Roy Hattersley, that indomitable pillar of the Labour Party who spent decades polishing his credentials as the thinking man’s Yorkshireman, finally shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 93, proving that even the most durable political lard can eventually melt. Born in Sheffield in 1932 into the sort of solid Labour household that regarded socialism as both birthright and hobby, young Roy ascended the greasy pole with the unhurried certainty of a man who had already composed his own footnotes.
As MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook for more than three decades, Shadow Cabinet stalwart, and Deputy Leader under Neil Kinnock from 1983 to 1992, Hattersley embodied the respectable face of the soft left—or was it the hard centre? Even he seemed occasionally unsure. He railed against Militant with the righteous fury of a man who knew a good purge when he saw one, yet retained enough old-fashioned eloquence to make one wonder whether he secretly preferred the sound of his own voice to the prospect of electoral victory. In the great struggle to make Labour electable, he played the reliable second fiddle, sawing away gamely while the orchestra tuned up for Tony Blair’s more ambitious concerto.
Television, that merciless leveller, granted him two immortal cameos. On Spitting Image, his puppet became a glorious fountain of expectoration, lisping and spraying with every sibilant in a performance so vivid that Hattersley himself graciously conceded it put the 'spit' into the programme. One almost felt the latex version had more expressive range. Then came the sublime Have I Got News for You moment in 1993 when, having cancelled for the third time, he was replaced by a tub of lard credited as The Rt Hon. Tubson of Lardon MP. It was, the producers noted with forensic deadpan, “liable to give much the same performance and imbued with many of the same qualities.” The lard, along with Paul Merton, won. Politics rarely produces so perfect an epitaph.
Away from the Commons he churned out more than twenty books—biographies, histories, memoirs—like a one-man municipal library with opinions. A journalist, broadcaster, and Sheffield Wednesday loyalist to the end, he combined pomposity and self-deprecation in proportions that kept him just the right side of insufferable. In an age of slick soundbites, Hattersley remained defiantly prolix, a reminder that politics once rewarded men who could talk at length without quite saying very much. He is survived by his second wife and a legacy that, like the famous tub, sits there solidly: substantial, slightly ridiculous, and oddly impossible to ignore.