Leo McKinstry

I prefer the tub of lard

Leo McKinstry attacks the modern obsession with party loyalty and says that Roy Hattersley is a prime offender

Just after David Hill’s appointment as the new Downing Street press chief, I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Mail. In this article, I revealed that Hill was a superb amateur rock vocalist, who had not only sung in several major venues across London, but had also appeared in the musical Hair.

But, even in the face of such revelations, by far the most startling fact about Hill remains his 20 years of service as an aide to Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour party. Even murderers rarely have to endure sentences of more than 15 years, yet Hill was shackled to this charmless figure of epic mediocrity from 1971 to 1991. As one former Labour press officer, who worked with Hill in the early Nineties, said to me last week, ‘David has a great sense of humour. Mind you, he needed one to work with Roy Hattersley for all that time.’

Hattersley has often been seen as a genial buffoon, ineffectual as a politician but amusing as a minor celebrity and writer. It is an image reinforced by his books about his dog, Buster’s Diaries, and his appearances on talk shows like that hosted by Ali G. His clownish reputation was symbolised by the famous moment in 1993 when he failed to turn up as a guest on the quiz programme Have I Got News For You and was replaced by a tub of lard. The lard, explained the programme-makers, was the ideal substitute for Hattersley because ‘they possessed the same qualities and were liable to give similar performances’.

But beneath that carefully manufactured comic veneer there lurks a political obsessive, a partisan bloated by the righteousness of his position and driven by a hatred for anyone who shows insufficient allegiance to his own brand of socialist ideology.

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