If Gordon Brown’s current crop of young cabinet ministers are part of Labour’s ‘lucky generation’ – their political careers blessed by the party’s unprecedented stretch in power – Roy Hattersley must surely count as part of its unlucky generation. When Jim Callaghan’s government was evicted from power in 1979, Hattersley’s cabinet career, then in its third year, came to an abrupt close at the tender age of 44.
It was, quips Labour’s former deputy leader, ‘a not wholly encouraging thing to happen’, although he does not regard the subsequent years ‘out in the wilderness’ as wasted: ‘I think I helped to keep the Labour party together by not going where the Gang of Four went. I was a soldier in the battle to produce the right sort of Labour party.’ But, says Hattersley, ‘if I had wanted to go into a luckier or easier profession, I’d have done something else.’
In fact, he feels ‘immensely lucky, because I enjoyed my time in politics and I was able to flop from one trade to another when politics came to an end’. That ‘new trade’ – as an accomplished and prolific writer and journalist – has just produced its latest result. Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars, Hattersley’s 19th book, ranges widely over what Churchill damned as ‘the years for the locusts to eat’ – a period blighted by mass unemployment, unaddressed poverty and searing deprivation. And, of course, the seemingly inexorable and inevitable countdown to war.
But the book’s worth is not simply as a history of the ‘anxious nation’ in which Hattersley – born in 1932 to a former Catholic priest and a mother who would later become mayor of the family’s beloved Sheffield – grew up. It also depicts a time which, in many ways, shaped and illuminates aspects of the country’s later politics.
Hattersley’s depiction of the General Strike of 1926 – the ruthless antics of the Tory government, the lack of realism on the part of the miners’ leaders, and the ambivalence felt by both the TUC and the Labour leadership – must, surely, for instance, have called to mind the miners’ strike of 1984-5, into which Hattersley was thrust during his first months as deputy leader?
‘The miners of 1926 weren’t fighting the mine owners, they were fighting history and they were fighting it again in 1984,’ he acknowledges. ‘And, on both occasions, the miners were poorly led.’ There was, however, ‘much more sympathy’ from both the TUC and the Labour leadership in 1984 than had been the case in 1926. The problem was that ‘Neil Kinnock, like the TUC and like me, thought the strike was just but that the way in which it was being fought was doomed to failure.’
And the miners in 1984 were, believes Hattersley, influenced by the folklore of 1926 – the feeling that ‘we stood alone, we fought on, and then our friends deserted us’ – in ways that were not helpful to their cause. ‘The collective memory, instead of making people careful, cautious and pragmatic, made the miners, who are instinctively by their trade brave men, fight on, because that’s what miners do; miners don’t give in.’
Memories of the collapse of the first Labour government in 1931 have also had a lasting effect, too. Hattersley admits to finding himself ‘slightly more sympathetic’ to Ramsay MacDonald – who abandoned Labour to form a National government with Conservative and Liberal support when his cabinet failed to accept cuts to unemployment benefit in order to balance the budget – than he was when he embarked upon the book. ‘He was morally wrong, economically wrong and economically illiterate, but I don’t think he was the double-dyed arch-villain that the party has always made him out to be,’ he says of Labour’s first prime minister.
But the myth of betrayal – the idea that all Labour leaders sell out in the end – which MacDonald’s supposed treachery sparked still lingers. It has been ‘exploited by Tony Benn over the last 25 years and has done the Labour party immense damage,’ Hattersley believes, despite the fact that ‘apart from Ramsay, it’s absolutely untrue’.
However, Hattersley’s frequent criticisms of Tony Blair were often cited as proof of the former prime minister’s apostasy. After all, as a Gaitskellite follower of Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, the former deputy leader had impeccable credentials as an opponent of the party’s hard left, who had refused to compromise on his support for Europe and NATO, battled Militant with Neil Kinnock, and bluntly admitted that Labour lost in 1983 because ‘we supported bizarre policies, appeared incompetent and were conspicuously disunited’.
Hattersley now admits that he found Blair’s premiership ‘more difficult’ than ‘the Militant period’ in part because, however ‘personally very uncongenial’ the party’s years in opposition were, there was ‘always a feeling once we get a Labour [government] it will be alright. Suddenly, we have a Labour [government] in which the gap between the rich and poor is widening rather than narrowing, so this was, in a sense, more difficult than the previous stage’.
He regrets, he says, having urged Blair to run for the leadership in 1994. He had found the former prime minister’s attachment to Christian socialism appealing but now believes that ‘his position and mine are mirror images: he’s a Christian but not a socialist; I’m a socialist but not a Christian’. Hattersley wishes instead that Gordon Brown had made the run: he would have won the 1997 election, he believes, and ‘things would have been materially different if that had been the case’.
But despite finding both the early 1980s and Blair’s time in office uncomfortable, Hattersley ‘never found it difficult in terms of shall I stay or shall I go?’ Was he not tempted to defect to the SDP? ‘I never thought for a second and [the Gang of Four] never thought of me doing so,’ he says. Instead, ‘my conclusion was, if Labour sinks, I will go down with the ship’, a prospect which he then thought entirely possible. And, he makes clear, ‘nor during my constant bickering and moaning about Tony Blair has it ever struck me to go anywhere else’.
Hattersley’s loyalty is, though, neither blind nor purely tribal. Instead, it is to the ideal of a more equal society, of which, he believes, only a Labour government holds out the possibility. ‘There is within the Labour party,’ he says, ‘a great strand of egalitarian belief. As John Wesley said, a little candle, but it could light the world.’ Hattersley’s optimism about Brown’s premiership rests, in part, on a belief that both the prime minister and other members of the cabinet are similarly committed.
How does he square this hope with the recent increase in the inheritance tax allowance? He admits to having ‘great doubts’ about the policy but also believes that concessions were ‘absolutely irresistible’, stemming as they did from rising house prices and a belief – ‘not about money’ – that people should be able to pass on their homes to their children. ‘While I regret it, if I had been a member of the cabinet, and the chancellor had come along and said “we’re going to do this”, I certainly wouldn’t have resigned.’ He pauses: ‘I might have mumbled a bit.’ Any chancellor who got away with just a mumble of disagreement from Hattersley would probably have considered himself very lucky indeed.