When Margaret Thatcher died a joke did the rounds after her funeral that most of her cabinet, by then in their dotage, had turned up to St Paul’s Cathedral looking at last like their Spitting Image puppets. Roy Hattersley, who died on Saturday, aged far better. In later life the chubby-cheeked, clean-shaven splutterer took on something of a stylish, elderly bearded-hipster look as the Labour grandee embraced his calling as an author.
He was fascinated by the motivations of the adherents of the theological system which his father had abandoned
The combination of politics and writing is a well-trodden path, although not all who tread it find fame and fortune. Hattersley excelled: millions of words flowed from his pen, including two-dozen books, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his later works, despite his professed lack of faith, were religious subjects: notably biographies of William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, and of John Wesley.
Perhaps most remarkable of all was The Catholics, a history of post-Reformation Catholicism in the British Isles, published in 2017. Towards the end of his research he looked for someone who might be able to help him fine-tune his manuscript, and through a mutual friend found me. I was duly summoned to an interview over drinks in the bar at the Garrick.
