Many who had followed British politics for decades wondered what had finally caught up with Roy Hattersley when the news of his death broke on a Sunday night in mid-June. It’s an obvious question. It is rare for public figures to live into their nineties without having some sort of medical shadow following them, and Hattersley, to be honest, had one dating back to his early years.
He was five years old when he contracted diphtheria in Sheffield in December 1937. Before widespread vaccination, the disease killed thousands of British children annually. He made it through it, but not without incident. His respiratory issues persisted for years afterward, leading to an asthma diagnosis that, according to most accounts, never completely went away. It’s worth taking a moment to consider that particular detail. A boy who had breathing difficulties for a large portion of his early life went on to outlive almost all of his generation’s political peers, including some who never experienced a serious illness.
Strangely, though, no specific ailment was mentioned at the time of his passing. Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock, and Downing Street all made statements about living a long and full life rather than fighting a specific illness. There’s a feeling that this was just how Hattersley would have wanted it to be presented, not as a man who had been defeated by his body but rather as one who had overcome it for nine decades in his own dry way.
Some of the confusion on the internet can be traced back to unrelated social media posts that appeared around the same time. These posts included tributes to different individuals, such as the father of a different family or a councillor in Northern Ireland, and they became entangled in search results due to similar language regarding “bouts of ill health.” When the death of a public figure dominates headlines, it occurs more frequently than people realize; the algorithm doesn’t always distinguish fact from coincidence.
What is actually recorded is perhaps more intriguing, but it is also more modest. Hattersley wrote about Sheffield Wednesday, the internal strife within the Labour Party, or his father’s covert past as a defrocked Catholic priest. He rarely talked about his asthma in his journalism or his twenty-odd books. You can learn something about the man by observing how little attention he paid to his own health issues in contrast to how much attention he paid to the politics of everyone else.
According to family statements provided by Labour figures, he passed away at home in Derbyshire with his wife Maggie Pearlstine by his side. No late-stage diagnosis was featured on the front pages, nor was there any hospital drama. It’s still unclear if he had experienced any severe illness in his last weeks or if this was just the slow demise of a body that had survived to ninety-three against all odds.
Investors in his legacy, which are numerous and dispersed throughout the Labour movement, publishing, and journalism, seem to think the illness isn’t the true story at all. He had asthma since he was a young child, but his political endurance never quite matched it.
