The irony was that Porter, for all her Thatcherite rhetoric, was implementing policies that were the opposite of true conservatism. Her rule was utterly dysfunctional. She created a vast, expensive bureaucracy to preside over her corrupt regime. Like Nixon at the height of Watergate, she tried to sack anyone who disagreed with her ideology. On one bizarre occasion, the riot police were even summoned into the City Hall to arrest Labour councillors. And she wasted a fortune in public money by keeping properties empty and boarded up while the homeless were pushed out to bed and breakfast accommodation in other boroughs. In one characteristically lunatic scheme, she tried to get a huge prefabricated shelter built in Dagenham to house some of Westminster’s homeless.

A few brave Tories, like party agent Donald Stewart, regarded her leadership as ‘bordering on the criminal’ and heroically worked to bring her down, though, as Hosken points out, it was a disgrace that so many city directors colluded with her for so long. In fact, it was only after she had voluntarily left office that proceedings for corruption started against her. Again, Hosken is excellent on untangling the complex web of financial duplicity that she had woven around City Hall. Eventually, in 1996, after elongated legal proceedings, she was ordered to pay a surcharge of an astonishing £43 million. In exile in Israel, she avoided any payment for years by hiding her personal fortune in secret accounts, but it was Hosken’s own dogged research into her wealth that helped to force a settlement out of her.

Parts of the story of her downfall almost read like a thriller, some achievement for a book about a local councillor. The tragedy of Dame Shirley was that she wanted to be a second Margaret Thatcher, but ended as a copy of that epic old fraudster Horatio Bottomley.

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