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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... luxuriantly and I should end up looking like Bernard Ingham or (this in the interests of balance) Denis Healey. However, I am getting on and there will scarcely be time for the development of comparable thickets so today I am tidied up. The last time I remember having related thoughts was when I was 17 and had not yet started to shave. Though most of my ...

Reproaches from the Past

Peter Clarke: Gordon Brown, 1 April 2004

The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown 
by William Keegan.
Wiley, 356 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 470 84697 6
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... chose to devalue the pound; in 1967, when Callaghan was forced to do likewise; and in 1976, when Healey had to propitiate the IMF with a mixture of budget cuts and monetarist incantations. He goes too far, however, when he repeatedly tells us that ‘Labour was in office when Britain was forced off the gold standard in 1931.’ The fact is that it was the ...

Hobnobbing

Simon Hoggart, 24 April 1997

Michael Heseltine: A Biography 
by Michael Crick.
Hamish Hamilton, 496 pp., £20, February 1997, 0 241 13691 1
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... results in the Strangers’ Bar. In 1976 there were few Labour MPs who had been consulted by Denis Healey and probably even fewer who hadn’t been insulted for their intellectual shortcomings. One (possibly apocryphal) story about Roy Jenkins illustrates the point. He’d been persuaded by a Welsh colleague to hobnob with some of the lads. ‘Buy ...

Pure New Labour

Ross McKibbin: Three Groans for Gordon, 4 October 2007

... to control inflation throughout the economy is especially risky (he might have a word with Denis Healey about this) at a time when rates of inflation have been at a historic low, and made even more so by taxation policies for which he is definitely responsible. Tax under Brown has hitherto been very mildly redistributionary; but if we are to judge ...

Guano to Guns

Laleh Khalili, 16 February 2023

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy 
by Philippe Sands.
Weidenfeld, 208 pp., £16.99, August 2022, 978 1 4746 1812 0
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... it as the British Indian Ocean Territory, known by the unartful acronym BIOT. A few months later Denis Healey, Harold Wilson’s defence secretary, was asked in Parliament whether a military base was being built on Diego Garcia. He dissembled, claiming that neither the UK nor the US had ‘any specific plans for constructing military facilities on any ...

Grieve not, but try again

N.A.M. Rodger: Submarines, 22 September 2016

The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945 
by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks.
Allen Lane, 823 pp., £12.99, June 2016, 978 1 84614 580 3
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... by the defence review. Then the crisis following the devaluation of sterling in 1967 forced Denis Healey, the defence minister, into a choice between Polaris or the RAF’s new F-111 aircraft. He cancelled the bomber. From 1968 the British nuclear deterrent depended on submarines. At the same time, unknown to the public, British and US submarines ...

Every club in the bag

Michael Howard, 10 September 1992

The Chiefs: The Story of the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff 
by Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall.
Brassey, 508 pp., £29.95, April 1992, 0 08 040370 0
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... in which the CDS was by no means necessarily the most important member.This was the system that Denis Healey found when he because Secretary of State in 1964, and it suited him admirably. He had his own strong and well-informed ideas about defence policy, and did not need a powerful uniformed supremo to second-guess them. For advice on nuclear ...

Nemesis

David Marquand, 22 January 1981

Change and Fortune 
by Douglas Jay.
Hutchinson, 515 pp., £16, June 1980, 0 09 139530 5
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Life and Labour 
by Michael Stewart.
Sidgwick, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 0 283 98686 7
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... side. In Parliament, he was overtaken by younger men – George Brown, Jim Callaghan, even Denis Healey. When Labour returned to power in 1964, he was given the important, but hardly central, office of President of the Board of Trade. Three years later, he was brutally and unceremoniously sacked. Since then, he has hung on in politics as a ...

Diary

Rosemary Hill: At Mars Avenue, 26 May 2022

... but hutment dwellers could not be oblivious to the hostilities. The former Labour chancellor Denis Healey, who spent the first five years of his life there, remembered a Zeppelin coming down on Blackheath ‘like a great meteor’. There were other dangers too. The tar roofs would melt in summer, sometimes setting the huts alight, and one woman ...

The Importance of Being Ernie

Ferdinand Mount, 5 November 2020

Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill 
by Andrew Adonis.
Biteback, 352 pp., £20, July, 978 1 78590 598 8
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... memorably into politics. No Labour politician of his time better justified the proposition, which Denis Healey may have been the first to make, that ‘Labour owed more to Methodism than to Marx.’ From his religion, Bevin probably also derived his frugality and diligence. Though he drank and smoked himself to death, and enjoyed the music hall and ...

The Retreat from Monetarism

J.R. Shackleton, 6 February 1986

... declared commitment to monetary discipline (even longer if we include the half-hearted efforts of Denis Healey), the UK inflation rate remains stubbornly above that which the Government wishes to see. Meanwhile unemployment, which was only expected to rise temporarily, has been stuck at pre-war levels for four years or more, and shows no real sign of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... of the Leeds Piano Competition. The last time I was here was in Harold Wilson’s time, when Denis Healey was in the cabinet. And here still is Denis Healey, thinner but with the eyebrows intact, shaking hands with R. saying: ‘And is this your Young Man?’ The place is more corporate than I remember, and ...

Long March

Martin Pugh, 2 June 1983

Renewal: Labour’s Britain in the 1980s 
by Shadow Cabinet, edited by Gerald Kaufman.
Penguin, 201 pp., £2.50, April 1983, 0 14 052351 0
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Socialism in a Cold Climate 
edited by John Griffith.
Allen and Unwin, 230 pp., £2.95, April 1983, 9780043350508
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Liberal Party Politics 
edited by Vernon Bogdanor.
Oxford, 302 pp., £17.50, April 1983, 0 19 827465 3
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... denied attention. Withdrawal from the EEC is overlooked. And in an essay tucked away at the end Denis Healey skates deftly over the surface of world affairs and defence, never stopping too long in case he finds himself in danger of giving us his views on nuclear disarmament. Nor will the interested voter find here any indication of a policy for the ...

Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher

John Gray: The Tory Future, 22 April 2010

The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 446 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 7456 4857 6
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Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection 
by Peter Snowdon.
Harper Press, 419 pp., £14.99, March 2010, 978 0 00 730725 8
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... of the economy she oversaw during her decade in power accelerated changes that were already afoot. Denis Healey had tried and failed to get Labour to deal with the fact that the postwar settlement was breaking down. Thatcher made the breakdown the basis of her programme, and it was this that attracted Tony Blair. Together with Gordon Brown and the rest of ...

The Darth Vader Option

Colin Kidd: The Tories, 24 January 2013

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change 
by Tim Bale.
Oxford, 372 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 923437 0
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The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 471 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 7456 4858 3
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Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997-2010 
by Richard Hayton.
Manchester, 166 pp., £60, September 2012, 978 0 7190 8316 7
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... approach extended beyond public relations to matters of substance. Indeed, the Labour chancellor Denis Healey described the quest to identify policy in Thatcher’s first election manifesto as like ‘looking for a black cat in a dark coal cellar’. Not only did Thatcher become more narrowly ideological, but this intransigence constituted her bequest ...

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