I got... Crick and Watson to write letters to The Times to say about this laboratory, what it had done not just in Nobel Prizes, but it actually had inventions coming out of it, for which we could... I think the confocal had just then come out at this time. But this was in the early days. So when the finalists appeared, we went on the list, but the Dunn nutrition Lab was on the list, for example, and the so...called inspectors came to see me, to see how we worked here, and it turned out they were absolutely surprised to discover that I was Head of the Lab. They expected to have an administrator as Head of the Lab, and I was supposed to be, like on tap, you see, to head the science and recruit people, and there was no understanding because I discovered I was called in Treasury terms a Senior Manager, because I was a certain grade. The MRC grades are parallel to the Civil Service, and my grade put me as a Senior Manager. So I told them what I did, and they said, 'Are you a working scientist?' I said, 'Yes, most certainly, I try to be part of the time but I have an administrator, who was Anne, but she does the budget and things like that but I keep an eye on all that', and they thought this was all wrong. And this was the Civil Service! So I think we also helped educate the Civil Service. Things have changed... a good deal now.