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“... a journalistic art-form of which they need take not the slightest notice. One Christmas, he meets Denis Healey in the street. ‘Don’t think you’re going to get away with it,’ booms Healey’s voice as Junor is caught feeding a parking meter. They engage in bonhomous conversation. What a marvellous moment, the ...”

“... briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis Healey. One is tempted to say that even in the MI5 officers’ mess, the idea of Denis Healey collaborating with Messrs Benn and Orme on anything at all must surely have required the assistance of a few double ...”

“... passing generation of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding suspicion that Wilson was a KGB plant led to rumoured attempts by MI5 ...”

“... established, and the election was decided by MPs alone. They voted 139 for Michael Foot, 129 for Denis Healey. This, to put it mildly, was asking for trouble: and the 1983 election duly delivered it. Few people can doubt that Mrs Thatcher would have faced a far more formidable foe in Healey, and it is not absurd to ...”

“... track behind him, partly because the man he wanted to back, Peter Shore, seemed unlikely to beat Healey, and partly because of the urgings of those who felt he was the only man who could avert a damaging party split. Jones is keen to convince us that only Foot’s leadership ‘averted catastrophe’ for Labour, and it is certainly true that a ...”

“... formal monologues by Front-Bench speakers, some of whom had watched from the floor when, in 1976, Denis Healey, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had fought to be given five minutes of Conference time to put his case. With red roses (pink next year?) being thrown to the delegates from the platform and ‘Jerusalem’ easing out ‘The Red Flag’ as the ...”

“... and more hostile statement from the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (drafted by Denis Healey), the idea was scorned of any union with countries opposed to socialist policies of full employment, public ownership and a planned economy. Monnet later wrote in his memoirs, ‘Britain had not been conquered: she felt no need to exorcise ...”

“... Club tie to say so, and if television can’t abide reasoned arguments, why was he arguing? Denis Healey, a realist, called Lord Stockton’s speech ‘a lulu’, in the tones of one already planning a few lulus of his ...”

“... a betrayal. Crosland was not any old revisionist, after all. He was not a mere apparatchik, like Denis Healey, or a burnt-out case, like Douglas Jay. He was the revisionists’ guru – our teacher and mentor. We were what we were, in part at any rate, because of him. To watch him sulking in his tent, when the cause being fought over was, in ...”

“... had not the slightest intention of carrying out their leftish programme of 1974, or, today, that Denis Healey is no kind of socialist. Why Socialism? Why Socialism in the 1980s? One reason given by Benn (which forms the main theme of Manifesto, the most coherent and comprehensive account of Bennism I have come across) is that Britain is unable to ...”

“... and, except in occasional flashes of personal animosity (as against Herbert Morrison or Denis Healey), without much passion or enthusiasm. There is only one good joke, and it was made at Wilson’s expense by Aneurin Bevan. When Wilson announced with customary Yorkshire pomposity that he was ‘forged’ in that county, Bevan replied: ‘Forged ...”

“... credit for it. Blair and Brown might ponder the fact that the last Labour Chancellor to do it was Denis Healey, and that led directly to the Winter of Discontent. Which brings us back to Frank Field and Gordon Brown’s money. Field’s departure from the Government did not cause a peep; not one minister or backbench MP defended him. This is very ...”

“... and pique, Mr Callaghan insisted that he be dismissed, as a punishment for having asked Denis Healey questions about a confidential Treasury paper during a meeting of the House of Commons Expenditure Committee. The Secret Constitution is his revenge. It consists of a rather incoherent discussion of the power relationships between the prime ...”

“... I believed, and still believe, Madame Tashibekova. As an MP who beseeched James Callaghan, Denis Healey and finally Harold Wilson not to send the troops – particularly the Scots regiments – into Northern Ireland in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how the Russians may have felt. They thought they ...”

“... In doing so he was able to establish a ‘third camp’ between Benn, the challenger, and Denis Healey, the incumbent: a ‘refuge for beleaguered careerists of both Left and Right’. It was in this camp that the ‘soft left’, springboard for Kinnock’s leap to the leadership, was born. The second date was 1984 – the ...”