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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”