A former civil servant Barbara Hosking took time to talk about being 91 years old and gay on the Emma Barnett Show.

She served as the former aide to Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and she discussed how she had to remain in the closet.

“I lead a conventional life, and actually that’s just one part of it, and in a way it’s not that important,” she said. “My family never knew, I never told my parents. They would have not understood, and they would have been shocked. My mother loved me very much indeed, so did my father, but he was very old-fashioned and conventional.

“My mother would have been not so conventional, but she would have probably thought it was a difficult choice for me to make, an unhappy choice, although I have been very happy, I’ve lived a very full life.”

You can read her book, Exceeding my Brief: Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant out now,