Lord Roy Hattersley, a giant of the Labour Party has died at the age of 93. He served as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection under the government of James Callaghan as well as in more junior ministerial posts. He went on to become Labour deputy leader under Neil Kinnock. He was a great Labour thinker and as such attracted much negative attention from his party’s opponents in Parliament and elsewhere.

Some of that negative attention was supplied by me via one of my media employers around 1985. I was working as a freelance photojournalist at the time and this particular media organisation contacted me for a ‘stake out’ job to find and photograph Roy Hattersley’s alleged mistress. These jobs were when a photographer and a journalist were assigned to sit in a car or a van outside or near the subject of a story’s home or work and snap pictures of them or those associated with the target as they go in or out of the particular building. Yes some might say it’s a bit of a grubby way to earn a living but it could be very well paid and in any event I saw little wrong with exposing charity cheats or fraudsters or politicians doing stuff they ought not to be doing. It was however less grubby than going through a celebrity’s dustbin for information or some of the other techniques that were once regularly used to get sufficient information for a story.

This particular employer of mine, who for various reasons will remain nameless, sent me and a journalist, who stuck by me most of the time, to a building in London said to be occupied by Roy Hattersley’s mistress. We were stuck outside of this building for about a fortnight with others covering other shifts in other vehicles. I had the day shift and others took the night shifts. We were looking for the woman who my employer’s source had said was Mr Hattersley’s mistress. Eventually I got the snap of the woman and later got the snap of Mr Hattersley coming out of the building. He was not pleased to be photographed but then not many of those who I staked out or ‘doorstepped’ were pleased as it normally heralded a whole world of negative and painful publicity.

I knew that the paper was taking this story seriously because they were investing a whole lot of cash (low four figures for me alone for the fortnight) and resources into it. We even had a journalist with what he called ‘his phone in a briefcase’, an early model of mobile phone. This was one of those stories where we could not afford to have someone run to a phone box in order to tell the news desk where the target was and what they were doing, hence the huge, compared to today, mobile phone being deployed. Looking back it was either an early cellular phone or one of the VHF ‘London Radiophone’ jobs, a system that is now defunct. I had an alphanumeric pager on me but it was only one way.

I finished the job, processed the films and as with many of these sorts of contract jobs handed the negatives over to my employer as they were their copyright. I got paid enough money to be satisfied and left it at that. I kept checking the publication week by week and month by month and the story had not appeared. I assumed that it had been spiked for some sort of legal reason, which sometimes happened. But a few weeks before the 1987 General Election my employer splashed it across their front and centre pages. ‘Hattersley the love cheat’ was something along the lines of the headline.

The ‘Hattersley love cheat’ story ended up as being just another calamity for Neil Kinnock’s Labour party which was suffering because it was still dominated by the Left and the Trade Unions and had not yet embraced centrism although Neil Kinnock tried hard, but failed, to make that centrist embrace grip the Labour Party in any sort of significant way. Labour were also crippled by public distrust of Labour’s defence policy which Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher called a policy of ‘surrender’. The ‘Hattersley love cheat’ affair was just another nail in the coffin for Labour because at the time many people were less likely to respect politicians who cheated on their partners. Some of them took the view that if a politician can cheat on their wife or their husband then would they not cheat on the country?

Did I play a small but significant part in Labour’s defeat in 1987, yes I believe I did, only a very tiny part because there was still widespread distrust of Labour among the electorate and Margaret Thatcher and the Tories were still broadly popular but maybe one or two people might have been swayed by my work. Labour might have been destined to fail in 1987 but it’s possible that some might have been put off voting Labour because of the coverage of various stories about the personal conduct of Labour politicians, including mine.

When I look back do I feel ashamed of what I did. Not really, it was exciting and well paid and most of the people I was tasked to target were either doing something wrong, were hypocrites or had something nefarious either relationship wise or otherwise that they were involved in. Even today I’d be willing to sit in a van with my cameras and piss in a bucket whilst watching some wrong’un for nearly a grand a week, especially if the story would make a positive difference to society.

What I will say is that Lord Hattersley was one of the more decent subjects of my door stepping and stakeout activities. Unlike some of my subjects he hadn’t cheated a charity, he hadn’t tried to pass himself off as Lady Diana, nor claimed to be a close associate of pop star XXXXX XXXXXXXX’s (subject is still alive) coke dealer. He wasn’t one of those celebrity hypocrites from the worlds of entertainment and politics who preached saccharine homilies about secure families whilst getting their private jollies from some woman in a dominatrix outfit or a man in similar attire in a Bayswater basement. Lord Hattersley was a great politician, political thinker and chronicler who led an unconventional personal life and that unconventional life might have been completely ignored but for his high profile political status and the need for my employers to dig dirt on Labour. Thus passes another person who entered my life through my professional activities but who has now, like so many others, sadly passed away.