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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.
Howard-
Both are cases of a special kind of evil.
It's not really how people think nowadays, but until WWII I think people accepted wartime decisions as wartime decisions - locking up the instigators of WWII for instigating a war was pretty new territory. Penalising Germany as a state for starting WWI was, in legal terms, pretty new ground as well. Before that it was just raison d'état and the victor's spoils.
Edit to add - okay, people were locked up for starting wars previously, but more as a matter of neutralising them than as some overarching legal principle.
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.