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'Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey', CH, MBE, PC (born 30 August 1917), is a British Labour politician. He was the UK Defence Secretary in the late 1960s and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the late 1970s.

Contents

Early life

World War II

Member of Parliament and In government

Shadow Cabinet and Retirement

Personal life

Author

In popular culture

Notes

External links

Early life

Healey was born in Mottingham in Kent. At the age of five he and his family moved to Keighley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His paternal grandfather was a tailor from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Healey's father was an engineer. Healey was one of three siblings, they each had a distant relationship with their father, who had worked his way up from humble origins studying at night school.
Healey was given his middle name in honour of Winston Churchill and was educated at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition in classics at Balliol College, Oxford where he was involved in Labour politics, although unlike many future politicians he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. He studied Moderations (Latin and Greek literature) and Greats (ancient history and philosophy). 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 managed to get a double first for his degree, awarded in 1940.

World War II

After Healey had taken his degree, he served in World War II, with the Royal Engineers, in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, 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.^[1] Following this, he was appointed to the post of International Secretary of the Labour Party.

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 7000 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 voted for Callaghan in the first ballot and Harold Wilson in the second. He was horrified at the idea of the volatile 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". 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.
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 in a shadow position after Labour's unexpected defeat in June 1970.
Healey was appointed Shadow Chancellor in April 1972 after Roy Jenkins resigned in a row over Europe. Healey was widely - but incorrectly - reported as saying that under a Labour Government he would "tax the rich until the pips squeak". However he did say at the Labour Party conference in 1973), "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".
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''. 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.

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,^[2] meaning to imply that they were Maoist, but offending the Chinese community. The controversy over this remark led 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'.^[3] Nevertheless, when Healey was featured on ''This Is Your Life'' in 1989, Howe appeared and paid a warm tribute to Healey. The two have been close friends for many years.
Healey was considered as the 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. Four Labour MPs of the time who later defected to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) claimed that they voted against Healey in order to land the Labour Party with an unelectably left-wing leader and so help their new party.
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 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. In this still controversial contest Ron Todd the General Secretary of the huge Transport and General Workers Union (the "T&G") was obligated to cast the T&G's collective votes for the left candidate Tony Benn. The T&G's choice of Tony Benn as Deputy Leader of the labour Party was the outcome of a normal and constitutional preconference vote conducted by the T&G's democratically elected Labour Party Conference Delegation. The T&G's support for Tony Benn reflected the votes of union members in T&G branches and regions nationally but after secret consultations with the rightwing of the party the General Secretary defied the democratic decision of the delegation and at the very last minute cast all the T&G's "block vote" for Healey, thus assuring him of a narrow victory, which he would certainly never have achieved without this now infamous vote switch.
Healey served as Shadow Foreign Secretary during most of the 1980s, a job he had coveted. His own 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".^[4] Denis Healey is a founder member of the Bilderberg Group.^[5]
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".^[6]

Personal life

Healey married Edna on 21 December 1945. They are still married today after over 60 years, and they live in East Sussex. They have three children.
He has been a keen photographer for many years and enjoys music and painting.

Author

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).

In popular culture

A passing reference is made to a "Mr. Healey" being Prime Minister in the Alan Moore graphic novel ''Watchmen,'' suggesting that in that alternate universe of 1985, he finally reached the pinnacle of British political life.

Notes

1. British parliamentary election results 1918-1949, , F. W. S., Craig, Parliamentary Research Services, 1983, ISBN 0-900178-06-X
2. (The Daily Telegraph, 24 February, 1976
3. ''Hansard, 14 June, 1978, Col. 1027
4. Passed/failed: An education in the life of Denis Healey, Labour peer, ''The Independent'', 4 May 2006
5. Jon Ronson interviews Denis Healey about Bilderberg - Healey (HTML) (2006-07-07). Retrieved on 2007-01-13. [1]
6. UK needs no nuclear arms - Healey

External links

★ 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

★ Denis Healey at 90 BBC interview