Daily Inspiration Quote by Roy Hattersley

Hattersley is pushing back against the fashionable pose that politics is just grubby deal-making with a moral fig leaf. In one clean sentence, he argues that the overlap between doing the right thing and doing the useful thing is larger than the cynics admit - and that cynicism is often less “realistic” than it pretends to be.

The line works because it reframes morality as a strategic asset, not a decorative constraint. “Coincide” is doing heavy lifting: it suggests alignment, not constant harmony, and implies that good outcomes can be engineered when leaders stop treating ethics and effectiveness as rival camps. The target isn’t only corruption; it’s the cooler, more corrosive assumption that public life is a zero-sum contest where virtue is for speeches and expediency is for decisions. Hattersley is saying that this split is partly a narrative choice - one that licenses bad behavior by calling it inevitable.

As a Labour statesman shaped by postwar social democracy, Hattersley is speaking from a tradition that sold reforms on both moral and practical grounds: universal services, worker protections, anti-poverty policy. Those weren’t presented as charity; they were framed as stabilizing the country, improving productivity, preventing unrest, making citizenship real. His subtext is also an admonition to his own side: if you abandon moral language out of fear of sounding naive, you surrender the argument to people who benefit from public mistrust.

The sentence isn’t starry-eyed. It’s a wager that decent politics can be defended on the only terrain cynics claim to respect: results.