Lord Healey, who has died aged 98, was a giant of British politics, serving as Defence Secretary and Chancellor in Labour governments under the most difficult circumstances and becoming almost a national institution.
A boon to cartoonists and impressionists through his beetling brows and colourful turn of phrase, Denis Healey combined a formidable intellect with an ability to communicate with the man in the street. No other politician of his era could have held their own playing a pub piano in a Christmas television special, yet no-one doubted his seriousness in government.
Healey was, with Rab Butler, one of the tiny band who could count themselves unlucky not to have been Prime Minister. For two decades he was Labour’s most substantial figure after Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, in each of whose Cabinets he was a senior member. Yet two factors denied him the ultimate prize.
One was timing; Healey’s best opportunity to lead his party, if not the nation, came after Labour’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher which cast it into opposition for 18 years. The other was his refusal to suffer fools gladly, which earned him powerful enemies on his own side. He never concealed his contempt for Left-wing theorists and those he judged careerists, and over the years he bruised many egos.
While Healey only held two ministerial posts, each was vitally important and extremely testing. He held each for at least a full parliamentary term, a record at the time: Defence Secretary from 1964-70 and Chancellor from 1974-79. And in each he left a decisive, if controversial, mark, winning the respect of his officials for his grasp of issues and courage in implementing his decisions.
Healey with his budget box in 1976
As Defence Secretary he had to fight the anti-nuclear and anti-American instincts of many in his party and ensure adequate defences for the nation and its remaining interests abroad at a time of financial stringency. His most controversial decisions were cancellation of the TSR2 aircraft, which still rankles, and abandonment of Britain’s commitments East of Suez, which he had at first tried vigorously to maintain. Both decisions outraged the Conservatives, but they were obliged to accept them on returning to power. The abiding memory of Healey as Defence Secretary was him standing with his back to the fire, the umpteenth gin in his hand, arguing points of strategy with the generals.
Tory ministers could for years get a cheer from the faithful by recalling how Healey had to turn back at Heathrow when on his way to an IMF meeting, and address Labour’s 1976 party conference as the crisis deteriorated. Even more demeaning was that he had just three minutes to defend his policies as a delegate, set-piece conference speeches being the preserve of the Left-dominated National Executive (NEC).
By the standards of short-term controversy Healey’s chancellorship could be reckoned a failure, an impression amplified by the economic success achieved - albeit even more controversially and with much pain - by his Thatcherite successors. Yet history may be more generous.
He inherited the world-wide inflation and economic disruption precipitated by Opec’s oil price increases, but left office with inflation and unemployment falling. Perhaps a few more months and a less rigid wages ceiling, combined with a better rapport with union leaders, might have averted disaster. Again, his abrasiveness had not helped.
For 40 years in the Commons and during a vocal retirement in the Lords, Healey was eternally combative. Against Mrs Thatcher - whom he christened “Rhoda the Rhino” - and Sir Geoffrey Howe - whose questioning he scorned as “like being savaged by a dead sheep” - this was fine. When he dismissed critics of his fiscal policies as “silly Billies” (an expression put into his mouth by the impressionist Mike Yarwood), this too drew laughter.
On occasions, though, he overstepped the mark, as when he accused Mrs Thatcher during the 1983 election of “glorying in slaughter” during the Falklands conflict. And when he excoriated the Labour Left as “Toytown Trots” and being “out of their tiny Chinese minds” and scorned even some of his natural allies on the centre-Right, he jeopardised his prospects of leading his party.
Healey first stood for the leadership in 1976 on Wilson’s retirement, but was outgunned by Callaghan, whom he supported in the final ballot after polling only 38 votes.
In 1980 he seemed certain to achieve his goal. Callaghan had timed his retirement to “take the shine off the ball” for Healey, and Michael Foot was reckoned too left-wing to win a ballot of Labour MPs. Yet Healey was denied by a narrow margin, becoming Foot’s deputy.
Victory would, however, have handed him a poisoned chalice. The Bennite Left was rampant, and Healey’s refusal to tolerate what he saw as its lunacy would could have split the party even more damagingly than did the defection of a number of Right-wingers to the new-born SDP.
As it was, Healey helped lead the fightback, as a loyal deputy to Foot. Under Neil Kinnock, he soft-pedalled his opposition to unilateralism as Labour began its move back to the centre ground. Before then, he had seen off Benn in a bruising contest for the deputy leadership that debilitated the party for most of 1981.
Healey’s victory broke Benn’s ambition to win control of the party for himself and the Left. Yet the margin was uncomfortably close: just 0.852 per cent of Labour’s electoral college after an eight-month contest that had put Foot’s leadership under serious question.
It also cast doubts over Healey’s judgment. He again fought a complacent campaign; then, as defeat loomed, he accused one of Benn’s lieutenants of trying to disrupt his meetings, only for it to turn out that the person he named had not been present. Had a handful of MPs left for the SDP immediately instead of staying to vote for Healey, the result would have gone the other way, with seismic consequences for Labour.
When Benn announced his intention to stand in a 3.30 am press release, Healey observed: “Yes, and next week he is parachuting into Scotland to negotiate peace terms with the Duke of Hamilton”.
Lord and Lady Healey with Joan Collins and her husband Percy Gibson
The eagerness of the centre and Right of the party to see off the Bennite threat made the outcome look a foregone conclusion. But Healey had reckoned without the zeal and commitment of a hard Left who realised this was not only their best but probably their last chance - and the reluctance of some moderate colleagues to support him.
By the 1984 Chesterfield by-election, when Benn returned to the Commons following his defeat at Bristol the year before, the hard Left was on the wane. Yet Healey, perfunctorily “campaigning” for Benn in the station buffet, could not resist saying: “Healey and Benn are like Torvill and Dean - I can’t get the bugger off my back”.
Healey’s longevity in Labour’s upper echelons gave him authority; he was the last senior figure to have rubbed shoulders with Attlee, Gaitskell and Bevan. He drew a double-edged comparison with the gerontocracy in the Soviet Union, declaring himself “the Gromyko of the Labour Party”. Seeing the serried ranks of Kremlin old-timers on a visit to Moscow as shadow foreign secretary, he greeted them with: “Same old mafia again, I see!”
Healey was ruggedly loyal both to his party and those colleagues he respected. From an adoptive Yorkshireman with Irish roots one might have expected nothing less. Healey never tolerated sycophants; quite the opposite. But to many, his at times overly robust manner and burly build combined to make him seem a thug and a bully; for an ambitious politician he was strangely insensitive to other people’s feelings.
Nor was he ever afraid to speak his mind; when asked on the BBC after the US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 what he thought of Tony Blair’s claim that Saddam Hussein could have unleashed weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes’ notice, he replied with a single word: “Shit.”
Healey shared with his Tory contemporary Christopher Soames the ability to bring a restaurant to a standstill with the vigorous deployment of a four-letter word. He took pride, too, in being rated by Lobby correspondents an even more expensive lunch guest than Roy Jenkins.
He reached the heights by managing to conceal from most of his colleagues how cultured he actually was. Few if any British Cabinet ministers could have sat in the stalls at La Scala and conversed about the merits of the singers in faultless Milanese.
Not only did he love music and literature; in his hobby, photography, he achieved near professional skill. Indeed it was impossible to spend an hour in his company without being aware - unless he chose to conceal it - of intellectual gifts which in Continental politics would have been seen as an immense plus.
Denis Winston Healey (his middle name was in honour of Churchill) was born at Mottingham, south-east London, on August 10 1917; the family moved to Yorkshire soon after. His father, William, an Asquithian Liberal and Congregationalist, was principal of Keighley Technical College; his grandfather was a Catholic Fenian tailor in Belfast from whom he inherited his bellicosity.
From Bradford Grammar School he won a a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, taking a double First in Greats. He was involved in Labour politics at Oxford and knew Edward Heath, but it was the Communist Party he joined in response to the threat from Hitler; he left in protest at the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact.
He volunteered when war broke out and became a major in the Royal Engineers, serving in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. He was awarded a military MBE for service as beachmaster during the Anzio landings, and was mentioned in despatches.
At Labour’s 1945 “Victory” conference the young Major Healey, in uniform, delivered a barnstorming left-wing speech summing up the aspirations of the generation who had fought the war for a break with the mass unemployment and rigid class structure of pre-war Britain. Its impact inspired Labour’s supporters nationally, but was not quite enough to win the seat he contested: Pudsey and Otley.
On demobilisation Healey rejected an academic career at Oxford to become secretary of Labour’s International Committee, holding the post until 1952. He helped re-establish democratic socialist parties in war-torn Europe, and develop Labour’s commitment to Nato.
This interest in foreign policy dominated Healey’s political life; a major disappointment was being passed over by Callaghan for the Foreign Office in favour of the youthful David Owen. His maiden speech after being elected for Leeds South-East in 1952 was on Nato’s role in Europe, and his first clashes with the Left were over its opposition to West German rearmament.
Healey arriving at the House of Commons on his first day as an MP
Healey argued that the state formed from the British, American and French Zones could not be neutral, and was safer armed and inside the Western alliance than outside. But he also pressed for a policy of disengagement in Europe and a neutral bloc between East and West. He accompanied Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan to Moscow in 1959 for talks with the Soviet leadership, and later that year became shadow foreign affairs spokesman.
Though Healey sided with Gaitskell against Bevan and was both his friend and constituency neighbour, he was never an ideological Gaitskellite like Jenkins and Anthony Crosland. After Gaitskell’s death in 1963, Healey backed the supposedly left-wing Harold Wilson to succeed him in preference to the mercurial George Brown.
As shadow defence spokesman Healey was a key member of Wilson’s team in the run-up to the 1964 election, which brought Labour back to power with a narrow majority. For the next two parliaments - the first a short one - he worked to reconcile Britain’s defence capabilities and commitments to the money available through a series of sterling crises, while Wilson contrived, with no thanks from the Left, to keep Britain out of the war in Vietnam.
At times he could be frank about Labour’s performance, saying in 1968: “I think the Services can be rightly very upset at the continuous series of defence reviews which the government has been forced by economic circumstances - and maybe economic mistakes too - to carry out.”
In opposition from 1970, Healey’s move to Shadow Chancellor was a consequence of Jenkins’ resignation over Europe. As an increasingly left-wing NEC committed Labour to a wealth tax, he was widely but incorrectly quoted as saying he would “tax the rich until the pips squeak”. What he did say, to Labour’s 1973 conference, was: “I warn you that there are going to be howls of anguish from those rich enough to pay over 80 per cent on their last slice of earnings."
Labour’s return to office in March 1974 without a majority after Heath’s disastrous “Who governs Britain?” election took Healey to the Treasury with the economy in apparent meltdown and inflation nearing 30 per cent. For two years he worked closely with union leaders to keep down pay increases, in return for subsidies on basic foods and the promise of confiscatory left-wing policies.
Then the conditions imposed by the IMF brought cuts (some of which turned out to have been unnecessary) and government-imposed wage curbs. Healey also took the opportunity to abandon commitments like a wealth tax which he saw as electorally suicidal; the Left did not forgive him.
The sole question mark over Healey’s political integrity concerned his acquiescence in Kinnock’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1983 election. Though he had long argued for a non-nuclear defence policy for Europe, abandoning Britain’s deterrent flew in the face of everything he believed in. Yet his resignation on the issue would have split the party again just as the wounds were starting to heal.
He reconciled the conflict by maintaining that East-West disarmament negotiations were moving so rapidly that the British position was irrelevant, and that as Foreign Secretary he would be able to blur the commitment enough to avoid damaging Nato. It was an unattractive position to be in, and not surprisingly Healey played little part in that election campaign. Within a few years the Berlin Wall had fallen, a new world order seemed in sight and Kinnock had abandoned unilateralism.
Healey retired to the back benches after the 1987 election, but continued to speak out. He was sceptical about the UN-backed operation in 1990 to oust Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, and from the Lords (he received a life peerage in 1992) was an outspoken critic of the intervention in Iraq 13 years later - and other aspects of New Labour. From 2004 he was calling for Blair to make way for Gordon Brown, and by 2006 he had concluded that Britain no longer needed nuclear weapons.
Healey’s contribution to the nation was recognised by his appointment as a Companion of Honour in 1979. He was a copious author, his most successful books being Healey’s Eye (1980), a collection of his photographs, and his autobiography The Time of My Life (1989).
Denis Healey was blessed with an exceptionally happy marriage. His wife, the former Edna Edmunds, whom he married in 1945, established a reputation as a biographer; she died in 2010. He is survived by their son and two daughters.
Lord Healey, born August 10 1917, died October 3 2015
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