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Society of dead poets

Ferdinand Mount

THE TIME OF MY LIFE by Denis Healey

Michael Joseph, £17.95, pp.607

The day Denis Healey was born, Virgi- nia Woolf recorded in her diary that it was not actually raining, though dark.' Mrs Woolf was not to know it, but she was condemned to haunt Mr Healey for the rest of her days and into the Beyond, appearing and reappearing in the long Windings of his biography like a Grey Lady at the end of the corridor: 'Virginia Woolf, a writer who never fails to refresh me . . . Virginia Woolf has been as much an unseen presence during our years at Alfris- ton as Yeats was when we were living at Withyham.' When Yeats took up dabbling in the occult, did he have any idea where he would finish up being an unseen pre- sence? Nor is he the only poet to be hovering in the Healey ambience; 'Emily Bronte's poems have a unique resonance for me.' Mr Healey also saw 'more than a touch of Jane Eyre' in Alice Bacon, Labour MP for Leeds South-East (though he seems to have failed to spot the uncanny likeness between Mrs Barbara Castle and Tess of the D'Urbervilles). Among mere male literary figures, Ibsen, Chekhov, Montherlant, Malraux and Stendhal all get high marks. While on the military staff in Bari, he scurries to buy up the works of Croce, and 'Italian translations of Nietz- sche and Unamuno, who were more to my taste.'

It should not be thought, however, that Mr Healey is a mere literary superman. He keeps on bumping into pale young men Who turn out, later on, to be the Duke of Norfolk, or Lord John Hope, or Jack Profumo or Bill Cavendish-Bentinck. He dines at Buscot with Lord Faringdon and Lord Berners, he goes to Glyndebourne with the Christies and the Gibsons. When he declared in his spur-winning speech at the 1945 Labour conference that 'the upper classes in every country are selfish, de- praved, dissolute and decadent,' he pre- sumably knew what he was talking about, and by the 1970s he must have had some inside knowledge of 'the howls of anguish' from the rich which he predicted would follow Labour's increases in income tax.

Sometimes, on the other hand, the pale Young men turn out to be Zbig Brzezinski or Helmut Schmidt, or, if not so pale, Steve Biko or Henry Kissinger. But in most cases, the principal feature of these items from the small-world department is their bare, unadorned nature. The point of the anecdote about meeting Peggy Ashcroft when young, for example, is not that at that period she hated acting and wanted to be a physiotherapist. It is, quite simply, that our hero met her.

There is, in short, nothing that Mr Healey has not read, nowhere he has not been, no one he has not met — except a good editor. For, alas, the fruits of these far-flung travels, these rare encounters, these great literary experiences are not always as plump or ripe as they might be. There is too often a leaden touch, a faint echo of the essay on What I Did in the Holidays: 'Greece itself was an inexhausti- ble revelation — the people, landscape and art were all infinitely more exciting than I had expected.' My most unforgettable experience in Poland was my visit to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.' Chou- en-Lai was 'the most impressive political leader I had ever met.'

The Impressive Political Leader class turns out to be pretty crowded. President Ford strikes him as 'decisive, shrewd and helpful', as well as 'an exceptionally nice and decent man'. Pierre Trudeau was 'one of the most attractive and enigmatic public figures I have met', with 'exceptional charisma'. As for the Kremlin, it seems to be choc-a-bloc with leadership qualities. Krushchev was 'one of the half-dozen greatest political leaders of this century'. Malenkov he describes in words which he himself says might have been said 30 years later of Gorbachev: 'obviously quick in- telligence and subtlety . . . parried all questions with wit, moderation and adroit- ness . . . replied with a twinkle.'

Yet, on second thoughts, this book might have been less utterly endearing, less repeatedly thought-provoking than it is if all this stuff had been cut out. Perhaps a decent proof-reader would have been enough, one who knew how to spell lain Macleod and Lydia Lopokova, who could check that it was Eric Hammond, not Neil Kinnock, who said that the miners were like the men in the trenches — 'lions led by donkeys' — and that it was Jeremy Thorpe and not 'a Tory backbencher' who said of Macmillan's sacking half his Cabinet, `Greater love hath no man than he who lays down his friends for his life.' I suspect too that when Mr Healey speaks of his (infinitely embarrassing) 'supporting roles in sketches for Morecambe and Wise and Virginia Wood', he means Victoria Wood —.perhaps the shade of Mrs Woolf was jogging his elbow again. Alas, the Eric-and-Ernie-meet-Leonard-and-Virginia show remains, unperformed. I could also have done without the shower of old Churchill anecdotes. In a couple of pages, we have the Plasterass joke, the Bossom joke, and the joke about every cliché except Please Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving — to be followed a few pages later by 'this pudding has no theme'. Not quite up to Nietzsche or Unamuno, even in an Italian translation.

But out of all this — and perhaps partly because of it -- is built up an unrivalled self-portrait, all the more vivid because so artless, of a leading member of the gov- erning class in post-war Western democra- cy. Healey responds instinctively to the vibrations of the spirit of the times. I do not mean that he is a time-server or placeman. On the contrary, there have been few more dedicated, energetic and sincere public servants anywhere, no more ferocious executant of the contemporary imperative. True, he likes office— no, that is an understatement, he basks in it, he glows. I have never seen a happier man than Chancellor Healey in his scarlet braces with a bucket of gin-and-tonic in his hand, holding forth about Schumpeter. On one or two occasions, he says, he threatened to resign, over the cancellation of the F-111 aircraft, for example, but nobody took the threat very seriously, then or now. He was and is a Government Man.

After his brilliant exploits as beachmas- ter at Anzio — described here with a vivid exactness which, unfortunately, is not maintained elsewhere — he came out of the war with the conviction that 'we must solve the problems of the peace by ap- plying the same planning techniques as we had used to win the war'.

Gradually, like everyone else, he be- comes disenchanted with planning. At the end of the Callaghan government, he exults that not a single one of the planning agreements dreamed of by Tony Benn is in operation, except the Farm Price Review, which had been invented yearS earlier. ke begins to detect a widespread desire to reduce the role of government and make people more self-reliant. In any case, government simply does not possess enough accurate information to make all the decisions. He tells us, not once but four times, that if he had had the right figures for the Public Sector Borrowing Require- ments he would never have had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund. And so it was that our Denis set in hand the most vigorous pruning of public expenditure undertaken since the Snowden era, far more stringent and at-a-stroke than anything since attempted by. Mrs Thatcher. Similarly, it was also Mr Healey who, as Minister of Defetice, finally ended Bri- tain's pretensions to be a world military power. Yet only a year or so earlier, he was still reassuring the Australians that it was right and possible for us to stay East of Suez.

No other British politician has devoted anything like the time or the intelligence to mastering the technicalities of defence strategy or East-West relations. No other British politician has enjoyed anything like the same network of comrades in expertise built up over the years of attendance at Bilderberg conferences and Konigswinter and Ditchley. Yet none of this seems to have enabled him to see much further than the ordinary insular ignoramus. Indeed, there is a strong case for saying that, although he will certainly be remembered as a formidable Defence Secretary, he was really better as a Chancellor, despite or perhaps because of having never previous- ly read the City pages.

He it was, after all, who laid or re-laid the foundations of such capacity to manage the economy as his successors as Chancel- lor have shown, namely, the introduction of cash limits on public expenditure and the consideration of monetary targets in some shape or form. Mr Healey is proud of having 'abandoned Keynesianism' and likes to pretend contempt for 'punk' or `sado' monetarism, preferring to call him- self an 'eclectic pragmatist'. It would be simpler to call him a conservative Chancel-

lor, who erred on the side of prudence when his colleagues would let him.

By contrast, his much greater expertise on defence matters led him to go haring off into some strange wastelands, sometimes in company with Dr Kissinger, sometimes with the entire defence mafia. In fact, it would be difficult to think of a single fashionable notion, from the Rapacki Plan to 'non-provocative defence' (including the famous Maginot Line of slurry packed with explosives), which Mr Healey has not taken up in its heyday. Sometimes he is candid about the transience of his enthu- siasms and his failure to foresee debacles like the Winter of Discontent. At other moments, he presents himself as a prophet amid a host of myopic pygmies.

Unfortunately, at some of the most interesting parts of his career, the light shed by this book becomes rather poor, as during a power cut on an autumn after- noon. When, for example, the forces of the Left are rampaging through the party, all we see of Mr Healey is a somewhat indistinct figure counselling the Gang of Four not to leave because 'Right-wing breakaways from Left-wing parties have never come to anything'. In the 'several hours' of private discussion he had with them, there is no mention of any possibility that he himself might join any new centre party. These discussions are firmly identi- fied as having taken place in September 1980, while he was in the middle of standing against Michael Foot for the leadership. But the more interesting ques- tion is how close he came to joining the SDP after he had lost that contest. Some founding members of the SDP say very close indeed; some, that Edna stopped him. She certainly sounds the more tigerish of the two, from the few stray views attributed to her, unwillingness to hear a good word said of Mrs Thatcher, for example. Might he have become not only

the best leader Labour never had — which he surely was — but also the leader of a new centre party which, with the addition of his weight, would have mustered a few vital extra percentage points needed to overtake Labour at the 1983 election?

All the evidence is, though, that Mr Healey is not by nature a resigner or a splitter. He is a man for the mainstream, and he is quite prepared to swallow his pride and wait for the mainstream to flow back in his direction again. Besides, he seems to lack that creative instinct, that nose for the future, which is to be found in other perhaps less gifted politicians — Iain Macleod, Rab Butler, Tony Crosland, Margaret Thatcher, even Neil Kinnock. He only sees the rabbit when it is already caught and skinned.

There is something artificial, put-on about his serious bullying persona, no less than about his eyebrow-waggling comic act. He says of his father, Will Healey, the son of a tailor from Enniskillen, that he never established that warm and natural relationship with his children, or even his wife which he achieved effortlessly with his students at Keighley Technical College; `too often he found it necessary to conceal his emotions behind a brutal facetious- ness'. With his son, it sounds as if things turned out the other way round; a remark- ably happy and relaxed man at home, it seems, in public he exudes an off-putting sort of bogus menace.

Without wishing to venture where even Abses fear to tread, I was struck by the curious deadness of his account of his years in the Communist Party which lasted through the Nazi-Soviet Pact up to the fall of France. Almost any undergraduate who wanted to stop Hitler joined the CP, we are told. There was nothing to it. The experience seems to have been quite un- memorable. Virtually the only thing he tells us about his duties in the Party is that during one summer vacation he made 'a short stop in Paris to leave a message for a certain James Klugman, who was organis- ing aid for Spain'. Klugman? The Comin- tern agent, the spymaster-general. What sort of message — a violet-scented en- velope, a small flat package, a bizarre snippet of code — 'Badgers are sneezing in Nuremburg'? But that is all we are allowed to know. Not so much darkness at noon as a passing cloud at teatime.

It is as much from these flat, unhelpful passages as from the more ecstatic mo- ments — like unexpectedly seeing Bot- ticelli's Primavera in wartime storage at Montegufoni — that one gradually gets an impression of something suppressed, not harmfully but irreversibly, within Mr Healey. Is there somewhere in there a puckish Hibernian trying to get out of this great Yorkshire bullyboy? And is it be- cause, through some stern exercise of the will the Puck never does manage to get out, that there is, despite everything, a sort of greatness about him?