Overview
- Roy Hattersley's family said he died peacefully and senior Labour figures, including Sir Keir Starmer, paid tribute to his decades of service.
- Hattersley served 33 years as MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook after first being elected in 1964 and held ministerial posts under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
- He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992 under Neil Kinnock and served twice as shadow home secretary during the opposition years.
- On leaving the Commons in 1997 he was made a life peer, Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook, and afterwards published more than 20 books while working as a columnist and broadcaster.
- Long seen as a figure on Labour's centre-right, he later criticised Tony Blair's New Labour for abandoning the pursuit of social equality and his death is likely to prompt retrospectives on that ideological debate; he is survived by his wife, literary agent Maggie Pearlstine.