Denis Healey
Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey was a British Labour Party politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979 and as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970; he remains the longest-serving Defence Secretary to date. He was a Member of Parliament from 1952 to 1992, and was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. To the public at large, Healey became well known for his bushy eyebrows, his avuncular manner and his creative turns of phrase.
Healey attended the University of Oxford and served as a Major in the Second World War. He was later an agent for the Information Research Department, a secret branch of the Foreign Office dedicated to spreading anti-communist propaganda during the early Cold War. Healey was first elected to Parliament in a by-election in 1952 for the seat of Leeds South East. He moved to the seat of Leeds East at the 1955 election, which he represented until his retirement at the 1992 election.
After Labour's victory at the 1964 election, he was appointed to the Cabinet by Prime Minister Harold Wilson as Defence Secretary; he held this role until Labour's defeat at the 1970 election, making him the longest-serving Secretary of State for Defence to date. When Labour returned to power after the 1974 election, Wilson appointed Healey Chancellor of the Exchequer. He stood for the leadership of the Labour Party in the election to replace Wilson in March 1976, but lost to James Callaghan; Callaghan retained Healey as Chancellor in his new government. During his time as Chancellor, Healey notably sought an international loan from the International Monetary Fund for the British economy, which imposed external conditions on public spending.
Healey stood a second time for the leadership of the Labour Party in November 1980, but narrowly lost to Michael Foot. Foot immediately chose Healey as his Deputy Leader, but after the Labour Party agreed a series of changes to the rules governing leadership elections, Tony Benn launched a challenge to Healey for the role; the election was bitterly contested throughout most of 1981, and Healey was able to beat the challenge by less than 1%. Standing down as Deputy Leader after Labour's landslide defeat at the 1983 election, Healey remained in the Shadow Cabinet until 1987, and entered the House of Lords soon after his retirement from Parliament in 1992. Healey died in 2015 at the age of 98, having become the oldest sitting member of the House of Lords, and the last surviving member of Harold Wilson's first government formed in 1964.
Early life
Denis Winston Healey was born in Mottingham, Kent, son of William Healey and Winifred Mary, née Powell. The family moved to Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire when he was five. His middle name honoured Winston Churchill. His father, the son of a tailor from Glenfarne, County Leitrim, was an engineering mechanic who worked his way up from humble origins, winning an engineering scholarship to Leeds University and qualifying to teach engineering, eventually becoming head of Keighley Technical School.Healey had one brother, Terence Blair Healey, known as Terry. Healey's family often spent the summer in Scotland during his youth.
Education
Healey was privately educated at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Greats. He there became involved in Labour politics, although he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. Also while at Oxford, Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 during the Great Purge, but left in 1940 after the Fall of France.At Oxford, Healey met future Prime Minister Edward Heath, whom he succeeded as president of Balliol College Junior Common Room, and who became a lifelong friend and political rival.
Healey achieved a double first degree, awarded in 1940. He was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford in 1940.
Second World War
After graduation, Healey served in the Second World War as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. Serving with the Royal Engineers, he saw action in the North African campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign and was the military landing officer for the British assault brigade at Anzio in 1944. He was twice mentioned in dispatches during this campaign.Healey became an MBE in 1945.
He left the service with the rank of Major. He declined an offer to remain in the army, with the rank of Lieutenant colonel, as part of the team researching the history of the Italian campaign under Colonel David Hunt. He also decided against taking up a senior scholarship at Balliol, which might have led to an academic career.
Political career
Early career
Healey joined the Labour Party. Still in uniform, he gave a strongly left-wing speech to the Labour Party conference in 1945, declaring, "the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent" 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 1,651 votes.He became secretary of the international department of the Labour Party in 1945, becoming a foreign policy adviser to Labour leaders and establishing contacts with socialists across Europe. He was a strong opponent of the Communist Party of Great Britain at home and the Soviet Union internationally. From 1948 to 1960 he was a councillor for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies from 1958 until 1961. He was a member of the Fabian Society executive from 1954 until 1961. Healey used his position as the Labour Party's International Secretary to promote the Korean War on behalf of British state propagandists, used British intelligence agencies to attack Marxist leaders within UK trade unions, and to exploit his position in government to publish his books through IRD propaganda fronts.
Healey was one of the leading players in the Königswinter conference that was organised by Lilo Milchsack that was credited with helping to heal the bad memories after the end of the Second World War. Healey met Hans von Herwarth, the ex soldier Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin and future German President Richard von Weizsäcker and other leading West German decision makers. The conference also included other leading British thinkers like Richard Crossman and the journalist Robin Day.
Member of Parliament
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 7,000 votes. Following constituency boundary changes, he was elected for Leeds East at the 1955 general election, holding that seat until he retired as an MP in 1992. During these years, Healey was close friends with the Rev. Canon Ernest Southcott, and Douglas Gabb, who would go on to become Lord Mayor of Leeds.He was a moderate on the right during the series of splits in the Labour Party in the 1950s. He was a supporter and friend of Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party. He persuaded Gaitskell to temper his initial support for British military action in 1956 when the Suez Canal was seized by the Nasserist Egypt, resulting in the Suez Crisis. In 1959 he was elected on to the Shadow Cabinet where he was made the deputy to the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Aneurin Bevan.
When Gaitskell died in 1963, he was horrified at the idea of Gaitskell's volatile deputy, George Brown, leading Labour, saying "He was like immortal Jemima; when he was good he was very good but when he was bad he was horrid". In the 1963 Labour Party leadership election, he voted for James Callaghan in the first ballot and Harold Wilson in the second. Healey thought Wilson would unite the Labour Party and lead it to victory in the next general election. He didn't think Brown was capable of doing either. He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Defence after the creation of the position in 1964.
Defence Secretary
Following Labour's victory in the 1964 general election, Healey served as Secretary of State for Defence under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He was responsible for 450,000 British Armed Forces uniformed servicemen and women, and for 406,000 civil servants stationed around the globe. He was best known for his economising, liquidating most of Britain's military role outside of Europe and cancelling expensive projects. The cause was not a fiscal crisis but rather a decision to shift money and priorities to the domestic budget and maintain a commitment to NATO. He cut defence expenditure, scrapping the carrier and the reconstructed in 1967, cancelling the proposed CVA-01 fleet-carrier replacement and, just before Labour's defeat in 1970, downgrading to a commando carrier. He cancelled the fifth planned Polaris submarine. He also cancelled the production of the Hawker Siddeley P.1154 and HS 681 aircraft and, more controversially, both the production of the BAC TSR-2 and subsequent purchase of the F-111 in lieu.Of the scrapped Royal Navy aircraft carriers, Healey commented that to most ordinary seamen they were just "floating slums" and "too vulnerable". He continued postwar Conservative governments' reliance on strategic and tactical nuclear deterrence for the Navy, RAF and West Germany and supported the sale of advanced arms abroad, including to regimes such as those in Pahlavi Iran, Libya, Chile, and apartheid South Africa, to which he supplied nuclear-capable Buccaneer S.2 strike bombers and approved a repeat order. This brought him into serious conflict with Wilson, who had, initially, also supported the policy. Healey later said he had made the wrong decision on selling arms to South Africa.
In January 1968, a few weeks after the devaluation of the pound, Wilson and Healey announced that the two large British fleet carriers HMS Ark Royal and HMS Eagle would be scrapped in 1972. They also announced that British troops would be withdrawn in 1971 and the British military and navy bases in South East Asia, "East of Aden", closed, large facilities in Malaysia and Singapore and the Persian Gulf and the Maldives. The next Prime Minister Edward Heath slowed the implementation of the policy, with 5/6 frigates on station East of Suez until 1976, when Healey as Chancellor used the 1976 sterling crisis to withdraw the Royal Navy frigates attached to the Five Power Defence Arrangements squadron and the Hong Kong Guard frigate,. Healey also authorised the removal of the Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago and authorised the building of the United States military base at Diego Garcia. Following Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, he became Shadow Defence Secretary.