An air of arrogant authority
George Gale
'Intellectually they were a remarkable crew. Eight of them had first class degrees from Oxford — Harold Wilson, Dick Crossman, Douglas Jay, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, Michael Stewart (and myself). This must easily be a record. . . Jim Callaghan, the most fluent speaker I have ever listened to, George Brown, with his effortless power to arrest attention, Bar bara Castle, with her instant eloquence . were in a broad sense equal to the alpha men just mentioned.' Thus Lord Longford gushing on about the first Wilson cabinet. Of the first-class alpha eleven who were running the country (downhill) c. 1968 only two are running it (downhill) today: Prime Minister Callaghan and Chancellor Healey. The others have fallen by the wayside or died or moved to lusher pastures or, most remarkably of all, abdicated. Longford, pursuing his discussion of this particularly intellectually distinguished Cabinet declares that its underlying weakness was 'what I can only call a shortage of radical passion.' Of the two survivors, Callaghan and Healey, this can certainly now be seen. There is no radical passion whatever in the Prime Minister, and it is very much to be doubted whether there has ever been any. And no radical passion is displayed by the Chancellor, either: but there was a time when some kind of passion burned fire in his belly, for alone among his Oxford alphas he was once a Communist.
To be a Communist at Balliol before the war was pretty commonplace, although contemporaries such as Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins easily avoided the temptations of Marxist certainties. Heath once said to Cecil Smith that Healey was intolerably arrogant' and had been so when he and Jenkins and Healey had all been together at Balliol. Healey has long since lost whatever radical passion he possessed —I assume that to be a Communist even at Balliol some kind of radical passion was required — but most observers will accept that nothing much has changed his 'intolerable arrogance', although, to be fair, a great number of people have, in fact, managed to tolerate it. He figured frequently as a possible national coalition Prime Minister in Cecil King's account of the devious intrigues he and people like Alf, Lord Robens, had ten years ago — the time of which Frank, Lord Longford, was writing — in their seedy and silly efforts to unseat Harold Wilson and instal a Government of National Unity. Now, he cannot be discounted as a future Prime Minister, and, the Prime Minister aside, he has certainly become the dominant figure in the Callaghan adminstration and electoral strategy, His arrogance is tolerable rather than intolerable. People put up with Denis Healey, although he does not so easily put up with them. He belongs to that large class of successful politicians who, having attained Cabinet rank, tend to forget the friends and equals of their past and to prefer the unfriendly equals and rivals of their present and, as they see it, their future.
Healey, everyone says, is a bully. He has, nowadays, a bully's face: coarse, florid, heavily-jowled with eyebrows like a thunderous black cloud. It is not necessarily a bully's face. It could just about be the face of a boozy Irish poet, publican or hack; or, nearer the mark, it could well be the face of an Irish horse-dealer. You might buy a second-hand car from Denis Healey, but with a face like his, he'd never sell you a horse. He'd sell you a pup, mind you, and the pass.
The radical passion has long since gone: and the intellectualism, too. Healey has never attempted, as Crosland did, to analyse what his socialism was about. His political positions have not been put in their places by his political principles. He occupies no particular ideological segment within the Labour Party's spectrum of ideas. Towards the practice of politics he has never, come to that, exhibited the intellect u al's characteristic flibbertygibbettyness, as did his colleague Cross man. Not as clever as Douglas Jay or as smooth as Roy Jenkins or as loyal as Michael Stewart or as telented as George Brown, he has left them all behind and, up until now, has lately looked to be enjoying his power almost as much as the Prime Minister does. The pair of them have been purring a lot lately. And when the Chancellor addresses himself to the country, although he cannot affect the smug avuncularity of Sunny Jim, he makes a fair imitation of a genial fellow who knows what he is doing.
And this is a remarkable performance for a Chancellor who, in four years, has produced fourteen sets of budgetary measures, in the latest of which, to 'get back' what he claims the combined opposition 'took' from him when they voted to reduce income tax by one per cent, he has increased the tax on employers, and to restore City confidence he has pushed up the price he has to pay to borrow money from the lenders. To increase unemployment and the price of money a few weeks after what was designed as a pre-election Budget is not the behaviour of a Chancellor who knows what he is doing, but of one who is blown by whatever wind is blowing.
However, he looks solid — all-too solid, his unmelting flesh — and he sounds strong. He looked solid when he did his long spell as Minister of Defence, cutting defence expenditure as if he knew what he was doing, which in a way he did, for he was doing what he was told to do and thereby advancing his position. Healey's defence cuts, like his series of Defence White Papers, were not the product of any great thinking about defence. The cuts were what the Labour Party wanted, and the White Papers papered the cracks in our defences. Still, with this evidently tough man at the Ministry of Defence, this strong man, this great pragmatist, surely our defences were secure? They were not; and still are not; and their present condition owes much to Healey's time at Defence.
And what of our economy, after four years of his stewardship? He has done what he has been told to do: he has been a good boy in the eyes of the bankers. As far as the International Monetary Fund is concerned, he is top of the class. First class. Alpha. Well done, Denis, you're a very clever fellow.
But Chancellors shouldn't put themselves into positions where their bankers tell them what to do. They should be telling the banks what to do, if anyone is to do the telling. The strengths of Healey's term at the Treasury have been those of the IMF and — it has to be acknowledged — of the Prime Minister's crucial acknowledgement in October 1976 that this country could no longer spend its way out of recession. Told what to do, Mr Healey has obliged, with fourteen budgets and more to come. He has, however, done it all with much boisterous panache, and he deserves to share the credit with the Prime Minister for persuading much of the public that between them the country's health improves. It doesn't, except insofar as people think it does. To the extent that they have fooled the patient into believing the cure is working, they are an excellent pair of doctors. Their bedside manner, that is to say, is first-class, alpha. They are not only like doctors. They are like comics who work in pairs, which is why, in discussing Healey, Callaghan keeps cropping up; and vice versa. It is not that they like each other. It is that they are not much good apart. They arc a double act. Callaghan was Chancellor once, and a bad,one at that. He knows what it's like; and he panicked. Healey has come perilously close, too.
Behind the bully, behind the burbling boom of confidence, there are always whimpers of fear and doubt. Like Cal' laghan, Healey, I believe, fears that he does not know what he is doing; and this is why the pair of them are so eager and happy to be told what to do and to oblige. This lets the one get on with his burbling booming confidence, the other with his bullying ways.
Healey can be stung. Mrs Thatcher maw aged it during her campaign for the leadership of the Tory party. She made him very cross when, attacking him for budgets which did nothing for those who saved, she quoted what Healey was said to have said to a journalist: 'I never save. If I get any money I go out and buy something for the house.' Like most successful politicians Denis HealeY has in fact saved, chiefly through buying houses prudently. His ordinary domestic instincts are thoroughly Tory, as indeed are those of most of his colleagues. So, when he described Mrs Thatcher as the `La Pasionaria of Privilege' she replied,'If this Chancellor can be Chancellor, anyone in the House of Commons can be Chancellor. I had hoped that the Rt. Hon. Gentleman had learnt a lot from this debate. Clearly he has learnt nothing. He might at least address himself to the practical effects because it will affect . . . everyone, including people born as I was with no privilege at all.' This response helped to build up Mrs Thatcher's lead over Heath in the crucial first ballot for the Tory leadership. That she is now leader is due to her performances against Healey.
Which brings us back to the Chancellor: for the Tories, in picking her as they saw her perform against him, were paying him tribute. There is a quality some men have but most are without, and it is a quality which has nothing to do with their ability or then' will or their ambition, but which has a great deal to do with their success or failure and that quality is authority. When cardinals meet in conclave to choose a Pope from amongst their number, there are those who are seen as papabile, able to be Popes. Healey, if he were a cardinal (and an Italian) would be papabile. For ten years at least he has been in the running for the premiership. He is not of that running now.
He runs because of his ambition; he is in the running despite his bullying ways, and not because of his ministerial record at Defence or at the Treasury —and not because he got a first at Oxford and is an alpha fellow — but because, somewhere along the way he has acquired the air of a man having authority. It matters not, incidentally, whether a man actually possesses authority, except to hilly self. What matters is that he looks to others as if he possesses it. What is especially annoying about Healey is that so many pee' pie think he is a man with authority, himself included.
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