Lord Hattersley obituary

Roy Hattersley, then deputy leader, at the Labour party conference in Blackpool in 1985. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenRoy Hattersley, then deputy leader, at the Labour party conference in Blackpool in 1985. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty ImagesObituaryLord Hattersley obituaryPolitician, journalist and writer who was deputy leader of the Labour party for a decade“Politics is a tough business,” the Labour politician Roy Hattersley once wrote, “and the proper response to assaults and 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 and 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 and 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) and 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, and 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 and 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 and 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 and 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.

View image in fullscreenRoy Hattersley, left, with the Labour leader Neil Kinnock at the launch of the party’s election manifesto in May 1987. Photograph: PA Images/AlamyTo 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, and he never held office again.

All that early effort, in student and 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, and 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 and the Labour party begins has never deserted me,” he claimed. From success in the 11-plus and a coveted place at Sheffield City gramma