Denis Healey

Died: October 3, 2015

Lord (Denis) Healey, who has died aged 98, was an outwardly jovial, ebullient and much-impersonated Labour minister – but behind the jolly frontage lay a consummate politician who was feared by friend, foe and nervous media interviewer in equal measure. He did not suffer fools gladly but he also never forgot one of the first rules of life in the House of Commons: the Opposition are facing you, but your opponents are behind you.

Sadly, apart from those giant eyebrows of his, he will probably best be remembered for having to go cap in hand on Britain's behalf to the International Monetary Fund when the British economy ran into the sand in the mid 1970s.

In what amounted to the most famous moment of his political career, in 1976, he also had to turn back on his way to the annual meeting of the IMF to address his party's conference in Blackpool. There, to the sound of booing and jeering, he had to defend his decision to ask the IMF for help – and to make it worse, he had to speak from the floor and was only given three minutes to do so (he had lost his place on the party executive).

However, whenever he was asked about that period of his career, he continued to insist that the Callaghan government actually did a good job with the nation's finances.

As Chancellor from 1974-79 he inherited a dual OPEC (Oil Petroleum Export Countries) and balance of payments crisis, but he took the British economy through a uniquely critical period with a minimum of pain for the ordinary citizen, and ended with both unemployment and inflation falling.

As one observer said in 1987: "the economic historians may hand down a more charitable judgement" while Healey himself said in a 1989 interview that Labour had, at the time of the economic collapse, been forced to deal with the worst crisis any British government had ever inherited - from the Tory government of Edward Heath.

He said: "We had just had a very damaging miners' strike, we had just had a balance of payments problem which the monetarist London Business School thought insoluble, yet we solved it in three years, and we put the whole economy into balance. It was all thrown away in the winter of discontent because we didn't solve the pay problem."

Denis Winston Healey (the middle name was in honour of Churchill) was born in Mottingham in south-east London, although the family moved to Yorkshire soon afterwards. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and won a scholarship to Balliol, Oxford, where he read classics and philosophy. A contemporary of Edward Heath, he was involved in student Labour politics although it was the Communist party he joined at first because he saw it as the only party that was unequivocally against Hitler.

When war broke out, he became a major in the Royal Engineers and served in North Africa and Italy and was awarded the military MBE in 1945 recognition of his service. He had his first brush with politics the same year when he contested Pudsey and Otley for Labour in the General Election, but eventually became an MP when he won South East Leeds in 1952. The constituency became Leeds East in 1955, and Healey held it until he decided to step down as an MP at the 1992 election.

A few years after he was elected, Labour suffered its third successive general election defeat and Healey was at the centre of an argument about the direction of the party that will be recognised by anyone who has followed the recent leadership battle and the election of Jeremy Corbyn.

Speaking at the party conference in 1959, Healey said: "There are far too many people who want to luxuriate complacently in moral righteousness in opposition. We are not just a debating society. We are not just a socialist Sunday school. We are a great movement that wants to help real people at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power until we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country."

Quickly making an impression, he was a member of the Shadow Cabinet from 1959-64, 1970-74 and 1979-87. He was Defence Secretary from 1964-70 and Chancellor from 1974-79.

Apart, clearly, from the impressions he left from his time as Chancellor, it was probably the impact he made both from the front and back benches on foreign affairs that sticks in the mind. He concentrated heavily on developments in the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc in general, South Africa and the Middle East.

He will also be remembered for his colourful turn of phrase in attacking his political enemies. He really did describe being attacked by the then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe as like being attacked by a dead sheep, but the worst - or best - of his invective was reserved for Margaret Thatcher (whom he sometimes described as Rhoda the Rhino). On the eve of the 1983 General Election he accused her of glorifying in the Falklands War - a statement he was forced to retract - but there was much more to come.

One of his most spectacular attacks came while campaigning in the Glasgow Central by-election in 1989, when he described the then Prime Minister as "cranky and old-fashioned, still clanking around in her rusty armour like a fugitive from the Middle Ages. She does appear an alarming irrelevance in a world which is growing more interdependent every day." His argument was that people all over the country, in all parties, felt she had been there too long and gone too far.

He thundered: "She has isolated Britain in Europe, in NATO, in the Commonwealth and in the world. She has isolated herself in her own Cabinet. No earlier Prime Minister has ever consistently undermined her Foreign Secretary and Chancellor at the same time. As a result she has exiled Britain to the margin of world affairs and ruined our economy."

Following a Thatcher trip to Paris in July of that year Healey said in a Commons debate on foreign affairs that she had "added the diplomacy of Alf Garnett to the economics of Arthur Daley", while an exchange with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1993 went thus - Gorbachev on Thatcher: "She is an outstanding politician, an outstanding woman." Healey's response: "Was."

He did, of course, challenge for the leadership in 1976 and 1980, being beaten respectively by James Callaghan and Michael Foot.

In 1976 he obtained only 30 votes in the first ballot and dropped out of the race, but it was felt he was in with a real chance in 1980. He came top in the first ballot, beating Foot by 29 votes, but he was defeated by 10 votes in the second.

He had a hard battle in 1981 when Tony Benn challenged him for the deputy leadership. It was crucial because if Benn had won, the party would have taken a massive lurch to the left, of whom Healey was always suspicious, but the old warhorse survived.

His final shadow of a chance for the leadership came in February, 1983, when sections of the party discussed the possibility of dumping Foot, but Healey remained aloof from the infighting, the plotters against Foot failed to get their act together and the chance was gone.

And so we had Healey the intellectual (a double first from Balliol College, Oxford), Healey the robust and feared politician, Healey the scourge of TV and other journalists, and Healey the peer, raised to the House of Lords as Baron Healey of Riddlesden in the County of West Yorkshire in 1992.

There was also, however, Healey the bon viveur, Healey the family man, Healey the entertainer, and Healey the writer (in 1980, he published Healey's Eye, a collection of his photographs, and his autobiography, The Time of My Life, appeared in 1989).

He was also more than decent pianist, did a song and dance routine with Roger Moore on a Dame Edna Everage Christmas Special in 1987 and, almost unbelievably, could sing The Ball of Kirriemuir in Latin. He also got the joke when the impressionist Mike Yarwood did a take on him – in fact, he adopted the catchphrase Yarwood gave him – "silly billy" – and used it with relish.

In his time, before the emergence of John Smith, Tony Blair and New Labour, Healey was arguably the best leader Labour never had, coupling a massive intellect with a real presence in the House which enabled him to take on senior figures facing him across the despatch box with total confidence. In later years, he criticised British intervention in Iraq in 1992 and in 2004 called for Tony Blair to make way for Gordon Brown.

He married his wife Edna in December 1945 and they had one son and two daughters. Edna died in 2010 and he is survived by his children.