Lord Healey: a chancellor who really knows about coalitions and crisis
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Version 0 of 1. What with speculation about hung parliaments and possible party “pacts” after the election, publishers Faber & Faber have chosen a good moment to reprint The Pact by Alistair Michie and my much-missed late colleague, Simon Hoggart. First published in 1978 as The Inside Story of the Lib-Lab Government, 1977-78, The Pact is a reminder of how tiresome such arrangements can be for the chancellor of the day. In this case it was Denis Healey, the chancellor from 1974 to 1979, who, in addition to grappling with the inflationary consequences of the quintupling of oil prices in 1973-74, also had to deal with the demands of powerful trade unions and unhelpful policy suggestions from the Liberals. As Healey reflected in his memoirs: “It was never easy working with the Liberals… I found it particularly difficult working with their economic spokesman, John Pardoe; he was robust and intelligent enough, but sometimes I felt he was simply Denis Healey with no redeeming features.” Like so many who had served in the war, he was shocked by the trigger-happy approach of Tony Blair over Iraq There is a danger in nostalgia, but there is no getting away from the fact that his generation of politicians were more impressive than many of the modern generation. When I told people I was seeing him recently, the common response was: “I thought he was dead”. But I have known him since his chancellor days and always treasured a boast of his: his parents had lived to a ripe old age and he was expecting to reach his 90s. At 97, he is obviously not as physically robust as people remember him – as with one of his successors at No 11, Lord Lawson, one sees a slimmer version – but still mentally alert, a genial host, who proudly showed us (I was with Alun Evans, incoming British Academy chief executive) around various studies, and an impressive collection of books, paintings and photographs. There were fond references to Edna, his late wife, and to his three children, with whom he keeps in close touch. Family is very important to him. That was why he turned down the secretary generalship of Nato after his spell as defence secretary, and the managing directorship of the International Monetary Fund after his time as chancellor. He liked travelling, but not the prospect of living in Brussels or Washington. He is a great believer in nuclear deterrence: “If your enemy has nuclear weapons, then you need them too.” But, as he once confessed on Desert Island Discs, he would not have pressed the button. “My real interest in politics was to stop a war.” Like so many who had served in the war, he was shocked by the trigger-happy approach of Tony Blair over Iraq. He is particularly proud of his record as defence secretary under Harold Wilson, 1964-70. Although Wilson is credited with not having sent troops to Vietnam, Healey hints that he had to stiffen Wilson’s resolve. He preferred Callaghan to Wilson as prime minister, and saw a lot of the former at weekends in Sussex during the IMF crisis of 1976, when things got fraught over the negotiations with the fund, but Callaghan managed to keep the cabinet together. It was intriguing that he was offered the IMF job after all the humiliation of having to “turn back at the airport” in the middle of the 1976 crisis and apply for an IMF loan, and his frequent use of the phrase “sod-off day” when the Labour government finally emerged from the clutches of the fund. He enjoyed defence, but not the Treasury. His ambition had been to become foreign secretary, given his deep interest in international relations dating from his undergraduate communist days. As to how serious those Oxford flirtations with communism were, “most people just stayed in the party for bed and breakfast”, he quips. Healey is such a broad character, a towering intellectual with deep interests in the arts, and is certainly not one to nurse grudges. Yet he does regret not having been given the Foreign Office, and repeated one of his favourite lines over the years: when he was secretary for defence, half the people in the Foreign Office thought he ought to be foreign secretary and the other half thought he was. In common with Kenneth Clarke, who never became leader of the Tories but possesses similar characteristics, Healey was never a member of a clique and did not cultivate colleagues. “The only thing I regret is not trying to be prime minister,” he says. He also feels strongly that the IMF crisis need never have happened if the Treasury had not double-counted some elements of public spending and been better at forecasting. This does not stop him from saying that Sir Douglas Wass, then permanent secretary to the Treasury, was an outstanding civil servant – even though Wass has devoted a book to arguing that recourse to the IMF was inevitable in the atmosphere of the times. One of the secrets of longevity is said to be an active interest in life. Over coffee, his helper, Carol, gave him the latest Hansard – “very good debates in the Lords, you know”. There was an amusing moment when he opened his Coutts bank statement in front of us: “Oh, £10.75 in credit I see… ” The books and official papers are obviously much used; he reads the papers and keeps cuttings, so voluminous that they made your correspondent feel better about the mess in his own study. |