Cardinal’s support for a Labour party
Customers browsing the shelves at Hatchards bookshop in London’s Piccadilly looked increasingly discombobulated as first David Owen and Shirley Williams, then Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, and finally Ed Stourton and Cardinal Vincent Nichols all made their way through the door and up the narrow stairs to the same book launch. Who could have brought together these venerable figures from the political, literary and Catholic establishments to London’s oldest bookshop?

The unlikely ecumenist turned out to be Lord (Roy) Hattersley, the one-time deputy leader of the Labour Party and “atheist son of a defrocked priest”, whose new book is The Catholics, a remarkably sympathetic and hugely entertaining broad-brush scamper through the history of the Church in Britain and Ireland since the Reformation.

Lord Hattersley was effusive in his thanks to the cardinal for opening doors to archives in Britain and in Rome.