The New World is sad to have learned from a friend of the family that Roy Hattersley, the Labour politician, author and journalist who served as deputy leader of his party from 1983 to 1992, has died aged 93.
Born in Sheffield in 1932, Hattersley entered Parliament as MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook in 1964, a seat he held for 33 years. Under Harold Wilson he held junior office, including minister of state for defence administration and minister of state at the Foreign Office.
A committed pro-European, he entered the Cabinet in 1976 as secretary of state for prices and consumer protection under James Callaghan, entering opposition after the 1979 general election.
The defining decision of his long political career came in 1981. When the so-called Gang of Four split off to form the SDP, many of Hattersley’s ideological allies abandoned Labour. Hattersley decided to stay and fight the hard left and Militant from inside.
His loyalty made him a pillar of the “stay and fight” Labour right alongside John Smith and Denis Healey, and culminated with him becoming Neil Kinnock’s deputy from 1983 to 1992, half of the so-called “dream ticket” which helped drag Labour back toward electability, albeit ultimately ending with the failure of the 1992 general election loss to John Major’s Conservatives.
Then came the irony that defined his later years: having spent two decades as the right’s standard-bearer against the left, he became one of the sharpest critics of New Labour, attacking Tony Blair’s government for what he considered the abandonment of the pursuit of social equality, and for being, in the the words of Peter Mandelson, “intensely relaxed” about extreme wealth.
He left the Commons in 1997 and was made a life peer as Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook. He published more than 20 books, including biographies, histories and memoirs, and was a long-standing columnist and broadcaster. He was an ardent fan of Sheffield Wednesday.
He married Molly Loughran in 1956; the marriage was dissolved in 2013, when he married his literary agent Maggie Pearlstine, who survives him. He had no children.
