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Both are cases of a special kind of evil. It's possible to argue that Thatcher is showing some kind of inconsistency by viewing and acting on the two remarkable cases differently. Personally I'm not sure, but it would take a whole lot of digging in to some pretty murky stuff to come to a well founded conclusion.
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Hess's problem was that he did not know enough about rockets to be valuable enough to the US, and was not as posh as Speer, so didn't get a soft sentence.
Howard
Manc_Ronnie
@h2o
Not defending Hess - he was, after all, a war criminal - but it's worth remembering that he had flown to Scotland in May 1941, just before Barbarossa started in June that year, to try to open peace negotiations with Britain, and spent the rest of the war as a POW. (His reasons weren't altrusitic - he didn't think Germany could survive a battle on two fronts).
The Jews were having a pretty shitty time of it already, but systematic mass shootings started after Barbarossa started later in 1941, and the 'final solution' was formulated in January 1942.
So conceivably the reason the UK, the US and France were all in favour of his release is because they didn't hold him responsible for the Holocaust.