Anthony Howard - Denis Healey: 'The cat that walks alone in politics' (32/41)
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The prominent British political observer, Anthony Howard (1934-2010) reported on global political issues for over 40 years for 'The Guardian', 'The Sunday Times' and 'The Observer', and was editor of the 'New Statesman' and 'The Listener'. He received a CBE in 1997. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]
TRANSCRIPT: Denis Healey was the cat that walks alone in politics. That was true from the very start. He didn’t have, sort of, allies and supporters and subsidiaries. Take Roy Jenkins. Tremendous contrast between Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey. Roy always believed in having a claque of supporters. He was… Healey said it himself: he was a Trollopian politician, it means he came out of Anthony Trollope, 19th century novel, very rude thing to say, but Healey and Jenkins never hit it off. They’d been at Balliol together and they didn’t… I think Healey was a year ahead of Jenkins. They disliked each other in those days and they went on being really incompatible all the way through the politics of the '80s and the '90s. And it’s my view that if they had rubbed along, the whole history of the Labour Party, post-1983, would have been completely different. Maybe post-1980, when Foot became leader. But the lack of… total lack of understanding between Healey and Jenkins was, I think, one of the tragedies that the Labour Party suffered from. They were both able men, firsts at Oxford, this kind of thing. Both been President of the Balliol JCR, but they just never could somehow… and they were… Roy once said to me, we were like chalk and cheese. And I think though Roy never felt happy with Callaghan, never liked Callaghan, I think he actually disliked Healey more. Oddly enough, the last summer before he died, Jenkins, on the same day, went to lunch with Callaghan and tea with Healey. And I think the tea with Healey was much the greater strain of the two. But they were doing their best, they were both old men by then.
Denis was so arrogant. I mean, this is the real trouble, that he was Mr Know-all. Now he’s obviously much cleverer than most people, certainly much cleverer than me, but he always wanted to know better than you on every single subject. And there were subjects, I think very few, which probably I knew more about than he did, but he would never allow that. And that’s one of the things that grated on people. He was also very thuggish. You know, there was a coarse side to Denis, and he obviously, in a sense, blew the leadership, that he would have won against Foot in 1980 if he hadn’t made himself so unpopular with members of the parliamentary party by being intellectually superior, and also by being brutal, and saying, you know, you’re out of your little Chinese mind, this kind of thing. Well, people don’t like being talked to like that. But he also pretty… he used quite a lot of sort of profane and bad language. He had great ability. He was not a great speaker. Rather a poor speaker, as a matter of fact, both in the House of Commons and on the public platform, but clearly, as a minister, and of course this is the great thing to be said for Healey, that he understood the importance of being on top of a department.
He only held two jobs in government. One was Minister of Defence, which he held from 1964 to 1970, and he really did impose his will on that department. Not the easiest department to run, but he’d stuck there. He wouldn’t… once or twice, Wilson, I think, sounded him about would you like to move? If he’d been offered the Foreign Office, he’d certainly have taken it, but he wasn’t being offered the Foreign Office, so he said, 'No, I’ll stay where I am'. And I think that’s an important thing, to have a politician who realises that if you are to run a department properly, you have got to be really the equal to any argument that’s put against you in the Ministry of Defence, whether by the, you know, chief of the Defence Staff, whether by the Permanent Secretary, you want to be on top of the job. He understood that. And then he became Chancellor in '74, and again, he did five full years as Chancellor... '74 to '79. They were very difficult years, but I think he was right. I mean, at the time when he got the job, he obviously still wanted to be Foreign Secretary more than anything in the world, but as long as Callaghan was prepared to back him, and he was, more or less, he stayed at the Treasury. Again, I think if the Foreign Office had come up, and it did come up, of course, when Tony Crosland died, but that was a very bad moment for him to move, 1977, I think it was. Or was it '76? '77. And so he was stuck there. I think he was a very strong Chancellor. [...]
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