Denis Healey

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The Right Honourable  The Lord Healey  CH MBE PC
Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office 5 March 1974 – 4 May 1979
Prime Minister	Harold Wilson James Callaghan
Preceded by	Anthony Barber
Succeeded by	Geoffrey Howe
Secretary of State for Defence
In office 16 October 1964 – 19 June 1970
Prime Minister	Harold Wilson
Preceded by	Peter Thorneycroft
Succeeded by	Peter Carington
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party
In office 4 November 1980 – 2 October 1983
Leader	Michael Foot
Preceded by	Michael Foot
Succeeded by	Roy Hattersley
Member of Parliament for Leeds South East
In office 14 February 1952 – 26 May 1955
Preceded by	James Milner
Succeeded by	Alice Bacon
Member of Parliament for Leeds East
In office 26 May 1955 – 9 April 1992
Preceded by	Constituency created
Succeeded by	George Mudie
Born	30 August 1917 (1917-08-30) (age 92) Bramley, Leeds, UK
Nationality	British
Political party	Labour

Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey CH, MBE, PC (born 30 August 1917) is an British Labour politician, who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979.

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 World War II 2 Member of Parliament and in government 2.1 Shadow Cabinet and retirement 3 Personal life 4 In popular culture 4.1 Film, television and theatre 4.2 Graphic novels 4.3 Music 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Early life

Healey was born in Bramley, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, but moved with his family to the nearby town of Keighley when he was five. Healey was given his middle name in honour of Winston Churchill.^[1] Healey was one of three siblings. Healey's father was an engineer who had worked his way up from humble origins studying at night school. His paternal grandfather was a tailor from Enniskillen in Ireland.

Healey was educated at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Greats where he was involved in Labour politics, although unlike many future politicians he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. Whilst at Oxford, Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 but left it in 1939, in protest over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

At Oxford, Healey met future Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath, whom he succeeded as President of Balliol College Junior Common Room, and who was to be both a life-long friend and political rival. Healey achieved a double first for his degree, awarded in 1940.

[edit] World War II

After Healey had taken his degree, he served in World War II with the Royal Engineers, in the North African Campaign, Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign, and was the Military Landing Officer for the British assault brigade at Anzio. Leaving the service with the rank of Major after the war – he declined an offer to remain in the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel – Healey joined the Labour Party. Still in uniform, Major Healey gave a barnstorming and strongly left-wing speech to the Labour Party conference in 1945, shortly before the general election in which he narrowly failed to win the Conservative-held seat of Pudsey and Otley, doubling the Labour vote but losing by 1651 votes.^[2] Following this, he was appointed to the post of secretary of the International Department of the Labour Party, becoming a foreign policy adviser to Labour Party leaders and establishing contacts with socialists across Europe.

From 1948 to 1960 he was a councillor of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and of the International Institute for Strategic Studies from 1958 till 1961. He was a member of the Fabian Society executive from 1954 till 1961.

[edit] Member of Parliament and in government

Healey was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Leeds South East at a by-election in February 1952 with a majority of 7,000 votes, after the incumbent MP Major James Milner left the Commons to accept a peerage.

Healey supported the moderate side in the Labour Party during the series of 1950s' splits. Though a supporter and friend of Hugh Gaitskell, when Gaitskell died in 1963, Healey was horrified at the idea of Gaitskell's volatile deputy, George Brown, leading the Labour Party, saying "He was like immortal Jemima, when he was good he was very good but when he was bad he was horrid". As a result Healey voted for James Callaghan in the first ballot and Harold Wilson in the second. Healey thought Wilson would be able to unite the Labour party and lead it to victory in the next general election. He didn't think Brown was capable of doing either. He was later appointed Shadow Defence Secretary after the creation of the position in 1964.

When Labour won the 1964 election Healey served throughout the government as Secretary of State for Defence. In this capacity he had to cut back on defence expenditure, including cancelling the TSR-2 aircraft and withdrawing from "East of Suez" commitments. He remained in that post for the party's near six-years of Government and as Shadow Defence Secretary after Labour's unexpected defeat in June 1970.

Healey was appointed Shadow Chancellor in April 1972 after Roy Jenkins resigned in a row over the European Economic Community ("Common Market"). At the Labour Party conference on 1 October 1973, he said, "I warn you that there are going to be howls of anguish from those rich enough to pay over 75% on their last slice of earnings".^[3] In a speech in Lincoln on 18 February 1974, reported in The Times the following day, Healey went further, promising that he would "squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak" and said that Lord Carrington, the then Conservative Secretary of State for Energy, had made £10m profit from selling agricultural land at prices 30 to 60 times as high as it would command as farming land.^[4] He was later widely – but incorrectly - reported as saying that under a Labour Government he would "tax the rich until the pips squeak", which Healey accurately but disingenuously denied. When he was accused by colleagues from his own party, including Eric Heffer, left-wing MP for Liverpool Walton, of putting the Labour party's chances of winning the next election in jeopardy with his tax proposals, Healey said that the party and the country must face the consequences of Labour's policy of the redistribution of income and wealth; "That is what our policy is", he declared, "the party must face the realities of it".^[5]

Healey became Chancellor of the Exchequer in March 1974 after the Labour Party's narrow election victory. As Chancellor, Healey's tenure is sometimes divided into two parts which are sometimes called Healey Mark I and Healey Mark II. (See The Jekyll and Hyde Years: Politics and Economic Policy since 1964 by Michael Stewart.) The divide between the two is marked by Healey's decision, taken in conjunction with then-Prime Minister James Callaghan to seek an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and submit the British economy to the associated IMF supervision. Within some parts of the Labour Party the transition from Healey Mark I (which had seen a proposal for a wealth tax) to Healey Mark II (associated with a government specified wage control) was regarded as a betrayal. Healey's policy of increasing benefits for the poor meant those earning over £4,000 per year would be taxed more heavily than beforehand.

[edit] Shadow Cabinet and retirement

Healey's bushy eyebrows and soft-spoken wit earned him a favourable reputation with the public. When the media were not present, his humour was equally caustic but more risqué: "These fallacies (pronounced like 'phalluses') are rising up everywhere", he once retorted at a meeting of Leeds University Labour Society. The impressionist Mike Yarwood coined for him the catchphrase "Silly Billy", which Healey had never actually said until that point, but he adopted it and used it frequently. However Healey's directness of speech made enemies. He attacked left-wing opponents of his policies as being "out of their tiny Chinese minds" early in 1976,^[6] meaning to imply that they were Maoist, but offending the Chinese community^{[citation needed]}. The controversy over this remark led^{[citation needed]} to a poor performance when he fought for the Labour leadership on Harold Wilson's resignation. He obtained 30 votes in the first ballot on 25 March, and then 38 in the second on 30 March. He was eliminated from the election and supported James Callaghan in the final ballot on 5 April.

His long-serving deputy at the Treasury, Joel Barnett, in response to a remark by a third party that "Denis Healey would sell his own grandmother", quipped, "No, he would get me to do it for him". On 14 June 1978, he likened being attacked by the mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons to being "savaged by a dead sheep".^[7] Nevertheless, when Healey was featured on This Is Your Life in 1989, Howe appeared and paid warm tribute to Healey. The two have been friends for many years.

Healey was considered favourite to win the Labour Party leadership election in November 1980, which was decided by Labour MPs only. However he ran a complacent campaign in which he took his support from the right wing of the party for granted. In one notable incident, Healey was reputed to have told members of the right-wing Manifesto Group that they must vote for him as they had "nowhere else to go." Mike Thomas, the MP for Newcastle East and a defector to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), later revealed that he had been tempted to send Healey a telegram stating that he had found "somewhere else to go". Indeed, four Labour MPs who later defected to the SDP claimed they voted against Healey in order to land the Labour Party with an unelectable left-wing leader and so help their new party.^[8]

He was elected deputy leader to Michael Foot when Foot became leader, but the next year was challenged for the job by Tony Benn under the new election system, which included individual members and trade unions. The contest was seen by many^[who?] as a battle for the soul of the Labour Party and was vigorously debated over the summer of 1981 ending with Healey winning by 50.4% to Benn's 49.6% on 27 September 1981. Healey's narrow majority can be attributed to the action of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) delegation to the Labour party conference. Ignoring the results of a consultation with the union's members, which had shown two to one majority support for Healey, it cast the union's block vote (the largest in the union section) for Tony Benn. Despite this Healey attracted enough support from other key unions, constituency parties and Labour MPs to win the contest.

Healey served as Shadow Foreign Secretary during most of the 1980s, a job he had coveted. His views on nuclear weapons were at variance with the official unilateral nuclear disarmament policy of the party. After the 1987 general election, he retired from the Shadow Cabinet, and in 1992 he stood down after 40 years as a Leeds MP. In that year he received a life peerage as Baron Healey of Riddlesden in the County of West Yorkshire. Healey is regarded by some – especially in the Labour Party – as "the best Prime Minister we never had".^[9] Denis Healey is a founder member of the secretive Bilderberg Group.^[10]

Although he supported Tony Blair to be leader of the Labour Party within hours of John Smith's death, he later became critical of Blair. During 2004 and 2005, he several times called on Blair to stand down as Prime Minister in favour of Gordon Brown. In July 2006 he argued that "Nuclear weapons are infinitely less important in our foreign policy than they were in the days of the Cold War" and that "I don't think we need nuclear weapons any longer".^[11]

[edit] Personal life

Healey married Edna May Edmunds on December 21, 1945. Their marriage has lasted for over 60 years, and they live in Alfriston, East Sussex.^[12].

When Edna fell ill in the mid 1980s, she received private health care - something apparently at odds with Healey's pro-NHS beliefs. Challenged about the decision by Anne Diamond on TV-am, Healey became visibly upset and ended the interview.^[13]

The couple have three children, one of whom is the broadcaster, writer and record producer Tim Healey^[14][15].

He was a keen photographer for many years^[16] and enjoyed music and painting. He would sometimes play popular piano tunes at public events.^[17]

[edit] In popular culture

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2009)

[edit] Film, television and theatre

In 1986 Healey appeared in Series One of Saturday Live reciting a satirical poem called 'Ode to Westminster'. He was portrayed by David Fleeshman in the 2002 BBC production of Ian Curteis's controversial The Falklands Play

[edit] Graphic novels

The 1986 comic Watchmen, set in an alternative present, mentioned a "British Prime Minister Healey".

[edit] Music

The Remastered edition of the Yes album Tormato, features the added track "Money"; which contains a satirical voice-over of Healey by Rick Wakeman in the background throughout the course of the song.

[edit] Bibliography

His publications have included; Healey's Eye (photography) (1980), The Time of My Life (his autobiography) (1989), When Shrimps Learn to Whistle (1990), My Secret Planet (an anthology) (1992), Denis Healey's Yorkshire Dales (1995) and Healey's World (2002).

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Denis Healey
• Interview about nuclear strategy in Europe for the WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
• The old bruiser who remained the boy next door The Observer interview and retrospective
• Births England and Wales 1837-1983
• "Desert Island Discs". Desert Island Discs. BBC. Radio 4. 2009-06-14. *

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Denis Healey

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Preceded by James Milner	Member of Parliament for Leeds South East 1952–1955	Succeeded by Alice Bacon
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Persondata
NAME	Healey, Denis Winston, Baron Healey of Riddlesden
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	British Labour Party politician and Life peer; MP 1952–1992, Chancellor 1974–1979
DATE OF BIRTH	30 August 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH	Mottingham, Kent
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH