LONDON
Lord Healey, who has died aged 98, was a giant of British politics, serving as Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Labour governments under difficult circumstances and becoming almost a national institution. A boon to impressionists through his beetling brows and colourful turn of phrase, Denis Healey combined a formidable intellect with an ability to communicate.
For two decades he was Labour’s most substantial figure after Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. 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. He never concealed his contempt for Left-wing theorists and careerists, and 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. 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.
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 to maintain.
As Chancellor, Healey had humiliatingly to accept terms dictated by the International Monetary Fund as its price for supporting sterling. These included cuts in welfare spending, strict monetary controls and curbs on wage increases. This worked in the short term, but made him enemies on the Left and culminated in the “Winter of Discontent”.
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.
Healey’s chancellorship could be reckoned a failure, an impression amplified by the economic success achieved by his successors. Yet history may be more generous. He inherited the economic disruption precipitated by Opec’s oil price increases, but left office with inflation and unemployment falling.
Healey was combative and on occasions he overstepped the mark, as when accusing Thatcher during the 1983 election of “glorying in slaughter” during the Falklands conflict. When he coruscated the Left as “Toytown Trots” 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. 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 for 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 could have split the party even more damagingly than did the defection of a number of right-wingers to the newborn 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. Healey was ruggedly loyal, but for an ambitious politician he was strangely insensitive to other people’s feelings. 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. In his hobby, photography, he achieved near-professional skill. Denis Winston Healey was born at Mottingham, south-east London, on August 10 1917; the family moved to Yorkshire soon after. From Bradford Grammar he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, taking a 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. 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.
Its impact inspired Labour’s supporters, but was not quite enough to win the seat he contested: Pudsey and Otley. On demobilisation Healey rejected an academic career to become secretary of Labour’s International Committee, holding the post until 1952.
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. 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. He was never an ideological Gaitskellite. 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 he worked to reconcile Britain’s defence commitments to the money available.
In opposition from 1970, Healey’s move to shadow chancellor was a consequence of Jenkins’s resignation over Europe. As an increasingly Left-wing NEC committed Labour to a wealth tax, he was incorrectly quoted as saying he would “tax the rich until the pips squeak”. What he said, 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 the promise of confiscatory Left-wing policies. Then the conditions imposed by the IMF brought cuts. Healey also took the opportunity to abandon commitments such as 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. 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. 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.
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, Edna (née 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
— The Daily Telegraph
