Politics

Denis Healey shaped the world we live in

The late Labour giant understood the value of balancing high ideals with the pursuit of power

October 05, 2015
Denis Healey died this weekend at the age of 98 © PA/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Denis Healey died this weekend at the age of 98 © PA/PA Wire/Press Association Images

I once had the good fortune to meet a former Private Secretary to Denis Healey when he was Minister of Defence. Among a number of great stories was the occasion that private office had suggested to him that he should spend more time with the colleagues in the Commons. "Why?" he replied, "what could I possibly get from them?" Votes, was, of course, the unspoken response. Perhaps his aloofness cost him the precious votes that delivered Michael Foot his victory in the leadership election. I tend to side with Healey himself who blamed MPs who later defected to the SDP. They, he thought, wanted Foot in place to blow the Labour Party up. 

As big a contribution may have been Healey's character. He was cheerfully combative, telling The Guardian: "I dare say I am a bit of a thug ... On the other hand, you know, every party needs some people who will rough it up from time to time." Winning arguments doesn't always win friends, let alone votes. But you don't shape politics by staying silent and Denis Healey shaped the world we live in. 

Like all his generation, the war was a formative experience for Healey. A Beach Master at Anzio in the Second World War, mentioned twice in despatches, he was promoted to Major and as such, and in uniform, addressed the Labour Party conference in 1945. Different days, indeed, when a defence minister knew what he would be sending forces in to face. His experience informed his time as the Labour Party's International Secretary too. He worked on the policies that led to the founding of NATO—and he was an early, controversial and correct advocate of Germany's membership. He lived to see NATO not just victorious in the Cold War, but also winning the peace as it started to provide collective security to all of Europe—East, West and Central. 

He held major positions in the Wilson/Callaghan governments. Defence. Chancellor. Though never the Foreign Office for which he was well suited, and sometimes seems destined. He made the major decisions. Withdrawing troops from East of Suez—a decision that reverberates still as conflict centres on the South China Sea. And he negotiated with the IMF the loans and cuts package that both symbolised Britain's economic decline and were the moment that fortunes changed. In some sense the roots of Thatcherism can be seen here—and certainly the deep conflicts in the Labour about tax and spend, which the Corbyn leadership has re-surfaced, can be traced to this moment. As always with Healey there is a picture—this time of him signalling to get the attention of the chair at conference in 1976. Such was the state of the unreformed Labour Party that—in the middle of Britain's greatest post-war economic crisis—the Chancellor of the Labour government had to be called from the floor to speak. 

After a career in which he missed out on two jobs he was eminently qualified for personally and politically—Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister—Healey was famously never bitter.  He attributed his to his wide interests outside politics: "I have always been as interested in music, painting and poetry as in politics." Perhaps so—and it is refreshing to remember a time when senior politicians thought that there was more to culture than US TV box sets. But I think rather of the Book of Job: "man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." Conflict is an energy and sometimes what a political party needs is just that. No-one welcomes defeat, but it reveals character and Denis Healey's words to Labour Party conference in 1959, after a third election defeat in a row, ring down the decades:

"We are not just a debating society. We are not just a socialist Sunday school. We are a great movement that wants to help real people at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power until we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country."

He was a man who spoke truth to those in Labour who wanted to embrace powerlessness. In the end, that is why he mattered and still matters. Politics is a profession in which high ideals sometimes need to be delivered directly. Healey was a master of this, which is why we mourn a giant.