From the Daily Telegraph's obituary of journalist Graham Turner

He soon became one of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite interviewers and, rather to his amazement, a confidant and adviser. On one occasion he told her that he had been canvassing her Cabinet for a piece about her, and she demanded to know what they had said. “‘They say that you shout at them.’ ‘Shout at them?’ she bellowed, at a volume which would have made the rafters ring had there been any rafters. ‘THEY shout at me!’ 

He was particularly proud of a 1988 piece headlined “Why Britain’s eggheads look down on Mrs Thatcher”, in which he seduced various intellectuals into betraying the snobbery behind their dislike of the Iron Lady.

Dr (later Sir) Jonathan Miller castigated her “odious suburban gentility”; Alan Bennett described her as “typical of the people who go to the Chichester Festival”; Lady Warnock declared that “she epitomises the worst of the lower middle class”.

Interviewing his fellow northerner Harold Wilson, Turner told the Prime Minister that he hailed from Macclesfield and so did his cameraman. “That’s the trouble,” Wilson retorted. “Everybody comes from Macclesfield and nobody goes back there.”

He discovered that the Queen had said that Camilla Parker-Bowles “does look rather used” and had called Diana, Princess of Wales, “that impossible girl … quite mad”. He also elicited from an aide Prince Charles’s reaction to Diana’s death – “I feel guilty because I don’t feel guilty” – and prevailed on a senior civil servant to admit that Prince Philip had once said to him: “I’d always thought that what was wrong with this country was that all the best brains went into the Civil Service, but that was before I met you.”