In 1981, the radical MP Tony Benn challenged the incumbent Denis Healey for the Labour deputy leadership. The week before the contest, the New Statesman’s editor, Bruce Page, criticised both for their narrow-mindedness. Benn’s limitations were those of the activist; Healey’s those of the administrator.
Nothing could be more brutally plain than that Denis Healey, one of the Labour movement’s principal chieftains, is an object of hostility, even of hatred, for many of that movement’s members.
Some of the grisliest manifestations come from a paranoid minority whose pretensions to democracy are exposed on page four. But there is also an unwavering resistance to Mr Healey among Labour loyalists – MPs, many of them – who would never dream of shouting him down.
The essence of the deputy leadership crisis is that for each main camp the opposition candidate is beyond the limit of minimum political trust. In June, we spelt out some of the unpalatable items of record which erode Tony Benn’s trustworthiness in the eyes of those who aren’t his committed supporters. Extensive right-of-reply didn’t much alter the facts, but Benn’s defenders relied upon a different argument: saying that their man, whatever the chameleon character of his past, was irrevocably committed to the process of democratic legitimacy.
Events have dealt roughly with that argument. But a fresh danger to understanding augmented by the media’s lust for stereotypes is the growth of a myth suggesting that resistance to Healey must be confined to those who applaud the conduct of the T&G [Transport and General Workers’ Union] executive. Anyone investigating the crisis of Britain’s democratic left must reckon with the evidence that it owes as much to the character and record of Denis Healey as to the character and record of Tony Benn.
By Labour standards, Healey gets a mighty affectionate press. The label of “Renaissance man” is applied without consciousness of hyperbole. The standard profile describes him as unquenchably diligent: as gifted beyond all contemporaries in the absorption of technical detail, but as capable nonetheless of strategic perception.
Who else debates so fluently with foreign statesmen in their own languages, or turns so easily from industrial minutiae to the discussion of music, painting or literature? Who else so well combines a Balliol first with the common touch of Yorkshire?
Usually, the only fault advertised is a rough, tough over-confidence: a brash assertiveness about the product of his own excellent intellect, which emerges in office as a penchant for the brow-beating of civil servants. The virtues are authentic. It is the “fault” which is phoney.
Healey’s failure as Chancellor, with which Labour remains hag-ridden, occurred because the bravura mask concealed a deadly lack of self-assurance. He could not out-face the civil servants, however compelling intellectually the evidence of their unwisdom. He may have brow-beaten them, but only as a preliminary to accepting the seductive comfort of their advice.
Conspiracy theory aside, any Labour Chancellor must reckon with the Treasury’s hefty prejudice against any foreign borrowing on Britain’s part – unless this is provided within a context of “discipline”, such as that provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But Healey’s confrontation with this prejudice occurred within a context which might have altered the career of a man with different attitudes.
The great panic of 1976, when Labour abandoned a decisive part of its social programme, was as usual the climactic moment in a process of deterioration. Months beforehand, the pound was weakening, and indications were that without support it might fall to the alarming level of $1.50. Urgent Whitehall meetings discussed the possibility of using Britain’s dollar reserves to support the exchange rate through official buying of sterling – already, the implicit alternative was an approach to the IMF, with consequential “belt-tightening” for the Labour Party’s supporters. But the cost of holding sterling at $1.75 could be as much as $3 billion. The Treasury advice was that Britain’s reserves were inadequate.
Healey’s political colleagues canvassed the possibility of raising a loan from overseas central banks, who might be willing to give help with a minimum of conditions. But the Treasury response was unequivocal, and withering. Sir Derek Mitchell, head of Overseas Finance, said that the notion was as credible as a television fantasy, but nothing else. If any attempt were made to put it into practice, the news alone would be sufficient to cause a major financial panic. Therefore, impasse.
Within a few days of this crushing meeting, Healey went to Paris for a conference, at which he encountered Emile van Lennep, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Why, van Lennep wanted to know, was the pound not being supported? Shortage of funds, replied the British Chancellor. But, said van Lennep, that need be no obstacle. In going conditions, it would be simple to raise $5 billion, largely from European sources.
Healey responded eagerly, and a loan-package was swiftly assembled. (Sir Derek’s estimate of the impossibility of this feat was doubtless a specimen of the uninhibited counsel which Whitehall secrecy exists to stimulate.) This was not a permanent solution. But within weeks, a new scheme was being canvassed for giving long-term stability to Britain’s reserves. Borrowing was involved, which guaranteed mandarin resistance: however, the scheme’s promoters, led by Harold Lever, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, were buoyed up by memory of the Treasury’s spectacular pratfall.
Resistance was duly manifested: reportedly, Sir Derek Mitchell wheeled out his old joke about the television fantasy for another hearing.
Naturally, he encountered derision, much of it from Denis Healey in abrasive form. The Treasury claimed it was impossible to raise $10 billion for the reserves. But they also said that $3 billion for exchange-support was impossible and Britain had got $5 billion without asking. How was this to be explained?
It could not be, and after much crossfire Healey declared that the Treasury position was nonetheless, after reflection, he allowed the scheme to be killed. Britain stumbled onwards to the crisis of autumn 1976, when the pound “nearly died” – and Healey lined up with the Treasury under the melodramatic and highly simplistic threat that the IMF’s Enforcers would otherwise bankrupt Britain like a High Street dress shop.
Healey’s enemies see here the skilful class-traitor. His friends see the tragedy of a man armed everywhere with gifts – except the crucial intuition which reveals when every scrap of political credit must be risked on a challenge to the conventional wisdom. The consequences, from the viewpoint of an unemployed worker, must be indistinguishable.
The price of retaining office, as the political scientist Henry Drucker observed, was Labour’s adoption of interests which the Tories exist to defend. The consequences for Toryism weren’t salubrious, but that’s another story. For Labour, given the existing disaffection of the ‘bed-sitter radicals’, and the dilapidation of the whole movement’s democratic equipment, schism became an almost inevitable prospect.
Neither Denis Healey, Tony Benn nor any of their colleagues will admit that the price might have been excessive (though Benn stoutly refuses to pay his share of the bill). For various reasons, they all believe office must never be surrendered. In Healey’s case this is not treachery, nor common opportunism. It probably springs from inability to perceive any legitimate, dialectical role for the Tory interest: to Healey, no doubt, Toryism appears merely as another extreme manifestation of the human stupidity against which he has been struggling all his life, and yet another example of a role which, if required at all, could be performed better by himself. What this means, of course, is that his talents are those of a bureaucrat, rather than of a politician.
And it was as a party bureaucrat that he began, running Labour’s international department in the post-war years. Some papers now available in the Public Record Office give fascinating glimpses of a style not much altered by the passage of 30 years.
The subject is Malaya, a much-advertised triumph of Britain’s post-colonial manoeuvres in Asia but not then, or now, an uncontroversial one in socialist terms. A Mr Higham of the Colonial Office reports (26 October 1948) that he has had lunch with ‘Mr Denis Healey of the Labour Party’ in order to complain about a recent flood of letters and resolutions reaching Whitehall from union branches and Trades Councils and adopting a ‘decidedly communist flavour’. The author of misinformation seen as being responsible ‘might to some extent be working for his own purposes’, but was being “organised” by others.
“Mr Healey indicated that he would welcome collaboration with us to meet this kind of thing… He said that he would be very glad if I could let him have (a) a complete list of the TU Branches, Trade Councils etc who had written to us. (b) a list of any communist or ‘fellow traveller’ publications concerned with the Colonies issued in this country, so that (I presume, although he did not say so) he would know in future what was to be guarded against… I am sure that we can rely on Mr Healey to help us in tackling any flare-up of this kind which may happen in future I am not sure whether we have a handy ‘black list’ of communist colonial publications, but perhaps Information Department can list a few of them.”
Experience over the years has shown that government departments have not always been very discriminating in compiling their “black lists”, any more than Mr Healey himself has been very competent in distinguishing one hostile critic from another. Comparison with George Orwell may be a trifle hard on him. But when Orwell’s biographer examined the records of Whitehall’s information-peddlers, he found a crusty statement to the effect that Orwell seemed to be a man it was quite impossible to make any use of.
Many Labour politicians, though, have been over-trusting of the bureaucracy without incurring damage to themselves, and to the party, on the same scale as Healey. One reason for this is that although his opportunist behaviour is actually quite rare, it can be deployed with great tactical brutality against allies who should be entitled to loyalty on ordinary political grounds. An example occurred again in the financial run-up to the 1976 crisis.
Few political commitments can have been firmer than Labour’s promise to reform child benefits on taking office last time. It was emphasised in Labour Programme 1973, and in both of the 1974 manifestos, and in a whole battery of Parliamentary announcements up to 1977. It was an intrinsic part of the Social Contract and the plan for restraining wages. But by May 1977 James Callaghan and his Chancellor had decided that the new child benefits must be dropped.
How to defuse the natural outcry? First, as a spectacular leak of Cabinet papers revealed in New Society, Callaghan suggested to Cabinet that a Whips survey indicated growing back-bench opposition. In truth, no such survey existed. Then on 24 May Denis Healey discussed the matter with six TUC leaders engaged with him in pay negotiations. According to the TUC’s records, he told them that the Cabinet was now determined to defer the scheme: indeed, the impression left with the union leaders was that government and backbenchers were one, and that any rearguard in the name of public commitment (the TUC had been quite as firm as the Labour Party) was futile.
In fact, Cabinet did not decide until next day, when one powerful argument was a report from Healey saying that TUC leaders were ‘violently opposed’ to the new benefits. In fact, the TUC was uneasy and lukewarm: worried about reneging, but worried also about the effect of the scheme on male workers’ take-home pay. The “violent” opposition was Healey’s own: he was convinced that Labour was set upon a piece of folly, and that a resort to chicanery was required.
The bitterness among those who have been the victims of such methods is just as much one of the “facts of life” as the ones that Mr Healey likes to dwell on. And it is exacerbated by the fact that no-one can find much evidence of Healey’s confident ruthlessness being deployed against the bureaucracy, and against the conventional wisdom.
Healey is not the simple-minded reactionary of left-wing caricature – how many of those who heckle him, for instance, realise that he is opposed to Cruise missiles in Britain? But his conception of politics scarcely extends beyond the wearing-down of opposition, tempered by the occasional touch of what his best friends call “thuggery”. Like an administrator, he believes that there is only one correct path which is the one recommending itself to him. Sooner or later, the “silly billies” will achieve wisdom: if it looks like being too much later, they may have to be hustled.
His own firm belief is that no government can think. At its best, it can only implement a previously-devised plan, and nothing could be more foreign to his thought than that planning is only the precondition for the creative improvisation that must be called forth by stress. To Healey, a government taking office and a student leaving university are alike in having acquired their essential stock of knowledge, which then requires merely to be applied, with more or less success. It would be difficult to think of a more conservative conception in the non-political sense or, come to that, of one further from the idea of ‘Renaissance man’.
Obviously, to some Labour enthusiasts, any evidence of failure by Healey is source for rejoicing. But there is little advantage in it for Labour’s overall cause, for he retains a solid position among a large number of Labour’s voters: something just as necessary to the party as the activist enthusiasm which Tony Benn commands. Fairly or not, Healey bears the chief responsibility for Labour’s disastrous change-of-path in 1976. Indeed, some large part of his public standing probably derives from the fact that, for all his disputatious skills, he hasn’t really tried to shuffle that responsibility off. It is the kind of broad point which political enthusiasts may overlook in their concern with the intricacies of praise and blame.
Whatever the leader-writers may say, Labour will never succeed as the party of radical change so long as its leadership is dominated by Denis Healey. But a major problem for the party, and one which could yet be too much for its democratic skills, is to eliminate Healey’s claim to command without, in the process, destroying its own legitimacy.
One says that Healey must bear the 1976 blame “fairly or not”: there is a basic sense in which politics can never be fair. Events impose nightmare and disaster upon a political leader with the same narrative remorselessness as the monsters which afflict Bunyan’s characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Overcoming one is no more than a qualification to confront the next, and misfortune or irresolution are penalised indifferently, and at once.
Still, in Bunyan’s specially English version of predestination, there was always a special qualification. What a failure demolishes is not always the possibility of survival, but the duty of leadership, which is the only subject of competition among Bunyan’s characters. There is the awkward moment when Christian—largely because of his force of personality – gets the expedition embroiled in the pit called Vain-Confidence. They extract themselves, and Christian says: if you please let me go first; that if there be any danger I may be first therein, because by my means we are both gone out of the way. No, said Hopeful, you shall not go first, because your mind being troubled may lead you out of the way again.Another, more jocular way of putting this is in the Founding Rule of the Look-Here-Wait-A-Minute Party, first identified by the Times columnist Michael Leapman, and believed to be the real inner control-group of every political party which retains its sanity. It says: There is nothing in the rules about the people who got us into the mess being the right ones to get us out of it.
[Further reading: From the archive: Reagan’s outrageous invasion]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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