Roy Hattersley

 Another good Yorkshireman gone.  I invited him to speak to the Annual  Dinner of the Isle of Wight Labour Party - when we still had these  things; wish we still had.  We'd endured difficult times, and I wanted the boost which he would give to us: and  he did.... I never  expected him  to accept our invitation, but - he and his then wife turned up and spoke to us, enabled by a bottle or two; it made a great deal of difference, as he must have known it would.  It put us back in  the centre of the Labour movement, where we'd always belonged; and our vote clambered upwards, through difficult but at least less impossible times: he knew that the future did not  lie with revolutionary slogans and impossible  demands.  God  knows we've slumped back again since  then: but we'd never have made the progress we did in subsequent years but for the support of Roy Hattersley and Sir Gerald Kaufman - who also went out of his way to re-establish our reputation as a non-revolutionary but still socialist party.  I  could only wish that our politicians these days had their intelligence, articulacy, realism - and approachability.  

The great David Hockney and Roy Hattersely were very different people; but both of them inspired me in their very different ways, and both are a great loss - the one to art, the other to our politics.   And Gawd bless  the both of them.