The birth of their two sons, Josh and Saul, did little to modify his work ethic. Indeed, when it came to his own children, Mayer modelled his mother rather than father. "I was so work-obsessed that I can't remember when I read the kids a bedtime story, because I had more important things - in my view - to do," he says candidly. “I feel I've missed out and my kids have missed out."
Josh, 34, is now head of education policy at the BBC and Saul, 32, is a researcher on child development at the Anna Freud Centre.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at Thames Valley University, has described him as "an inspiration to my generation of public policy thinkers. Quite simply, he has been one of the pioneers of the late 20th century in developing integrated policy thinking and planning."
His current preoccupation is with the social implications of climate change, and here Hillman's conclusions are so dramatic, so jumbo in their tentacles, that they'll probably propel him into prominence. His trigger is the Contraction and Convergence campaign devised by Aubrey Meyer, founder director of the independent Global Commons Institute (GCI). This has charted the vast reduction of carbon emissions required of the western world (that's the contraction bit) in order to equalise it with the rest of the world (the convergence) to avert climate catastrophe and protect the global commons - a process nothing less than "equity for survival". Their calculations make Kyoto look like trying to end a drought with a watering can.
PURCHASE MAYER'S PUBLICATION HERE