The most important event in my Observer period was being commissioned to write a book on the Treasury. The idea of going to ask ex-Chancellors and other former ministers to talk of their experiences was given to me by none other than Sir William Armstrong, the Treasury's friendly but intense Permanent Secretary. Armstrong, who came from a Salvation Army background, was different from the popular conception of a Treasury figure. He would talk to me freely at home in the evenings, but none the less warn me the following morning not to delve too deeply in my book into Treasury advice. He once observed that my real forte was as an in-depth reporter.

A mistake I made was to show my manuscript to Armstrong. The result was that Reginald Maudling, the usually genial Chancellor who succeeded Selwyn Lloyd, read the Riot Act to me (at a lunch for the two of us for which the Observer paid) for mentioning the content of official advice. My suspicions that the official Treasury had put Maudling up to it were confirmed when, once in Opposition, he reviewed a subsequent edition in the Spectator very favourably, saying, 'So far as he is dealing with matters of which I have personal experience, I find his account very fair.'

This refrain about 'advice given by civil servants to ministers' being on a par with the confessional has recurred throughout my journalistic life. All the talk of open government is so much hot air while the Whitehall line remains that officials will not give frank advice if it is liable to be reported, even with a lag. It is just as easy to argue that better advice will be given if those who provide it can be held to account.

The purpose of the title, The Treasury under the Tories, 1951-64, was to make a virtue of the historical aspect so that it would not seem to have been overtaken by events if Labour was in power by the time dhe book was published - as it was. Harold Wilson said that the book should have been called The Tories under the Treasury.

The policy recommendations of the 1964 edition are, from my present standpoint, too inflationary and countenance too much government intervention. What, however, still gives me retrospective satisfaction is that I distanced myself from the prevailing clamour for a more dynamic economic or production ministry to take over economic steering, with the Treasury as a subordinate instrument. 'If the Treasury remains responsible for the balance of payments, for taxation, for the Bank Rate ... it is likely to remain the effective economic ministry, whatever nominal changes are made.' Yet even as I was writing write this introduction, a former director general of dhe CBI, John Banham (1994), advocated the abolition of the Treasury as the key to overcoming Britain's economic problems - like killing the messenger who brings bad news.

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