POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Arms and the men

DAVID WALDER

The occasion of the presentation of his eighth Defence White Paper seems to be an appropriate time for some reflections on the sad life and hard times of Denis Winston Healey who, like Aeneas, has 'met many tribulations on his way.'

In the good old days of Tory misrule from 1951 to 1964 there were only two Labour politicians in the House of Commons who seemed either to know or care about defence matters, Denis Healey and George Wigg. This judgment was reinforced by my hearing Patrick Gordon Walker put up for half an hour on the subject one sad little evening.

Healey and Wigg were a formidable pair despite the fact that it was not at all obvious that they were on the same side. Colonel Wigg was essentially a 'rifle and boots' man who carried in his enormous ragbag of a mind more information than one wished decently to know. If the Army Chaplains' Department were all engaged on a bayonet fighting course, if the ship's company of HMS 'Intolerable' had eaten stew for dinner seven days running, then George Wigg had chapter and verse to prove the facts. If the personnel of RAF Schmetterling had been forced to fuel their planes with Ronsonol bought out of their own pockets then George Wigg seemed able to produce the relevant bills from the NAAFI.

Major Healey, on the other hand, was, in the Johd Terraine sense, the 'educated' Shadow Minister. A postures, B postures, the controlled response, the fallacies of the trip wire theory, each logical step in the process of escalation, all these, and more, were familiar to him if not to his audience.

Not of course that any of it had any effect. The Tories, with enough campaign medals among them to girdle the debating chamber and a sufficiency of senior officers to fill a Staff College, were not impressed by military scandals. Soldiers trimming barrack lawns with nail scissors was not news. As for Healey's high flown theories, these they re- garded as but reflections of the intellectual exercises indulged in by verbose American academics all with Germanic surnames.

So in the 'defence season', as George Wigg called it, Tories drifted in and drifted out and the Labour benches were generally deserted until late evening when the lads came in for a bit of shouting about the Bomb. Frankly, the defence debates of those days were pretty terrible affairs, the despair of all serious interested persons, Denis Healey no doubt among them.

Presumably for this reason the govern. ment of the day seemed to give less thought to the occupancy of the Ministry of Defence and the three Service ministries than to any other office of state. The list of incumbents has all the variety and distinction of Beach- comber's roll of Huntingdonshire cabmen and the average tenure of office was short. The exceptions only prove my point. Field- Marshal Alexander held the senior post for two years. I can only remember seeing him shy at the applause during a Tory party conference (he did not speak) as I am sure he never shied at gunfire. Harold Macmillan was there for six months and then was whisked off to the Foreign Office. Joe Godber, the farmer, took over the War Office in June 1963 and in the autumn of the same year harvested in the Ministry of Labour. For some a staging-point, for others a passport to oblivion. Antony Head, an ex- regular brigadier, was there for exactly three months, in one of which British troops landed at Suez.

Perhaps the most notable ministers were Duncan Sandys, who in two years made himself every serviceman's bite rouge, and his successor Harold Watkinson, a cold grey man (hair, face and clothes) who never condescended to explain to his supporters, nor bothered to argue with his opponents unless 'we have the bomb because we have the bomb' be an argument. He of course was eventually turned off in the Great Dis- missal of 1962 and went off to Sch . . . you- know-where. Then, with Peter Thorneycroft in charge, as a good knockabout man on the floor of the House, the Tories filed off into the shadows.

Now the ill-starred John Profumo, when Secretary of State for War, had once said to an audience of senior Army officers `I think I have the best job in the Government.' Never true of defence posts under the Tories, it has proved even less so under Labour.

Needless to say, in 1964 the top job went to Denis Healey. At the same time Alun Gwynne-Jones made fact of the fictional peerage of Chalfont with no apologies to myself who invented the Marquisate (The Short List) or Alec Guinness who played the Duke and his heirs and collaterals (Kind Hearts and Coronets). In fact, the much publicised but unofficial designation of Lord Chalfont as Minister for Disarmament underlines the whole difficulty of being a Labour Minister of Defence. To a sizeable and vocal segment of the parliamentary party it is as if the Christian Scientists were obliged to include in their hierarchy a quali- fied medical adviser.

Plainly there can be no dialogue with any meaning between Defence Minister and the pacifist wing of his own party in the House or the country. 'Cap guns, toy soldiers and spring-loaded cannon were wrong', reflected Fienburgh's Johnnie, so no love for Denis in that quarter. Equally plainly, if there are to be economies, although often more appar- ent than real, they look best in the defence sector; so morale in the services slumps and wise parents discourage their sons (and daughters) from taking the Queen's devalued and decimalised shilling. No Labour Minister of Defence can rely on the automatic loyalty of his own party as can a Tory in almost any circumstances. Nor can he expect much sympathy when Harold Wilson whips a num- ber of platforms, F-111 and East of Suez presence among them, from under his feet. That Denis Healey has remained standing at all is in itself something of a miracle, and goes some part of the way to explain the renewed pugnacity which he puts into each white paper, as if they followed each other in logical sequence rather than charting a series of enforced compromises and near- somersaults.

So what consolation can the charitable commentator offer to one of the most like- able and able Ministers of Defence since the job ceased to be merely another Churchillian hat? Since we learn only that our all-regular all-purpose armed forces could knock the conscripts of any one of our present EFTA, and hoped, for EEC, parners for six, not much about the efficacy of present policy.

Nor the excitement of change. Healey is plainly there to stay and chalk up his five years of regular employment. If one of the new Chieftain tanks, commanded by a young man who. believing the current ad- vertisements, saw himself on the way to the board of tet, knocked Michael Stewart down in the street, Denis Healey would not be kiss- ing hands at Buck House the next morning.

Perhaps, therefore, only the consolations of philosophy and reflection. This may well be his last white paper. Defence issues are unlikely to intrude into the coming EEC negotiations as they did, fatally, into the first Heath attempt. Come the general election, no Labour ex-Minister of Defence can win or lose his party a single vote, nor for that matter is it likely that any Tory spokesman can, either, at this moment of supreme dis- belief and indifference.

In fact, when any politician is asked to console himself his eye generally wanders to the state of the other side; and this luxury at least Denis Healey can permit himself: to take a glimpse at the Shadows. Enoch Powell has gone, of course, but he would have been uneasy even if he had stayed. His Brighton conference speech set the hawks a-fluttering and his subsequent expansions and explana- tions of his theme did little or nothing to smooth their ruffled plumage. In any event his language was wildly inappropriate to his post and his party. Stark logic, right or wrong, is no approach to those who wish, again rightly or wrongly, to contemplate the warming prospect of large grey aircraft carriers and little brown Gurkhas.

Admittedly Enoch Powell did once pro- duce a splendid emotive phrase, redolent not even of the last war, but of the drums and fifes at Ramillies. He said, 'the proudest moment of my life was when I first put on the King's coat' but unfortunately he de- livered that sentiment to the Bow Group, which was, I fear, the wrong audience.

So now, by a set of chances irrelevant to defence, Denis Healey can, as the mood takes him, smile or scowl across the dispatch boxes at Geoffrey Rippon. He it is, if the fates are kind and the polls accurate, who will have the task of returning the armed forces to something like the size, function and deployment originally accepted by Denis Healey. It is a mammoth task, of course, mili- tarily and politically, and will depend for its success not so much on Rippon's undoubted abilities as the skills of his financial and economic colleagues. As for Healey, so for Rippon. Emphatically it will not be defence on the cheap. My only minor hope is that the situation. although ironic in the extreme, will provoke a higher standard of debate than that of those dreadful Bomb or No Bomb two-day non-events. If that happens it may console Denis Healey a little, too, for his six years in the wilderness of office. -