HOW WE MET

JOHN COLE AND ROY HATTERSLEY

JOHN COLE: We met at a party for a Guardian colleague in 1967, when Roy was a junior minister. I had no opinion of him - you don't form opinions of politicians until you meet them. Roy is a formidable politician - who I should like to have seen leading his party - but at the same time he's incredibly funny. Although politics is a serious business, it certainly ought not to be a solemn business. The danger of a lunch with Roy was always that we'd both enjoy ourselves too much and that we wouldn't actually get round to my asking the hard questions. He would have a good story to tell, or I would, and one would lead on to another. We soon became friends.

He has a boyish tendency to play jokes. He once arrived at a dinner party and quickly realised he was in the wrong company - by which he meant that the other guests were too right-wing. When Jonathan Aitken arrived, wearing a white dinner-jacket, Roy adopted an old Anthony Crosland trick, by pretending he had identified him wrongly. "Your Guardian pieces are the first thing I read," he enthused, while all around guests were shouting: "Not Ian [the Guardian political correspondent], Jonathan." Roy ignored them. He said later that the incident had given him pleasure on a bad evening.

One of the things that has always struck me about England is the all- pervasiveness of the class system. Very few English people know what I'm talking about. Roy does. I once wrote a piece about how unhealthy it was to have so much academic concentration in Oxbridge. I argued that because they were such beautiful buildings I wouldn't send in the bulldozers, but that they should be used to house apprentice engineers who would spend so much of their future lives working in unpleasant surroundings. The next time Roy and his wife came to dinner he said it was the best thing I'd ever written.

He's also a prolific journalist. When I was deputy editor of the Observer he was one of the guys that I called on to write on the Labour side. Donald Trelford, the editor, once told me that he had bumped into Harry Evans and Harry Evans had said to him: "Do you think you and I should get together and make sure that Hugo Young [deputy editor at the Sunday Times] and John Cole don't get Roy Hattersley on to our leader pages on the same day?"

When Roy was a member of the Cabinet, I once visited him at his constituency, Sparkbrook, in Birmingham, which is heavily Asian. He bought me a pint and said: "Right, has Madge sent you out without any holes in your socks and with a clean handkerchief?" I said yes, but why do you ask? "We're going to a Sikh temple," he said, "and you'll be required to remove your shoes and have your head covered." When we arrived, he immediately got his handkerchief out and started knotting the corners. I was skillessly trying to do the same thing and he said to me with disdain, "I can see you have never stood behind the goal at Sheffield Wednesday on a wet day or you would know how to do that - give me it." And he knotted it for me.

We ended the day in an Asian cinema, where the manager interrupted the main film so Roy could make a political speech. I said, "Roy, if a politician had done that in the Lyceum in Belfast when I was a little boy, I would have gone home and told my mum and dad not to vote for him." He acknowledged the danger, but said this was what his Asian supporters expected. Sure enough, when we came out, a crowd gathered to tell him of their worries, and I thought: it shows the value of having constituent members of Parliament as ministers - if they have a constituency they meet the real world. This was, I thought, a funny way to do politics, but he knew how it worked.

I've missed him over the past six months when I've been locked away writing my book. But now we're working on a documentary together, and I'm struck by how much I enjoy his exuberant personality. He's a very amusing man on a grey day.

ROY HATTERSLEY: At the 1967 Labour Party conference Ian Ait-ken, then political correspondent of the Guardian, took me to dinner one night and said, as if it was this great achievement: "John Cole's coming to dinner." That was my first certain meeting with him - although he believes that we met at a party of the Guardian's industrial correspondent. I do remember that party, but I believe that our first meeting was at Wheeler's restaurant in Brighton and that he's forgotten all about it.

Anyway, a friendship developed, based on our affection for politics, our ability to find amusement in politics. John tells a story about us lunching together, him giving me the wine list and asking me to choose a decent wine. I know nothing about wine and said so. "Come on," he said, "don't give me that," and I said: "You mustn't believe everything you read in Private Eye - Private Eye says you have a funny voice." And he replied: "But I do have a funny voice," implying that I also knew about wine.

John's greatest strength is political judgement. In 1974, I'd had a number of rows with Harold Wilson and when the cabinet was formed I wasn't a member of it and then the sub-cabinet posts were given out, and I wasn't in one of those either. I went to see John, who was deputy editor of the Guardian, on the Thursday and said: "I'm not waiting to do anything in government any longer. What about a column in the Guardian?" John said he'd discuss it with the editor, but not until the Monday, because he thought I was wrong to give up the prospect of a political career. The next day, Wilson sent for me and asked if I'd be No 2 at the Foreign Office and run the European Community re-organisation.

Our friendship depends on two or three things. One is indiscretions. I don't think there's an indiscretion - an absurdity or enormity - committed by my colleagues over the last 20 years that I wouldn't tell John Cole about. For two reasons: we laugh a lot, and I know I'm not going to see it in the paper the next day.

We disagree about religion. I'm an atheist. The nearest we ever got to a little argument was the time he said that he felt ashamed of losing his temper with a TV producer. "We shouldn't have behaved like that," he said, "shouting at each other in front of the crew - he's a good Catholic and I'm a good Presby- terian." "Come off it," I said, "are you telling me people with religious beliefs behave better than those without? Do you expect atheists like me to shout and swear at the crew?" And he said: "Well, yes, actually."

The extraordinary thing is that a man with John Cole's character should have succeeded so well in the media. I know a lot of talented journalists, I know a large number who are decent and admirable, and I know some who are hugely amusing, but I know very few who are all three at the same time. John is all three at the same time.

What seems to be this man of integrity is this man of integrity. Once, when I was having supper at his house, he excused himself, very embarrassed, saying he had something to do. One of his sons had just started in journalism and had written up a football match for the local paper. John was subbing his copy before he sent it in. His sons are all successful now, so they won't mind me telling, but John was deputy editor of the Observer and there he was, subbing the local paper. That's the quintessential John Cole. ! The journalist and broadcaster John Cole, 68, began his career on the Belfast Telegraph. He was later deputy editor of the Guardian and of the Observer. He was Political Editor of the BBC from 1981 until 1992. Next month he publishes his political memoirs. He and his wife, Madge, have four sons. Roy Hattersley, the writer and politician, was born in York- shire in 1932. He entered politics in 1964 and has been a Labour MP ever since; in 1983 he became Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. He has written 12 books and is a Guardian columnist. He lives in London with his wife, Molly.