Dennis Healey RIP

[mongers]

 

Not found an adequate obituary yet, but we was not unlike a British Robert McNamara in terms of the impact he had on government.

IIRC he flirted with communism in his youth, service in the war included being a beachmaster at Anzio, when on to be a prominent Labour politican, holding most of the senior big cabinet posts and overseeing a fair bit of Britain's retreat from empire in the 1960s.

[The Brain]

Did he have 99 problems, but a beach wasn't one?

[Richard Hakluyt]

I think he may have been the last of the pre-1979 big hitters.

It all seems very diminished nowadays, I was reading an article in the Spectator yesterday that was arguing that Nicky Morgan was a contender for the Tory leadership and hence for the post of PM. April 1st comes around very quickly these days.

[mongers]

Whilst not an obituary, this interview gives a flavour of the man; ignore the click-bait title, worth a read:

Denis Healey was on the front line of Labour politics for more than 40 years. At 95, he's forgotten the minor squabbles and wants to take the long view.
By Rafael Behr

It is easy to miss the single sheet of A4 paper, with a pale blue logo and dulled gold lettering, that hangs above a sideboard in the spacious hallway, unobtrusive among the more eyecatching ornaments, portraits, photographs and yards of books. The letter is from the municipality of Anzio on Italy's Mediterranean coast, thanking Denis Healey for his role in planning the amphibious landing that liberated the city from Nazi control in 1944. That was a year before Healey first stood for parliament and 48 years before he left the Commons to become Baron Healey of Riddlesden, having served as defence secretary and chancellor in Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s and as deputy leader of the party in the vicious early years of 1980s opposition. Healey entered politics to defeat fascism and left after communism crumbled. Yet this letter is the only memento of the 20th century's ideological strife that I can see in his grand home in rural Sussex.

"Anzio was a piece of cake," he says when he catches me mulling the document. "We had total security. We captured some of the German officers in their pyjamas."

There isn't a hint of bragging in the voice, which carries only a faint quaver betraying 95 years of use. The landing at the Porto di Santa Venere in 1943 was "a different story". The plans went awry and the Allies were pinned on the beach under mortar fire, taking heavy casualties. "We had to sleep between concrete blocks on the beach," Healey reminisces, but then abruptly changes the subject: "Do you want me to take my clothes off?"

This ribald provocation is addressed to the photographer, who has set up his equipment for a portrait as we have been talking. Healey has been a keen photographer since childhood and the lens brings on an attack of boyish mischief. He grins and gurns with impish vigour. It seems quite plausible he would, if asked, strip naked. After the shoot he whips out a small camera from the pocket of his beige corduroy trousers and insists on shooting us right back. A brief anecdote rolls out about the time he met Henri Cartier-Bresson. This time there is a definite hint of bragging.

The arts, Healey says, have sustained him in retirement. It is, in a sense, a return to a first love. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he was a voracious reader and occasional writer of poetry, but the imperative of defeating Hitler intervened. A communist at university, he entered the army in 1940. "So many young middle-class boys and girls in my generation joined the Communist Party because it was the only unequivocal anti-fascist party," he says of the late 1930s, when Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy was still the orthodoxy. "The Labour Party was half pacifist in those days." He switched to Labour in 1940.

.......
.......

That remark about not caring about politics is a gentle rebuke to my line of inquiry. There is plenty more I'd like to ask. It isn't every day you get to sit down with someone whose career spanned every domestic and international drama from D-Day to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet the difference in Healey's demeanour when released from political topics is extraordinary.

The mention of poetry causes his eyes to brighten beneath those unruly brows that were such a gift to cartoonists. "I quite like Betjeman because he is good at suburban life." A rhapsodic tone banishes the quaver from his voice. "But there's nobody to touch Dylan Thomas!" It feels suddenly as if the struggles of the 20th century were a digression – exciting, important, but necessarily conducted in prose, when all along Denis Healey was craving the company of poets.

rest of article here:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2013/03/thatcher-was-good-looking-and-brilliant