[1] During his time there he and Oliver Letwin, a fellow Policy Unit adviser, co-authored a memo which argued that the government ought not to regenerate certain inner cities, claiming that black youths would use the money for the "discotheque and drug trade", and added: "So long as these bad moral attitudes remain, efforts to improve the inner cities will flounder.
Booth resigned in February 1994 as a parliamentary private secretary to Douglas Hogg, then the Foreign Office minister of state, after newspaper reports of a relationship with House of Commons researcher Emily Barr.
[6] This was politically embarrassing to the John Major government of the time, following the backlash of Major's Back to Basics initiative,[6] and in January 2015, the satirical magazine Private Eye criticised Booth for his alleged hypocrisy, saying it went against his recommendations in the newly released 1985 memo that the government should instill values of "personal responsibility, basic honesty, [and respect for] the law and the police" from an early age.
[7] Booth lost a bruising nomination battle with the Hendon South MP John Marshall for the new Finchley and Golders Green constituency, and was unsuccessful in finding another seat before the election.
[citation needed] Booth, with Mark Mallon who had been his constituency election campaign manager, co-wrote and self-published a book on the subject of long-term unemployment and homelessness, titled Return ticket : one hundred and one stories of long-term unemployed people who successfully made the journey back to work (publisher Lennard, isbn 1-85291-123-9.)