“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Balliol also produced a string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and ...”

“... genius found itself exchanging ideas with Harold Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist ...”

“... the same reason as other quiet revolutions in British politics: the threat of an empty till. As Denis Healey told the IMF in the Letter of Intent, ‘an essential element of the Government’s strategy will be a continuing and substantial reduction in the share of resources required for the public sector. It is also essential to reduce the Public ...”

“... before it was torn up and thrown on the scrapheap. The decision to kill the project was taken by Denis Healey, who bitterly remarked later that Wilson had made him put off the announcement for nine weeks, to smuggle it into the Chancellor’s Budget speech: a delay which cost £1 million a week. (It might help to know that people then lived decently on ...”

“... in power is a juicy might-have-been. The governing philosophy of the Labour Party used to be, as Denis Healey once said, ‘to erode by inches the conditions that produce avoidable misery’. It would have been good, not least as a corrective to the excesses of the Thatcher years, for a party espousing that philosophy to be in power. But Smith ...”

“... most of its contemporary representatives are poor at speaking and reasoning, with no sign of what Denis Healey called a ‘hinterland’ – and that this has been simultaneous with a collapse in respect. Is Chris Bryant an exception? Labour MP for Rhondda since 2001, he is a former deputy leader of the House of Commons and, until becoming shadow ...”

“... of whisky and ginger ale, ‘but she was never drunk,’ and she did not get through as much as Denis, who could more or less subsist on gin. She didn’t have hangovers and she didn’t get ill (she sometimes had toothache). Her skin continued to glow and her eye remained fierce. More striking than the amount of sleep she needed was her ability to sleep at ...”

“... and the Labour Party. But it will be only down to good fortune if they are. He has also, unlike Denis Healey, his Labour predecessor, been lucky with the international economy. Brown’s decision to hand over much of the direction of the economy to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England is thought to have been a brilliant stroke. But it ...”

“... In conversations with Wilson’s former colleagues, Beckett finds near universal contempt. Denis Healey says: ‘He was a terrible prime minister, actually.’ Gavyn Davies, then a Downing Street adviser, remembers him as bored and ‘slightly an absentee prime minister’. Drink got him through the day: ‘Brandy from midday till late ...”

“... dies. I never met him, though I saw him once in the street, noting then that he shared a walk with Denis Healey, both of them swinging their arms laterally as they walked in the manner of Soviet soldiery. Except I fancy Clark swung his arms more slowly than Healey, this putting him in a slightly King of the Apes ...”

“... the sentences. His paper powers to do so were smartly taken away by the Prime Minister urged on by Denis Healey. When the Berlin airlift ended without there being any change in the status of Germany or Berlin, the fate of Hess was sealed for a very long time, perhaps for ever. After the departure of Speer and Von Schirach from Spandau the ‘Freedom for ...”

“... authority was enhanced accordingly. The difference between this election and the manner in which Denis Healey became Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, by a fraction of a per cent of nothing in particular, was an object lesson in itself. It needs constantly to be recalled that the SDP is astonishingly new. This was its first election of a leader, and ...”

“... influence inside Labour peaked with the deputy leadership election in 1981, which he lost to Denis Healey by 0.852 per cent. One of Benn’s supporters said it was ‘the most intense power struggle I have ever witnessed’ (though he was writing before the great clashes of the Corbyn years). Despite Healey’s ...”