Denis Healey

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The Right Honourable  Denis Healey  Baron Healey of Riddlesden, PC, CH, MBE
Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office 5 March 1974 – 4 May 1979
Prime Minister	Harold Wilson James Callaghan
Preceded by	Anthony Barber
Succeeded by	Geoffrey Howe
Secretary of State for Defence
In office 16 October 1964 – 19 June 1970
Prime Minister	Harold Wilson
Preceded by	Peter Thorneycroft
Succeeded by	Peter Carington
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party
In office 4 November 1980 – 2 October 1983
Preceded by	Michael Foot
Succeeded by	Roy Hattersley
Member of Parliament for Leeds South East
In office 1952 – 26 May 1955
Preceded by	James Milner
Succeeded by	Alice Bacon
Member of Parliament for Leeds East
In office 26 May 1955 – 9 April 1992
Preceded by	New Constituency
Succeeded by	George Mudie
Born	30 August 1917 (1917-08-30) (age 90) Mottingham, Kent, UK
Political party	Labour

Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey, CH, MBE, PC (born 30 August 1917), is a British Labour politician. He was Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979.

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 World War II 2 Member of Parliament and In government 2.1 Shadow Cabinet and Retirement 3 Personal life 3.1 Author 3.2 In popular culture 4 Notes 5 External links

[edit] Early life

Healey was born in Mottingham in Kent. At the age of five he and his family moved to Keighley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His paternal grandfather was a tailor from Enniskillen in Ireland. Healey's father was an engineer who had worked his way up from humble origins studying at night school. Healey was one of three siblings.

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, although unlike many future politicians he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. He studied Moderations (Latin and Greek literature) and Greats (ancient history and philosophy). Whilst at Oxford, Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 but left it in 1939, in protest over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

At Oxford, Healey met future Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath, whom he succeeded as President of Balliol College Junior Common Room, and who was to be both a life-long friend and political rival. Healey managed to get a double first for his degree, awarded in 1940.

[edit] World War II

After Healey had taken his degree, he served in World War II, with the Royal Engineers, in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and 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. Still in uniform, Major Healey 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 the Conservative-held seat of Pudsey and Otley, doubling the Labour vote but losing by 1651 votes.^[1] Following this, he was appointed to the post of secretary of the International Department of the Labour Party, becoming a foreign policy advisor to Labour Party leaders and establishing contacts with socialists across Europe.

From 1948 to 1960 he was a councillor of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and of the International Institute for Strategic Studies from 1958 till 1961. He was a member of the Fabian Society executive from 1954 till 1961.

[edit] Member of Parliament and In government

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, after the incumbent MP Major James Milner left the Commons to accept a peerage.

Healey 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 was horrified at the idea of Gaitskell's volatile deputy, George Brown, leading the Labour Party, saying "He was like immortal Jemima, when he was good he was very good but when he was bad he was horrid". As a result Healey voted for Callaghan in the first ballot and Harold Wilson in the second. Healey thought Wilson would be able to unite the Labour party and lead it to victory in the next general election. He didn't think Brown was capable of doing either.

When Labour won the 1964 election Healey 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 position after Labour's unexpected defeat in June 1970.

Healey was appointed Shadow Chancellor in April 1972 after Roy Jenkins resigned in a row over Europe. Healey 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 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. (See "The Jekyll and Hyde Years: Politics and Economic Policy since 1964" by Michael Stewart.) 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. Healey's left-wing ideology of increasing benefits for the poor famously led to him saying that he would "Tax the rich until they squealed" in which to help the poor, those earning over £100,000 per year would be taxed more heavily than beforehand.

[edit] Shadow Cabinet and Retirement

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 until that point, 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,^[2] 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 30 March. He was eliminated from the election 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". On 14 June 1978, he likened being attacked by the mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons to being 'savaged by a dead sheep'.^[3] Nevertheless, when Healey was featured on This Is Your Life in 1989, Howe appeared and paid warm tribute to Healey. The two have been friends for many years.

Healey was considered 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 who later defected to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) claimed they voted against Healey in order to land the Labour Party with an unelectably left-wing leader and so help their new party.^{[citation needed]}

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 election system, which included individual members and trade unions. The contest was seen by many as a battle for the soul of the Labour Party and was vigorously debated over the summer of 1981 ending with Healey winning by 50.4 per cent to Benn's 49.6 on 27 September 1981. In this still controversial contest Ron Todd, the general secretary of the huge Transport and General Workers Union (the "T&G"), was obliged to cast the T&G's collective votes for the left candidate Tony Benn. The T&G's choice of Tony Benn as deputy leader of the labour Party was the outcome of a normal and constitutional preconference vote by the T&G's democratically elected Labour Party Conference Delegation. The T&G's support for Tony Benn reflected the votes of union members in T&G branches and regions nationally but after secret consultations with the rightwing of the party the general secretary defied the democratic decision of the delegation and at the last minute cast all the T&G's block vote for Healey, assuring him of a narrow victory he would never have achieved without this switch.

Healey served as Shadow Foreign Secretary during most of the 1980s, a job he had coveted. His 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. Healey is regarded by some - especially in the Labour Party - as "the best Prime Minister we never had".^[4] Denis Healey is a founder member of the secretive Bilderberg Group. When journalist Jon Ronson requested to see Healey's photos of Bilderberg meetings, Healey replied: "No. Fuck off."^[5]

Although he supported Tony Blair to be leader of the Labour Party within hours of John Smith's death, he later became critical of Blair. During 2004 and 2005, he several times called on 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". This view is shared by many Labour MPs. ^[6]

[edit] Personal life

Healey married Edna on 21 December 1945. They are still married today after over 60 years, and they live in East Sussex.^[7] They have three children.

He has been a keen photographer for many years and enjoys music and painting.

[edit] Author

His publications have included; Healey's Eye (photography) (1980), The Time of My Life, (his autobiography) (1989), When Shrimps Learn to Whistle (1990), My Secret Planet (an anthology) (1992), Denis Healey's Yorkshire Dales (1995) and Healey's World (2002).

[edit] In popular culture

• The Remastered edition of the Yes album Tormato, features the added track "Money"; which contains a satirical voice-over of Healey by Rick Wakeman in the background throughout the course of the song.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Interview about nuclear strategy in Europe for the WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
• The old bruiser who remained the boy next door The Observer interview and retrospective

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
Party political offices
Preceded by Michael Foot	Deputy Leader of the British Labour Party 1980 – 1983	Succeeded by Roy Hattersley

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Persondata
NAME	Healey, Denis Winston
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Baron Healey of Riddlesden; Lord Healey
SHORT DESCRIPTION	British Labour Party politician; MP 1952–1992, Chancellor 1974–1979
DATE OF BIRTH	30 August 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH	Mottingham, Kent
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH