Lord Hattersley
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Richard R
Times online obit (will probably appear in the print edn of 16 June 2026)
E X T R A C T
Roy Hattersley, Labour deputy leader and writer
Labour grandee, professional Yorkshireman and prolific author and journalist who was a curious mix of pomposity and self-deprecation
…the young Hattersley considered himself wholly dedicated to the life of politics and was a full-time professional politician from his early twenties. When first elected to the Commons at the age of 31 in 1964, he had known no other trade. Large, bulky and with a puce-coloured face to match, he looked what he was — a graduate of student and municipal politics. At 25 he had been Sheffield’s youngest councillor and before long was chairman, successively, of the city’s public works and housing committees. His boast that he was “born and bred in the Labour movement” was well founded. Both parents were Sheffield Labour councillors — his mother serving as lord mayor in 1981-82 — yet Roy, even in his twenties, dominated the council chamber in a way they never did.
Roy Sydney George Hattersley was born in 1932 and raised in a working-class household in Sheffield. By any standards, the circumstances of his birth were eye-bulgingly extraordinary. His father, Frederick, was a Catholic priest in Nottingham who had been preparing a young couple for marriage when he fell in love with the bride, Enid. Two weeks after he officiated at the wedding, he and Enid ran away together to live in Sheffield. Roy was born 11 months later. The couple did not marry until 1956 after the death of Enid’s first husband, a miner who never remarried. Roy only uncovered this background when his father died in 1972 and he read a letter of condolence sent to his mother by a priest friend of his father. He dedicated his book The Catholics (2017) to his father’s memory.
…His private life was complicated. In 1956 Hattersley married Molly Loughran, a former fellow student at Hull; she went on to be a distinguished headmistress and later a senior official of the Inner London Education Authority. In the 1980s he allegedly had an affair with Ann Taylor, a fellow Labour MP, and he separated from his wife in 1997, divorcing her in 2013, the same year he married his literary agent Maggie Pearlstine, also his partner for some years. They lived mainly in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Despite his opposition to hunting she was a senior master of a pack of hounds based at nearby Chatsworth House.
The fact that he was married but for many years living with another woman did not escape the attention of the tabloids. He divided his time, it was reported, between the two residences. A coach containing members of the press lobby once paused at a zebra crossing to allow a hesitant Hattersley to cross. With deadpan delivery, the coach driver said over his microphone: “Sorry for the delay, gents, Mr Hattersley can’t decide if ’e’s off to see the missus or the mistress.” The whole coach roared.
…It was probably just as well that Hattersley found an alternative outlet to politics in writing and journalism. It took him a long time to accept that he would never be a cabinet minister again. He had spoken of the “humiliations” of opposition and the frustration of proposing but not implementing policies. In his later years, though, he became as proud of his life as a writer as he had ever been of his career as politician. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2003.
…Created a life peer
on his retirement from the Commons in April 1997, he upset Labour’s whips in
the Lords by waiting six months to take his seat. Having once called for the
chamber’s abolition, he excused his membership on the original grounds of his
need to have somewhere to work with research facilities at his disposal. He
rarely appeared in the upper chamber and never after 2005.
He would probably have hated a close friend’s verdict that he was a better
author and journalist than he was a politician, and certainly a more successful
one. Shortly before her death, his mother admitted: “I’ve never thought much of
our Roy but he does look after his dog.”
Lord Hattersley, politician and author, was born on December 28, 1932. He died on June 14, 2026, aged 93
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/lord-hattersley-labour-politician-and-writer-b39ctxnst