Roy Hattersley

Roy Hattersley
Name	Roy Sydney George Hattersley (born 28 December, 1932)
Nicknames	Rattersley (the SDP), The Nearly Man (the SDP), Hatterjee (the media)
Politics
Party	Labour
Constituency	Birmingham Sparkbrook (1964 – 1997)
Positions	• Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (11 June, 1983 – 11 April, 1992) • Shadow Home Secretary (12 May, 1987 – 11 April, 1992) • Shadow Chancellor (11 June, 1983 – 12 May, 1987)
Likes	Yorkshire, Sheffield Wednesday F.C., Shakespeare, the Labour Party, dogs
Dislikes	The SDP
Friends	Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, John Smith, Peter Mandelson, David Hill, Neil Kinnock
Enemies	Harold Wilson, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, the SDP, Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair
Relationships
Partners	Molly Hattersley (195? - 2013, divorced) Maggie Pearlstine (married 2013)
Children	None
Personal Attributes
Nationality	English
Religion	?
Sexuality	Straight
Height	Taller than Neil
Eye Colour	Blue
Handedness	Right
Accent	Yorkshire

As a man of good will who enjoyed a good lunch, he sometimes gave the image of flabbiness and vagueness, but his faith in Labour, forged in a South Yorkshire childhood, was tough and durable.~ Kevin Jefferys, Labour Forces: from Ernest Bevin to Gordon Brown

The acceptable face of opportunism.~ David Owen

Roy Hattersley is a Labour grandee and writer who was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992. Unshakeably loyal to the Party and to his own center-left principles, he alienated successive generations of Labour leaders by failing to show the same loyalty to them. Affable and tubby, Roy is easily underestimated and has often been portrayed in the media as a clown, but behind his bovine countenance lurks one of the sharpest minds in the Labour Party. He may yet have the last laugh on his party comrades- after leaving Roy behind in its sharp tacks to the left and then the right, the ideological position the Party now appears to be converging on is his own. Roy is a skilled writer and has published a regular column in The Guardian for decades, as well as a number of books ranging from biographies to a diary from the perspective of his dog.

Life and Career

Early Life

You should never ask a man if he is from Yorkshire, because if he is, he will undoubtedly tell you, and if he isn’t, why bother to humiliate him?~ Roy Hattersley

A small Roy with enormous hair.

Roy was born in Sheffiled to Enid Hattersley, a city councillor and later the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, and her husband Frederick, also called Roy, a former Roman Catholic priest who fell in love with Enid when he was buying coal for his congregation from her father and left the church to marry her. Roy Junior was an only child. He attended Wisewood Primary School and won a scholarship to Sheffield City Grammar School. His mother saw to his political education, taking him leafleting in the 1945 election and signing him up for the Labour League of Youth as soon as he was eligible. In his own words, he imprinted on Yorkshire, Sheffield Wednesday, and the Labour Party in the same way that baby chick imprints on the first thing it sees, and he has remained tribally loyal to them all his life.

Roy was accepted to read English at the University of Leeds, but opted to study economics at the University of Hull instead in the belief that it would better qualify him for a political career. At university he joined the Socialist Society (SocSoc) and promptly got its name changed to the "Labour Club" and switched its affiliation to the non-aligned International Union of Socialist Youth rather than the Soviet-backed International Union of Students. Roy became chairman of the revamped club and later treasurer, and went on to chair the National Association of Labour Student Organisations and join the executive of the IUSY. In between studying and his political activities he found time to make a lifelong enemy of the poet Philip Larkin, then the university librarian, who was still referring to him as a 'great menacing slob' in letters written twenty-five years later.

Early Political Career

After university Roy returned to Sheffield, where he married his wife Molly and worked at several random jobs, first as a management trainee at Sheffield Steelworks, then a teacher for the Workers' Educational Association, and then an NHS manager. He also served briefly as a justice of the peace. He retained his ambition to go into politics, and in 1956 he was elected to the Sheffield City Council as the councilor for Crookesmoor, serving alongside his mother until 1964 when he was elected to Parliament. Roy became chairman of the Public Works Committee and then the Housing Committee, presiding over a minor housing boom and modernisation of the local construction standards. He's still proud enough of the achievement to insist on the inclusion of his council chairmanship in his Who's Who entry, alongside his positions in national government.

Parliamentary Career

In 1959 Roy contested the safe Conservative seat of Sutton Coldfield, and spent the next three years hunting around for a more likely candidacy, applying for twenty-five different seats before he was finally selected for he Birmingham constituency of Sparkbrook in Birmingham, a freak Tory gain in 1959 which dutifully reverted back to Labour in 1964. He won his first election with 1,254 votes; by the time he retired to the Lords he had increased that majority to 13,573. Although he remained at heart a Yorkshire man, never even an adopted son of Birmingham, Roy grew attached to his West Midlands constituency and served it faithfully for thirty-five years. As the years went by the constituency became increasingly ethnically diverse, the center of Birmingham's growing Asian community, and by 1981 it had the sixth highest proportion of residents living in minority ethnic households in the country. As early as 1965 Roy was dubbed 'Hatterjee' by Private Eye, and he became a major advocate for racial equality and the interests of his Muslim constituents.

After his election Roy moved to London, MPs not being expected to live in their constituencies in that era, and became something of a socialite, buying a house in fashionable Gayfere Street and a flashy wardrobe of loud shirts from Jermyn Street retailers. He joined the Reform Club and became a frequent patron of grand restaurants, the theatre and the opera. He was a socialist first, but his growing fondness for champagne served him well in later years, when to distract himself from the depressing internecine struggles of the Labour Party he took up a secondary career in light journalism and wrote urbane, chatty opinion columns for major newspapers.

Full List of Appointments
• Shadow Chancellor (11 June, 1983 – 12 May, 1987)
• Shadow Home Secretary (12 May, 1987 – 11 April, 1992)
• Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (11 June, 1983 – 11 April, 1992)

Personal Life

After 57 years of marriage, Roy and Molly got divorced in April 2013 after a five year separation. That summer he married his literary agent Maggie Pearlstine, with whom he'd been living for a while.

Roy and Maggie