lit a candle 10h agowas literally halfway through an old clip of him sparring with Paxman when this popped up on my phone. 93. Choose Freedom sat on my shelf for years before I actually read it properly last winter, didn't expect to feel this about a British Labour deputy leader but there it is.
Their story
Roy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley, was a British Labour politician, author and journalist who sat for Birmingham Sparkbrook from 1964 to 1997 and served as deputy leader of the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock from 1983 to 1992. Born in Sheffield on 28 December 1932, he grew up in…
Roy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley, was a British Labour politician, author and journalist who sat for Birmingham Sparkbrook from 1964 to 1997 and served as deputy leader of the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock from 1983 to 1992. Born in Sheffield on 28 December 1932, he grew up in a household steeped in municipal Labour politics: his mother, Enid Hattersley, later Lord Mayor of Sheffield, took him campaigning as a boy. He joined the party at sixteen, studied at the University of Hull, and at twenty-three became the youngest member of Sheffield City Council, where as housing chair he was associated with the Park Hill flats project.
After an unsuccessful 1959 candidacy in Sutton Coldfield he entered the Commons in 1964 as Sparkbrook's MP, remaining for thirty-three years. In government he held junior posts under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, including Minister of State for Defence, where he helped launch Operation Banner in Northern Ireland, and from 1976 to 1979 he was Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection. A Gaitskellite moderate, he stayed with Labour when the Gang of Four left to form the SDP, chaired the Labour Solidarity Campaign against Militant influence, and in 1983 finished second to Kinnock for the leadership before defeating Michael Meacher for the deputy leadership. In opposition he shadowed the Home Office and the Treasury before both he and Kinnock resigned after the 1992 general election defeat.
Outside office he wrote more than twenty books, from the democratic-socialist argument Choose Freedom to histories of the Edwardians, Lloyd George and British Catholicism, besides newspaper columns for titles including The Guardian and the Daily Mail. Created a life peer as Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook in 1997, he left the Lords in 2017. He remained a sharp critic of New Labour under Tony Blair and later of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, arguing that the party had drifted from its blue-collar base.
Hattersley married Molly in 1956; they had no children, separated in 2008 and divorced in 2013. In 2013 he married literary agent Maggie Pearlstine. He died at his home in Derbyshire on 13 June 2026, aged 93. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called him a giant of the Labour movement; Neil Kinnock and other colleagues paid tribute to a formidable writer and party moderniser who helped keep Labour's centre afloat through the wilderness years of the 1980s.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); The Guardian; BBC News; The Daily Telegraph.
Photos
1Roy Hattersley speaking at St Anne's Church, Baslow, Derbyshire, 2012
by People Forever
Choose Freedom holds up better than most of the stuff written since, strange how that happens