Roy Hattersley - Backbenches and Retirement

Backbenches and Retirement

The general election was finally held on 9 April 1992, but saw Labour defeated by the Conservatives, who were elected for a fourth successive term. Kinnock announced his resignation as party leader on 13 April, and on the same day Hattersley announced his intention to resign from the deputy leadership of the party, with the intention of carrying on in their roles until the new leadership was elected that summer.

Hattersley supported his friend John Smith in the leadership contest, which Smith won in July that year. In 1993 Hattersley announced he would leave politics at the following general election. He was made a life peer as Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook, in the County of West Midlands.

Hattersley was long regarded as being on the right of the party, but with New Labour in power he found himself criticising a Labour government from the left, even claiming that "Blair's Labour Party is not the Labour Party I joined". He has also mentioned repeatedly that he would be supporting Gordon Brown as leader.

Hattersley is the author of many books including three novels and many biographies. In 1996 he was fined for an incident involving his dog, Buster, after it killed a goose in one of London's royal parks. He later wrote the "diary" of Buster, writing from the dog's perspective on the incident, in which it claimed to have acted in self-defence. In January 2010, after the death of Buster the previous October, Hattersley adopted a white bull-terrier dog called Jake from an animal rescue centre.

In 2008, Hattersley appeared in a documentary on the DVD for the Doctor Who serial, Doctor Who and the Silurians, to discuss the political climate that existed at the time of making the serial.

He now writes a regular column, "In Search Of England", for the Daily Mail about different parts of the United Kingdom; it normally appears in the paper on Tuesdays.

In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature His latest book, a biography of Lloyd George The Great Outsider: David Lloyd George was published by Little, Brown in 2010.