Denis Healey

Healey worked between 1917 and 2015 across politician, engineer, autobiographer and writer. This article rests on 17 published texts and 33 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Denis Healey studied at Balliol College and Bradford Grammar School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is politics. Places of work recorded in the authority are London. Positions recorded include Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Distinctions recorded are Member of the Order of the British Empire, Companion of Honour, life peer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

• Honorific Prefix — The Right Honourable • Name — The Lord Healey • Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Office — Deputy Leader of the Labour Party Deputy Leader of the Opposition • Leader — Michael Foot • Term Start — 13 November 1980 • Term End — 2 October 1983 • Predecessor — Michael Foot • Successor — Roy Hattersley • Office1 — Chancellor of the Exchequer • Prime Minister1 — * Harold Wilson • James Callaghan • Term Start1 — 4 March 1974 • Term End1 — 4 May 1979 • Predecessor1 — Anthony Barber • Successor1 — Geoffrey Howe • Office2 — Secretary of State for Defence • Prime Minister2 — Harold Wilson • Term Start2 — 16 October 1964 • Term End2 — 19 June 1970 • Predecessor2 — Peter Thorneycroft • Successor2 — The Lord Carrington Shadow portfolios Parliamentary offices • Birth Name — Denis Winston Healey • Born — 30 August 1917 • Birthplace — Mottingham, Kent, England • Died — 3 October 2015 • Place of death — Alfriston, East Sussex, England • Resting Place — St Andrew's Church • Party — Labour • Other Party — Communist (1937–1940) • Children — 3 • Alma Mater — Balliol College, Oxford • Branch — British Army • Unit — Royal Engineers • Service Years — 1940–1945 • Rank — Major • Battles — * Second World War • North African campaign • Italian campaign • Battle of Anzio • Mawards — Member of the Order of the British Empire

Denis Winston Healey was born in Mottingham, Kent, son of William Healey (1886–1977) and Winifred Mary (1889–1988), née Powell. The family moved to Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire when he was five. His middle name honoured Winston Churchill. His father, the son of a tailor from Glenfarne, County Leitrim, was an engineering mechanic who worked his way up from humble origins, winning an engineering scholarship to Leeds University and qualifying to teach engineering, eventually becoming head of Keighley Technical School. Healey had one brother, Terence Blair Healey (1920–1998), known as Terry. Healey's family often spent the summer in Scotland during his youth.

Healey was educated at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Greats. He there became involved in Labour politics, although he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. Also while at Oxford, Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 during the Great Purge, but left in 1940 after the Fall of France. At Oxford, Healey met future Prime Minister Edward Heath (then known as "Teddy"), whom he succeeded as president of Balliol College Junior Common Room, and who became a lifelong friend and political rival. Healey achieved a double first degree, awarded in 1940. He was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford in 1940.

After graduation, Healey served in the Second World War as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. Serving with the Royal Engineers, he saw action in the North African campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily (1943) and the Italian campaign (1943–1945) and was the military landing officer ("beach master") for the British assault brigade at Anzio in 1944. He was twice mentioned in dispatches during this campaign. Healey became an MBE in 1945. He left the service with the rank of Major. He declined an offer to remain in the army, with the rank of Lieutenant colonel, as part of the team researching the history of the Italian campaign under Colonel David Hunt. He also decided against taking up a senior scholarship at Balliol, which might have led to an academic career.

Healey joined the Labour Party. Still in uniform, he gave a strongly left-wing speech to the Labour Party conference in 1945, declaring, "the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent" shortly before the general election in which he narrowly failed to win the Conservative-held seat of Pudsey and Otley, doubling the Labour vote but losing by 1,651 votes. He became secretary of the international department of the Labour Party in 1945, becoming a foreign policy adviser to Labour leaders and establishing contacts with socialists across Europe. He was a strong opponent of the Communist Party of Great Britain at home and the Soviet Union internationally. From 1948 to 1960 he was a councillor for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies from 1958 until 1961. He was a member of the Fabian Society executive from 1954 until 1961. Healey used his position as the Labour Party's International Secretary to promote the Korean War on behalf of British state propagandists, used British intelligence agencies to attack Marxist leaders within UK trade unions, and to exploit his position in government to publish his books through IRD propaganda fronts. Healey was one of the leading players in the Königswinter conference, organised by Lilo Milchsack, that was credited with helping to heal the bad memories between Britain and Germany after the end of the Second World War. Healey met Hans von Herwarth, the ex soldier Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin and future German President Richard von Weizsäcker and other leading West German decision makers. The conference also included other leading British thinkers like Richard Crossman and the journalist Robin Day.

Healey was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Leeds South East at a by-election in February 1952, with a majority of 7,000 votes. Following constituency boundary changes, he was elected for Leeds East at the 1955 general election, holding that seat until he retired as an MP in 1992. During these years, Healey was close friends with the Rev. Canon Ernest Southcott, and Douglas Gabb, who would go on to become Lord Mayor of Leeds. He was a moderate on the right during the series of splits in the Labour Party in the 1950s. He was a supporter and friend of Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party. He persuaded Gaitskell to temper his initial support for British military action in 1956 when the Suez Canal was seized by the Nasserist Egypt, resulting in the Suez Crisis. In 1959 he was elected on to the Shadow Cabinet where he was made the deputy to the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Aneurin Bevan. When Gaitskell died in 1963, he was horrified at the idea of Gaitskell's volatile deputy, George Brown, leading Labour, saying "He was like immortal Jemima; when he was good he was very good but when he was bad he was horrid". In the 1963 Labour Party leadership election, he voted for James Callaghan in the first ballot and Harold Wilson in the second. Healey thought Wilson would unite the Labour Party and lead it to victory in the next general election. He didn't think Brown was capable of doing either. He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Defence after the creation of the position in 1964.

Following Labour's victory in the 1964 general election, Healey served as Secretary of State for Defence under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He was responsible for 450,000 British Armed Forces uniformed servicemen and women, and for 406,000 civil servants stationed around the globe. He was best known for his economising, liquidating most of Britain's military role outside of Europe and cancelling expensive projects. The cause was not a fiscal crisis but rather a decision to shift money and priorities to the domestic budget and maintain a commitment to NATO. He cut defence expenditure, scrapping the carrier Centaur and the reconstructed Victorious in 1967, cancelling the proposed CVA-01 fleet-carrier replacement and, just before Labour's defeat in 1970, downgrading Hermes to a commando carrier. He cancelled the fifth planned Polaris submarine. He also cancelled the production of the Hawker Siddeley P.1154 and HS 681 aircraft and, more controversially, both the production of the BAC TSR-2 and subsequent purchase of the F-111 in lieu. Of the scrapped Royal Navy aircraft carriers, Healey commented that to most ordinary seamen they were just "floating slums" and "too vulnerable". He continued postwar Conservative governments' reliance on strategic and tactical nuclear deterrence for the Navy, RAF and West Germany and supported the sale of advanced arms abroad, including to regimes such as those in Pahlavi Iran, Libya, Chile, and apartheid South Africa, to which he supplied nuclear-capable Buccaneer S.2 strike bombers and approved a repeat order. This brought him into serious conflict with Wilson, who had, initially, also supported the policy. Healey later said he had made the wrong decision on selling arms to South Africa. In January 1968, a few weeks after the devaluation of the pound, Wilson and Healey announced that the two large British fleet carriers HMS Ark Royal and HMS Eagle would be scrapped in 1972. They also announced that British troops would be withdrawn in 1971 and the British military and navy bases in South East Asia, "East of Aden", closed, large facilities in Malaysia and Singapore and the Persian Gulf and the Maldives. The next Prime Minister Edward Heath slowed the implementation of the policy, with 5/6 frigates on station East of Suez until 1976, when Healey as Chancellor used the 1976 sterling crisis to withdraw the Royal Navy frigates attached to the Five Power Defence Arrangements squadron and the Hong Kong Guard frigate, Chichester. Healey also authorised the removal of the Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago and authorised the building of the United States military base at Diego Garcia. Following Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, he became Shadow Defence Secretary.

Labour lost the general election to the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher in May 1979, following the Winter of Discontent during which Britain had faced a large number of strikes. On 12 June 1979, Healey was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. He won the most votes in the 1979 Shadow Cabinet elections which followed and The Glasgow Herald suggested that this showed that he was the "strongest contender" to succeed Callaghan as Leader of the Labour Party. When Callaghan stood down as Labour Party leader in November 1980, Healey was the favourite to win the leadership election, decided by Labour MPs. In September, an opinion poll had found that when asked who would make the best prime minister if Healey were Labour leader, 45% chose Healey over 39% for Thatcher. However, he lost to Michael Foot. He seems to have taken the support of the right of the party for granted; in one notable incident, Healey was reputed to have told the right-wing Manifesto Group they must vote for him as they had "nowhere else to go". When Mike Thomas, the MP for Newcastle East defected to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), he said he had been tempted to send Healey a telegram saying he had found "somewhere else to go". Four Labour MPs who defected to the SDP in early 1981 later said they voted for Foot in order to give the Labour Party an unelectable left-wing leader, thus helping their newly established party. In an essay addressing why Healey did not become Prime Minister or Labour leader, Steve Richards states that in 1980 Healey, not Foot, was widely expected by the media and many political figures to be the next Labour leader. Richards also notes that by that point, his main rivals as leaders from the right of the party, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, were no longer in contention for the position, with the former out of Parliament and the latter having died in 1977. However, he also argues that while "Healey was widely seen as the obvious successor to Callaghan", and that sections of the media ultimately reacted with "disbelief" at Labour not choosing him to be their leader, the decision to opt for Foot "was not as perverse as it seemed". He argues that Labour MPs were looking for a figure from the left who could unite the wider party with the leadership, which Healey could not do. Richards believes that Foot was not a "tribal politician" and had proved he could work with those of different ideologies and had been a loyal deputy to Callaghan and so came to be "seen as the unity candidate" which allowed him to defeat Healey. Healey was returned unopposed as deputy leader to Foot, but the next year was challenged by Tony Benn under the new election system, one in which individual members and trades unions voted alongside sitting members of Parliament. The contest was seen as a battle for the soul of the Labour Party, and the long debate over the summer of 1981 ended on 27 September with Healey winning by 50.4% to Benn's 49.6%. The narrowness of Healey's majority can be attributed to the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) delegation to the Labour Party conference. Ignoring its members, who had shown two-to-one majority support for Healey, it cast the union's block vote (the largest in the union section) for Benn. A significant factor in Benn's narrow loss, however, was the abstention of 20 MPs from the left-wing Tribune Group, which split as a result. Healey attracted just enough support from other unions, Constituency Labour Parties, and Labour MPs to win. Healey was Shadow Foreign Secretary during most of the 1980s, a job he coveted. He believed Foot was initially too willing to support military action after the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina in April 1982. He accused Thatcher of "glorying in slaughter", and had to withdraw the remark (he later claimed he had meant to say "conflict"). Healey was retained in the shadow cabinet by Neil Kinnock, who succeeded Foot following the disastrous 1983 general election, when the Conservatives bolstered their majority and Labour suffered their worst general election result in decades. Healey had declined to run as leader to succeed Foot and stood down as deputy leader.

Healey's views on nuclear weapons conflicted with the unilateral nuclear disarmament policy of the Labour Party. After the 1987 general election, he retired from the Shadow Cabinet, and in 1992 stood down after 40 years as a Leeds MP. In that year he received a life peerage as Baron Healey, of Riddlesden in the County of West Yorkshire. Healey was regarded by some – especially in the Labour Party – as "the best Prime Minister we never had". He was a founding member of the Bilderberg Group. He was interviewed on his role as a co-founder of the Bilderberg Group by Jon Ronson for the book Them: Adventures with Extremists. During an interview with Nick Clarke on BBC Radio 4, Healey was the first Labour politician to publicly declare his wish for the Labour leadership to pass to Tony Blair in 1994, following the death of John Smith. Healey later became critical of Blair. He publicly opposed Blair's decision to use military force in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In the spring of 2004, and again in 2005, he publicly called on Blair to stand down in favour of Gordon Brown. In July 2006 he argued, "Nuclear weapons are infinitely less important in our foreign policy than they were in the days of the Cold War", and, "I don't think we need nuclear weapons any longer". As defence secretary, Healey had been designated to take control of the British nuclear deterrent should the Prime Minister have been incapacitated; he later said that "though I am convinced that nuclear weapons prevented a world war, I could never have authorised their use". In March 2013 during an interview with the New Statesman, Healey said that if there was a referendum on British membership of the EU, he would vote to leave. In May, he further said: "I wouldn't object strongly to leaving the EU. The advantages of being members of the union are not obvious. The disadvantages are very obvious. I can see the case for leaving – the case for leaving is stronger than for staying in". Following the death of Alan Campbell, Baron Campbell of Alloway, in June 2013, Healey became the oldest sitting member of the House of Lords. Following the death of John Freeman on 20 December 2014, Healey became the surviving former MP with the earliest date of first election, and the second-oldest surviving former MP, after Ronald Atkins.

Healey's notably bushy eyebrows and piercing wit earned him a favourable reputation with the public. When the media were not present, his humour was equally caustic but more risqué. The popular impressionist Mike Yarwood coined the catchphrase "Silly Billy", and incorporated it into his shows as a supposed "Healey-ism". Healey had never said it until that point, but he adopted it and used it frequently. Healey's direct speech made enemies. "At a meeting of the PLP I accused Ian Mikardo of being 'out of his tiny Chinese mind' – a phrase of the comedienne Hermione Gingold, with which I thought everyone was familiar. On the contrary, when it leaked to the press, the Chinese Embassy took it as an insult to the People's Republic." The controversy may have contributed to a poor performance when he fought for the Labour leadership following Harold Wilson's resignation. Healey's long-serving deputy at the Treasury, Joel Barnett, in response to a remark by a third party that "Denis Healey would sell his own grandmother", quipped, "No, he would get me to do it for him". On 14 June 1978, Healey likened being attacked by the mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons to being "savaged by a dead sheep". Nevertheless, Howe appeared and paid warm tribute when Healey was featured on This Is Your Life in 1989. The two remained friends for many years, and Howe died only six days after Healey.

Healey married Edna May Edmunds on 21 December 1945, the two having met at Oxford University before the war. The couple had three children, one of whom is the broadcaster and writer Tim Healey. Edna Healey died on 21 July 2010, aged 92. They were married for almost 65 years and lived in Alfriston, East Sussex. In 1987, Edna underwent an operation at a private hospital – this event drawing media attention as being seemingly at odds with Healey's pro-NHS beliefs. Challenged on the apparent inconsistency by the presenter Anne Diamond on TV-am, Healey refused to comment and ended the interview. He then punched journalist Adam Boulton with a jab. Healey was an amateur photographer for many years; he also enjoyed music, painting and reading crime fiction. He sometimes played popular piano pieces at public events. In a May 2012 interview for The Daily Telegraph, Healey reported that he was swimming 20 lengths a day in his outdoor pool. Healey was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project. After a short illness, Healey died in his sleep at his home in Alfriston, Sussex, on 3 October 2015, aged 98. He was buried alongside his wife in the graveyard of St Andrew's Church, Alfriston. In 2017, his personal archives were deposited at the Bodleian Library.

• The play Gang of Three was originally performed at the King's Head Theatre in London in 2025 and will tour the UK in 2026. The play examines the relationship between Denis Healy, Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins and was written by Khan and Salinsky

During Led Zeppelin's 1975 and 1977 concert tours, Robert Plant facetiously dedicated the song "In My Time of Dying" to Healey for the tax exile issues the band was facing. During Yes's recording of what was to become the album Tormato (1978), there was an outtake called "Money", on which the Yes keyboardist at the time, Rick Wakeman, provides a satirical voice-over parodying Healey.

Denis Healey was born on 30 August 1917 in Mottingham. Healey held the nationality of United Kingdom and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Healey was educated at Balliol College and Bradford Grammar School. Married to: Edna Healey. Recorded father: William Healey. Recorded mother: Winnie (?). Recorded child: Jenifer Clare Healey, Timothy Blair Healey and Cressida Healey.

Healey worked as politician, engineer, autobiographer and writer. Healey was active from 1940. Healey worked in London. Healey worked in English.

• Ribbon — Name — Notes • — Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour — 12 June 1979 — CH • — Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire — 13 December 1945 — MBE • — Mentioned in dispatches x 2 In 2004, Healey became the recipient of the first Veteran's Badge.