FACING down a spitting cobra was probably good preparation for a career in Downing Street and at the IBA. Far from exceeding her brief, Barbara Hosking is a woman who knows no fear, except perhaps of loneliness, and she has remained far too busy for that. At 91, she has, at last, told the story of her remarkable life.

The bullet points are relatively straightforward. She grew up in Cornwall, a background which still gives her deep pride. Her earliest work experiences were as a reporter on the Scilly Isles, where there may have been some kind of karmic crossing with the future prime minister Harold Wilson, for whom she served as press secretary, Edward Heath, too; and while their reputations are now clouded with mental ill-health and accusations of abuse respectively, it is good to be reminded just how dynamic and positive those now distant administrations were. Hosking’s relationship with Heath seems to have been particularly close, not least because she managed to avoid the more egregious of his rages.

As a scholarship girl from the West Country, she could have had no inkling of what lay ahead. Her rite of passage was a period spent working in the office of a copper mine in Tanzania, in an atmosphere of late colonialism edging into something more enlightened. It’s a measure of how slow the edging was that when a colleague’s successor turned up at the mine and was seen to be of mixed race, she was peremptorily sent away. Hosking draws very few direct lessons from her experiences, preferring to deliver them, plainly and conversationally, and to move on, without further comment.

Inevitably, much of the publicity surrounding the appearance of her autobiography has centred on her sexuality. Coming out at 91 might sound like a headline-grabbing tag line, but in fact, Hosking knew from primary school onwards that she was attracted to girls. There was a brief heterosexual fling in Tanzania, and a consequent offer of marriage, but she mentions these so casually and after the fact that one flicks back through the relevant chapter, wondering if something significant has been missed. There is a poignancy to her decades long friendship with a former partner who eventually leaves to form another relationship and there are moments when she seems to conform uncomfortably closely to the stereotype of an unmarried woman who has sublimated romance in work.

The work has never really stopped. After returning from Africa, she began to work for the Labour Party at Transport House, and at a period when socialism in the UK still had some kind of intellectual veracity and some claims to gender blindness. With giants like the permanently underrated Bessie Braddock, Jennie Lee and Barbara Castle at the heart of Labour counsels, there was already a strong female presence, balanced by men of the quality of Nye Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland.

As a civil servant, Hosking was not so much a rebel and subversive as simply impatient with the slow pace of change. She comes across once or twice as lacking social radar, or a sense of her own professional limitations. Perhaps with that in mind, she found an agreeable berth working at IBA [Independent Broadcasting Authority] and subsequently in the early years of British breakfast television, an impossibly utopian era in broadcasting which ended when a rat called Roland saved a sinking ship, and in the process showed that serious morning tv was perhaps an oxymoron. Hosking also served as deputy chairwoman of Westcountry Television, which brought her life and career almost full circle.

Exceeding My Brief lacks an index — “It would be too long” — which in an odd way heightens rather than diminishes the faint air of name-dropping. And yet, there is no getting round the recognition that Hosking had an ability for being in the right place at the right – or wrong – time just as the right people were moving onstage. She was in the No.10 press office when the PLO hijacked three passenger jets bound for New York. When the perpetrators were overpowered, Leila Khaled was flown to London and became a poster girl for the Palestinian cause. Hosking’s handling of this delicate situation persuaded Heath to keep her in the press office. Her punchline to a PA speech delivered by Heath to a hostile news corps – “And so, gentlemen, I have one final request. If I can’t have a higher level of analysis, may I please ask for a higher level of abuse?” — endeared her to him for ever. Two years later, she was present in Munich when eleven Israeli hostages were killed, having been taken hostage by Black September. Hosking’s narration of events like this borders on the abrupt or even brusque, but underlying it is a sense that history is not made in headlines and slogans, but in the patient back-corridor work that defines the life of the civil servant. It’s a remarkable tale, well told and often insightful. There don’t seem to be many Barbara Hoskings around any more.

Exceeding My Brief: Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant by Barbara Hosking is published by Biteback Publishing, priced £25