Lord Hattersley obituary

“Politics is a tough business,” the Labour politician Roy Hattersley once wrote, “and the proper response to assaults. abuse from the wilder shores of socialism is neither surrender nor retreat. It is a determination to take the ideological battle into enemy territory.”

Politics was Hattersley’s greatest love, but it was far from his only career. His friends reckoned that he had written more books than most authors, done more journalism than many journalists. attended more Sheffield Wednesday football matches than most fans – without compromising his commitment to his constituency and the Labour party.

The determination of Hattersley. who has died aged 93, to do battle in defence of principle kept the Labour party’s centre afloat in the years after 1979. He was the architect of Labour Solidarity, a group that, in the early 1980s, led the organisational. ideological campaign for democratic socialism, providing support for dozens of MPs facing vituperative deselection campaigns run by Militant activists.

A decade or so later. he rearmed to do battle against what he saw as an equal threat from Labour’s new modernisers. He harried Tony Blair throughout the Labour leader’s decade in power (1997-2007). found himself, in an astonishing reversal, the toast of Labour party conferences.

After the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2015 Hattersley fought with renewed vigour against the party’s failure to tackle antisemitism or to oppose Brexit. In February 2019, he talked for the first time of the possibility of leaving the party,. castigated those MPs who did not support Corbyn’s brand of leftism for failing to articulate a version of Labour that could reclaim the party for ordinary members and voters – as he had done a generation earlier. He was still arguing for a clearer articulation of Labour’s purpose as Keir Starmer became leader. He always believed that the right of the party had to offer more than pragmatism.

Hattersley was often dismissed as an overambitious careerist, an only child propelled into political life by his mother, Enid, a Sheffield. Yorkshire county councillor and the city’s lord mayor in 1981. Advised that it would be politically advantageous. he even gave up a place to read English at Leeds in favour of economics at Hull.

But the man derided as “Rattersley” during one of Labour’s many internal crises also believed in party, democracy, liberty. equality, and throughout his long career in public life those were the principles to which he held. One of his best regarded books was an account of British Catholics’ unflinching adherence to their faith. The Catholics (2018) also tells the story of his own father. Frederick Hattersley, an ordained priest who fell in love with Roy’s mother, then Enid Brackenbury, while he gave her religious instruction in preparation for her marriage to another man. The priest. the bride ran away together a fortnight after her marriage, but married each other only after her first husband had died in the 1950s. It took till after his father’s death in 1973 for Hattersley to learn the story.

To an observer, Hattersley’s political career was an epic in disappointment. First elected for Birmingham Sparkbrook in 1964 (the constituency he was to represent for 33 years), he was the youngest member of Jim Callaghan ’s cabinet when Labour lost power in 1979,. he never held office again. All that early effort, in student. local politics before Westminster, was crowned by just two and a half years in the long-forgotten post of secretary of state for prices and consumer protection. But he never lost his enthusiasm for the fight.

Sheffield, where Roy was born, was a bastion of municipal socialism,. the Hattersleys were Labour aristocracy, a family of strong loyalties and deep commitment. Enid, a coal dealer’s daughter from Nottinghamshire, was a long-serving city councillor who oversaw the opening of the Crucible playhouse.

Roy’s earliest loyalties were to Sheffield Wednesday football club, the Yorkshire County Cricket Club and Labour. On vesting day for the coal industry. 1 January 1947, the young Roy bicycled out to his nearest pit to witness the transformation brought about by nationalisation. “The feeling that there is no clear line between where my family ends. the Labour party begins has never deserted me,” he claimed. From success in the 11-plus. a coveted place at Sheffield City grammar school, he went to Hull University where he was remembered for his “almost professional” determination to succeed.

In 1954 he served for a year as president of the National Association of Labour Students – the first to come from a provincial university – before returning to Sheffield to marry Molly Loughran, a teacher. later comprehensive school head whom he had met while at Hull.

At 23 he was the youngest Sheffield City councillor (younger than some of their dustcarts, he liked to say). As chair of the housing management committee he commissioned Park Hill, one of the city’s most-applauded but least-popular high-rise developments. His last column for this paper was a reflection on its history.

A series of unsuccessful appearances in front of northern Labour party selection committees finally led to selection by Birmingham Sparkbrook CLP. when he was still only 31. He became the youngest MP in the 1964 intake. The Labour rows of the 1950s simmered on,. Hattersley immediately identified himself with the old Gaitskellite right, and, specifically, with Roy Jenkins, whose urbane manner and epicurean habits he adopted. He joined the Reform club and later the Garrick. Within three years he was the youngest minister in Harold Wilson’s government. as joint parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Labour. “I’m in! I’m in!” he shouted to startled guests as they arrived for dinner at his house that night.

When Barbara Castle inherited him as her deputy at the Department of Employment. Productivity, she called him “an able, tough, unscrupulous little tyke”, and despite Wilson’s doubts about his loyalty, she kept him on. Privately he made his disagreement about trade union reform clear,. in public he was a robust defender of In Place of Strife, a policy that came close to splitting the party.

On 11 May 1969, as negotiations with the trade unions over the legislation approached a climax, Hattersley gave up his tickets for the Rugby League final. drove out to Oxfordshire to beg Jenkins, then chancellor, to abandon his support for Castle and Wilson and take his chance at the leadership. To his credit, Jenkins resisted all entreaties.

Hattersley wrote privately to Wilson demanding a change of course, but stayed in post. His reward was promotion to minister of state under Denis Healey at the Ministry of Defence.

In Northern Ireland, the Troubles were just beginning. While Healey was recuperating from a minor operation. the situation in Londonderry deteriorated to the point that all sides demanded military intervention to keep the peace. Hattersley, briefly in charge, became the man who sent the troops into Ulster. A lifelong concern for the affairs of the province ensued. From Healey, Hattersley acquired a thumping dispatch box style and a reputation for what one colleague called “callous candour”.

After the 1970 general election defeat, Hattersley was again at the heart of a crisis. In the summer of 1971. as the Tory prime minister Edward Heath successfully negotiated membership of the European Economic Community, which Wilson had himself unsuccessfully applied to join, the Labour party was split. Wilson, under pressure from the left, was wobbling towards opposition. Hattersley saw Europe as a source of economic growth and social justice. Heath needed Labour support to get the European Communities bill through. Hattersley decided to stay with the Jenkinsite right and vote with the Tory government in favour of membership.

But when. six months later, Jenkins resigned from the shadow cabinet over Labour’s decision to support a referendum on continued membership, Hattersley stayed in. To his detractors. it was another example of his “uproarious” ambition: within days he had been made defence spokesman (1972), replacing another pro-European, George Thomson, who had resigned with Jenkins.

From 1972 to 1974 Hattersley was shadow education spokesman, fighting Margaret Thatcher at the despatch box. formulating the views to which he held for the rest of his life on the importance not only of equality in education but also of education itself in tackling deprivation. With insight from his wife, Molly, head of a London comprehensive, Hattersley “got religion” about education.

But to his great disappointment. when Labour narrowly returned to power in 1974, Wilson – possibly embarrassed by Hattersley’s commitment to phase out private schools – left him out of the cabinet altogether and, instead of becoming education secretary, he became deputy to the new foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan, now charged with “renegotiating” Britain’s terms of entry into the Common Market. In March 1976, Wilson unexpectedly announced his resignation.

With three possible leadership candidates on the right – his old hero, Jenkins, his new mentor, Tony Crosland,. his current boss, Callaghan – Hattersley chose Callaghan, already the front-runner and the only man, Hattersley believed (on advice from Callaghan), who could hold the party together. Jenkins listened politely to Hattersley’s explanations. Crosland told him to “fuck off”. Callaghan’s eventual victory at last meant Hattersley’s promotion into the cabinet.

At 43, he was once more the youngest. The pleasure was undiminished by the refusal of the left’s new rising star, Neil Kinnock, to join him at the Department of Prices. Consumer Protection. It was an unglamorous job that put Hattersley in direct conflict with the trade unions. a poisoned chalice for an aspiring party leader.

Between 1974. 1979 inflation more than doubled, and in the final year of the government, as its “ social contract ” with the unions collapsed, Hattersley also had to deal with the attempt to hold pay increases down to 6%. He was, with Healey, tainted both by trade union fury at government intervention after years of pay restraint,. public rage at the squalor and chaos of the winter of discontent of 1978-79. Later, Hattersley blamed the unions for Labour’s defeat in the 1979 general election, but he also believed his own government had paved the way for Thatcherism by accepting the 1976 IMF bailout. failing to defend the value of public spending.

When Callaghan stood down in 1980. Hattersley became a key figure in Healey’s failed leadership campaign, the last to be fought on the MPs-only franchise. After Michael Foot ’s victory, it was taken as read that the party’s right faced a bleak future. But Hattersley refused to join his old colleagues, the Gang of Four led by Jenkins (no longer an MP), Shirley Williams, David Owen. Bill Rodgers, plotting a split.

In January 1981. the SDP was launched and, although his friendship with Jenkins survived, many lesser figures never re-established good relations with Hattersley, now left pre-eminent among the younger rightwingers. As leader of the newly formed Labour Solidarity, he set out to demonstrate “that the real Labour party was not dead. sleeping”.

Foot rewarded Hattersley’s loyalty to the party by making him shadow home secretary. After the “shambles” of the 1983 general election, when Labour slumped to a 28% share of the vote, only two points ahead of the new SDP-Liberal alliance, Foot resigned. Hattersley and Kinnock contested the leadership, but the result was never in doubt. Hattersley became deputy to the man who only a few years earlier had refused to be his junior minister. Later that night, the defeated candidate was filmed outside a London theatre jauntily performing a soft-shoe shuffle while singing “Even when the darkest clouds are in the sky / You mustn’t cry. you mustn’t sigh …”

From 1983 until Labour’s fourth consecutive defeat in 1992, Hattersley was bound in outward loyalty to a man whose political character – flamboyant, verbose, emotional – was often the antithesis of Hattersley’s self-confident, articulate. increasingly intellectual stance. But Hattersley recognised that the party needed Kinnock. the man from the left who could deliver the internal reforms demanded by the right. It was only after a third election defeat in 1987 –. Hattersley’s unhappy spell as shadow chancellor, which culminated in the vote-losing pledge to raise taxes for all those earning more than £25,000 – that he began to have doubts about the speed and direction of the reforms.

In 1983 he had been the main author of Labour’s Choices (revamped in 1987 as Choose Freedom). an updating of democratic socialism in which he set out his principal belief that “without equality, for a majority of the population liberty is a cruel joke”. In 1988, Kinnock invited him to use it as the basis for a new statement of the party’s aims. values. It sank almost without trace.

Hattersley never persuaded anyone to take him quite as seriously as he took himself,. throughout the 80s he was a hate figure for the left as well as a source of endless delight to impressionists. His jowly, blubber-lipped Spitting Image caricature invariably provoked the shadow cabinet to don sou’westers. He was the Yorkshire pudding, preaching socialism while living the high life.

In Private Eye he became Chatterjee. a reflection of his controversial decision to appease his Kashmiri constituents in Sparkbrook by proposing that Salman Rushdie refrain from publishing a paperback edition of Satanic Verses, the book that had provoked a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. When Hattersley cancelled at short notice for the third time an appearance on Have I Got News for You. in June 1993, he was replaced by a tub of lard.

He and Kinnock resigned their leadership after the unparalleled fourth election defeat in 1992. Hattersley had genuinely believed they would win. He told the infamous eve of poll rally in his home town of Sheffield: “It is the election for. I have waited since I joined the Labour party in this city on my 16th birthday. It is the election in which principle and power came together.”

In the event, he left the Commons at the 1997 election, was made a life peer. retired from the Lords in 2017. Hattersley never expressed in public the frustration he felt in private at his failure to fulfil the early promise of the youngest cabinet minister. Instead he embarked on a highly successful career as a writer, journalist and broadcaster.

He published more than 20 books. collections of columns, including a Victorian trilogy of novels based on his own family’s history, The Maker’s Mark (1990), In That Quiet Earth (1991) and Skylark’s Song (1994), two well-received volumes of memoirs, A Yorkshire Boyhood (1983) and Who Goes Home (1995), and a 20th-century history, Fifty Years On (1998), as well as biographies of William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army (Blood and Fire, 1999), John Wesley (2002) and, in 2010, David Lloyd George. There were two volumes of diaries on behalf of his bull terrier cross Buster. after his beloved dog killed a goose in St James’s Park. He also fought a lifelong campaign on behalf of comprehensive education and against fee-paying schools.

His Endpiece column was published first in the Spectator, then, from 1979, the Listener,. finally in this newspaper, until 2005. He also wrote a column for the Daily Mail and contributed regularly to the New Statesman.

Hattersley never abandoned politics. A supporter of the trade union-backed thinktank Catalyst, he was the first chair of its board from 1997, the year in which he resigned his Birmingham seat. took a peerage as Lord Hattersley.

He and Molly divorced in 2013, and later that year he married his literary agent, Maggie Pearlstine. She survives him.

Roy Sydney George Hattersley, politician, author and journalist, born 28 December 1932; died 13 June 2026