Observer Review: Denis Healey By Edward Pearce Essay, Research Paper

The great contenderDenis Healey: A Life in Our TimesEdward PearceLittle, Brown? 30, pp634Speculation about what might hold been is the kind of self-indulgence for which Denis Healey has merely disdain. Looking back on his ain calling, he said & # 8211 ; and I have no uncertainty meant & # 8211 ; that making something was far more of import so being person. But those of us with less robust emotions, who worked with him through the injury of the late Sixtiess, can non defy on occasion conceive ofing what would hold happened if he had won the Labour leading election in 1980.He doomed because a twosome of twelve Labour MPs believed, wrongly as it turned out, that if Michael Foot led the party, the militants in the constituencies would allow them take a quiet life. Their cowardliness was compounded by the perfidiousness of four or five deserters to the soon-to-be-formed SDP who supported Foot because they wanted what was worst for the party and an alibi for their desertion. Had Healey won, Labour would non hold split. Or, at least, as he said to me during the old ages of acrimonious division, the mistake line would hold been located differently.With Denis Healey taking the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher would still hold won the 1983 general election, but Labour would hold been defeated, non humiliated. And Healey would hold lived to contend ( and likely win ) another twenty-four hours. The irresponsible Left would ne’er hold taken control of an integral party which looked as if it had a opportunity of prehending power and Blairite Christian Democracy, which was a reaction to the old ages of failure and the harm done by extremism, would non hold been born out of desperation.It is impossible to read Edward Pearce & # 8217 ; s glorious life, made all the more closely enlightening by the writer & # 8217 ; s clear prejudice in favor of his topic, without coming to a affecting decision about Healey & # 8217 ; s failure to make the greasy top of the oily pole. He would hold been a great premier curate because he possessed in copiousness the two indispensable demands of that office & # 8211 ; bravery and mind. And he was horridly unequipped to win the parliamentary election which would hold made him party leader and given him a cleft at the title.From the really beginning of his political life, Healey found it about impossible to pare his canvass and, in defense mechanism of what he knew ( without the slightest uncertainty ) to be right, he could ne’er defy crunching his oppositions into the dust. Pearce reminds us that in the great one-sided disarming argument at Labour & # 8217 ; s 1960 conference, Hugh Gaitskill made his national repute with a address of high emotion and faultless rule. Healey, the bookman who might hold devoted his life to a survey of aesthetics and found a consolation in times of emphasis in music, art and doctrine, merely abused the unilateralists.Of class, his address was logically faultless, but what the carbon monoxide

mrades remembered was the question he addressed to Frank Cousins, the leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, who had just been humiliated in his attempt to increase bus crews’ wages: ‘Is there anybody in the hall who thinks it is easier to deal with Mr Khrushchev than with the chairman of the London Transport Executive?’When the great test came, it was not the earlier verbal and intellectual success that was held against him – it was his conduct during the campaign. He lost the second ballot and, therefore, the leadership by 10 votes.Putting aside the cowards and the traitors, he certainly threw away enough support to have made the difference between victory and defeat. I told him that by refusing to write a personal manifesto to the Guardian, he would alienate two potential supporters whom I was able to name. His reaction to my advice was unprintable. Pearce’s biography suits the subject. It makes very few compromises with easy reading. Few people will buy it for holiday amusement, but it has real merit.Pearce revives my irritation. But the biography also reminds how simply brilliant Healey was. His sixth-form essays, supplied, like so much of the book’s material, by Healey himself, must have been regarded as pretentious by his classmates. But his masters must have thought them the work of a prodigy.By the time I came to know him well – I was his deputy at the Ministry of Defence in 1969-70 – he had no need to prove how clever he was. I was there when Air Chief Marshal Elworthy (not Admiral Peter Hill-Norton, as Pearce reports) bade him goodbye, on behalf of the Chiefs of Staff, after the 1970 election defeat. He described him as the best Secretary of State since the war.Foreign Secretary was the job for which his early political career, as well as his natural instincts and interests, eminently equipped him. Instead, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer at the moment of almost maximum crisis in the postwar economy.He applied the same strategy which he had employed throughout his earlier political life and, no doubt, both during his gilded years at Balliol and in the course of winning the two mentions in dispatches during his time as beachmaster in the Italian campaign. He was immensely clever, usually right and immensely offensive to those who disagreed with him. It was a technique which I found irresistibly endearing. But I can understand why others, particularly those who suffered from his brutality, thought otherwise.In one sense, his uninhibited attitude to life has been an unqualified success. As Pearce makes clear, Healey was the happy warrior with an idyllic home life and intellectual interests so wide that they stimulated his wife into inventing the immortal phrase ‘political hinterland’, the other interests into which happy retreat was always possible. But for the rest of us, his failure to lead the Labour Party – and the country – was a tragedy.