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“... that’s part of a parent’s job. Robin Cook’s memoir repeats a story told by a journalist to Roy Hattersley. Tony Blair, asked why he had sent his son Euan to the Oratory, despite the inevitable political flak, said: ‘Look at Harold Wilson’s children.’ The journalist demurred: one of Wilson’s sons had become a headmaster, the other a ...”

“... stood eagerly in the prow as if waiting to strike land.On Any Questions on Radio 4 tonight are Roy Hattersley and Edward Heath, Janet Cohen and Jonathon Porritt. Neither Heath nor Hattersley is a particular favourite of mine but because no one on the panel is extreme in their views, discussion is sensible and ...”

“... tushery’. Perhaps the case needs to be made again. In his preface to this new edition, Roy Hattersley, a predictable admirer, calls the book ‘a masterpiece’, which it isn’t: when he describes it as ‘a social commentary, a polemic and a love story’, he is nearer the mark, and the way in which those aspects of the book are interwoven ...”

“... members. Presidents and chancellors of the Federal Republic have pleaded Hess’s case. In 1975, Roy Hattersley said he would be released ‘tomorrow’ if the Russians would only agree. We are asked to accept his release either because he is very old, or because he has expiated his crimes and deserves remission, or because his detention is ...”

“... turned out had the boot been on the other foot. What would the British newspapers have written, Roy Hattersley asked, if a Sinn Fein march had brushed aside the police and forced itself on a Protestant community in the way that the Orangemen forced themselves on Drumcree? Whether or not Adams had been seen on television arguing with the RUC, we would ...”

“... tweaking the tax rate paid by the 12,000 richest Britons. The changes, Lloyd George’s biographer Roy Hattersley points out, were expressly designed to take from the rich in order to give to the poor: it was the moment, as Hattersley puts it, that taxes became ‘the engine of social policy’. ‘There are many in the ...”

“... knows there is really only one), they both gave poor performances. Perhaps it was fatigue, or (in Hattersley’s case) depression, or (in Kinnock’s) arrogance. Neither talked as if what they had to say would make any difference at all. It is Roy Hattersley’s misfortune that when he attacks the institutions of ...”

“... book’s unconscious representation of its subject. ‘A puzzling polemical cold fish,’ wrote Roy Hattersley, in the Independent: ‘Few of the personal testaments with which Inglis enlivens Williams’s biography portray an affable or sympathetic character.’ ‘The tank commander of the New Left, but dull in college,’ according to Robin Blake, a ...”

“... school, Highgate, and thence to Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship and rivalry with Roy Jenkins, a steadier if equally ambitious intellectual, but one who always conceded Crosland’s superior brain. The Second World War interrupted and leavened his student politics, active service providing its own kind of filter. Afterwards, he returned to ...”

“... rules of the game (to be bent, broken and ignored) and the ferocity of the play remained the same. Roy Thomson, benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in ...”

“... fratricide which followed the fall of the Attlee Government in 1951. From the start, the Kinnock-Hattersley leadership has been hemmed in by the legacy of the Wilson Government of the Sixties, and by the even more disreputable legacy of the Wilson-Callaghan Government of the Seventies. It has no incomes policy because it has been unwilling to re-open the ...”

“... While fools ensure a once-proud heritage Goes down a tube that comes out up the creek. But he and Hattersley must grin and bear it: The cap Benn gives them fits. They have to wear The Labour Right’s lip-service to Clause 4 Now stands revealed as outright atheism. They simply don’t believe it any more, Hence the exultant rancour of the schism. The heretics ...”