Denis Healey

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Denis Healey
Image:Healey2031.jpg
Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office March 5, 1974 – May 4, 1979
Preceded by	Anthony Barber
Succeeded by	Geoffrey Howe

Born	30 August 1917 Mottingham, Kent
Political party	Labour

Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey, CH, MBE, PC (born 30 August 1917), is a British Labour politician, regarded by some (especially in the Labour Party) as "the best Prime Minister we never had".[1]

Denis Healey was born in Mottingham in Kent but in 1917 moved to Keighley, then 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 and they had a distant relationship with their father, who 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, joined the Communist Party in 1937 and met future Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath for the first time, who would later become a friend and rival. Healey got a double first for his degree.

1 War years
2 Political life
3 Stature
4 In popular culture
5 External links

[edit] War years

In World War II with the Royal Engineers, Healey served in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. He 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. He 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 Pudsey and Otley losing by 1651 votes. Following this, he was appointed as the International Secretary to the Labour Party.

[edit] Political life

When Major James Milner accepted a peerage, 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. He 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. Healey said of Brown "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 party and lead the party to victory in the next general election. He didn't think Brown would be able to do either.

When Labour won the 1964 election he 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 postion after their unexpected defeat in June 1970.

Healey was appointed Shadow Chancellor in April 1972 after Roy Jenkins resigned in a row over Europe. He 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 October 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.

[edit] Stature

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, 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, 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 the 30 March. He was eliminated 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". In June 1978, he alikened being attacked by the mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons to be attacked by a dead sheep. Nevertheless, when Healey appeared on This is your Life in 1989, Howe paid tribute.

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 system of election which included individual members and trade unions. The contest distracted the Labour Party over the summer of 1981 and ended with Healey winning by 50.426% to Benn's 49.574% on 27 September 1981.

Healey served as Shadow Foreign Secretary during most of the 1980s, which was 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.

Although he supported Tony Blair to be Leader of the Labour Party within hours of John Smith's death, more recently he has become critical of Blair. During 2004 and 2005, he several times called on Mr 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".[2]

[edit] 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.

Healey married Edna on 21 December 1945. He is still married today after over sixty years and they have three children.

[edit] External links

The old bruiser who remained the boy next door The Observer interview and retrospective

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Denis Healey

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by James Milner	Member of Parliament for Leeds South East 1952–1955	Succeeded by Alice Bacon
Preceded by new constituency	Member of Parliament for Leeds East 1955–1992	Succeeded by George Mudie
Political offices
Preceded by Aneurin Bevan	Shadow Foreign Secretary 1959-1961	Succeeded by Harold Wilson
Preceded by Peter Thorneycroft	Secretary of State for Defence 1964-1970	Succeeded by Lord Carrington
Preceded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home	Shadow Foreign Secretary 1970-1972	Succeeded by James Callaghan
Preceded by Anthony Barber	Chancellor of the Exchequer 1974-1979	Succeeded by Sir Geoffrey Howe
Preceded by Peter Shore	Shadow Foreign Secretary 1980-1987	Succeeded by Gerald Kaufman