Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93148 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-25
• Binding: Paperback

Synopsis
The inspiring memoirs of a leading politician is also the autobiography of a splendid Englishman, liked and respected across the political spectrum. Denis Healey was born in 1917, a year of revolution, and grew up in Yorkshire. At Oxford he began to test and expand his political views. After a distinguished war career, he travelled throughout a shattered Europe until he became an MP for Leeds in 1952. He rose to the highest political ranks, becoming Defence Secretary, Chancellor and a major player in the Labour government, standing for the party leadership in 1979. The autobiography is also about Denis Healey the man, who has witnessed the great changes that have taken place in Britain since the war. His wide-ranging intelligence brilliantly counterpoints the pace of change, and illuminates his love of literature, art, music and photography. This is the memoir of a man in the round: a great politician, speaker, writer and above all friend and family man - a book which will inspire all who read it with the wit, warmth and wisdom of Denis Healey.

Customer Reviews

Where Is He From?
Healey stands apart from almost all British politicians of the post-WW2 era and from, I should say, all of the present time in his erudition and wide cultural knowledge and interest. I say that despite the fact that I have never thought of him (and I do not do so now) as a particularly likeable person, inasmuch as one can judge a someone one has never met. The book goes through his background (southern English but brought up in Yorkshire) and his highly academic education (Grammar School scholar, Balliol Exhibitioner) and on from there. His intelligence is not in doubt, his views can be. He becomes a Communist at Oxford in the 1930's and remains on for years because it seems "the only alternative to Hitler and his concentration camps", which ignores the fact that (despite huge efforts at secrecy) Stalin had far more and mostly far worse. It also ignores another fact: Life rarely offers simply a black and white simple choice. Neither does he mention the outright murder or indirect slaughter of millions in Russia and especially the Ukraine, the result of the Collectivization of agriculture etc. Healey joins the Army a while after the start of WW2 and end up a Major in the Royal Engineers, fighting mainly in Italy but also having quite a good time in places, as a staff officer with FANY girlfriends etc. He becomes a Labour Member of Parliament soon after WW2 and from then on is a major player in British politics right up to when this work was published in 1989 and beyond. It is a pity it was not published in 1999, that we might hear his views on the fudges of Blairism...He is, inevitably, against white rule in Africa, but look at what happens without the Europeans. He is not interested, at root. He evidences many Jewish connections, but is quite clear on the flaws in Israel and its policies and does not shrink from speaking out against the Jewish-Zionist lobby in America: he notes that Eisenhower was the only U.S. President to put America's interests before those of Israel.I found this autobiography almost as remarkable for its omissions as anything: Oswald Mosley, at least one of the foremost politicos of the 1920's and 1930's, surely, is not even mentioned even critically or dismissively! Healey mentions some other philosophers and thinkers but not Rudolf Steiner; also, he glosses over his own linkages: the word Freemasonry nowhere appears, though he does briefly note his own attendance at the secretive (he says "private"...) Bilderberg Conferences and the World Economic Forum. What lies behind thse bodies, really? If he knows, he does not tell. The book is also light on his real vision of the future for the UK and the world. Everything is mechanistic and without colour. Worth reading.

A very attractive man.
Throughout this autobiography the personality of Denis Healey is luminous. He is a very attractive as a politician as well as a man. There is a decency and genuiness that is difficult to write about, but it is invested in every chapter of this book. Healey is an hard-working school boy, an intelligent scholar, a brave, honest soldier, a generous, ambitious, loyal politician, and a witty and stylish autobiographer. He appears to be the type of man who we would wish to run the country and, unusually for a Labour man, appears to have attained the gentlemanly ideal of easeful excellence - he spoke French, German, Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek. He does not appear to suffer some of the inferiority complexes that his Labour colleagues did. Add to this what he has called his 'hinterlands' which with the reading that he does quote extend far both into the terrain of British and European literature, then we know we are perusing the words of a truly remarkable man.

He did not become Prime Minister: he is not perturbed. He only wanted to be leader of the Labour Party to save it from extremists and no-hopers which in light of the proceeding history is warranted. His life is a success from the point of view that he is recognised as the ablest defence secretary in the post-war years; he saved the British economy, and he was a great family man, which is a point often referred to and appears to be most important to him. I can't help but like and admire Denis Healey. However, and there is always a 'but' in any life, his view of the world is remarkably secure and certain. His beliefs are wide and allow him to absorb mostly everything, and he never appears to be out of his depth no matter who he is with. He has never, it seems, known despair or a great wrestling with himself, or even questioned deeply the whole purpose of politics. His aim, both simple and noble, was to prevent a Third World War. And that is what he spent his political life doing. He was a remarkable man, perhaps he was a great man.

But Why Labour, Denis?
In his autobiography Denis Healey does not pause to ponder whether, as in the opinion of so many, he is the greatest prime minister Britain never had. But he holds in low regard almost all of those who held the office during his own time in Parliament. Of the leaders whom Healey himself served, the woolly, short-termist Wilson is held in contempt, although Callaghan is admired both for his management of the cabinet and for his integrity: "once prime minister, he had no ambition except to serve his country well".

And evidently one of Callaghan's great services to his country was to retain Healey as his Chancellor - a role in which Callaghan himself had failed a decade earlier. The chapters dealing with Healey's labours at the Treasury are at the heart of the book. He figures himself as Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, as he restores stability to the UK economy after Tony Barber's calamitous superintendence of it under Heath. Healey arrived the Treasury in 1974 with no grounding in economics, as he admits, and therefore with an open mind - sceptical in economic theory, as in ideology, of all dogma. But he is a layman with a truly giant intellect, and the book is at its most illuminating as he applies his voracious mind to the evils conjured up by Barber's credit boom and by OPEC's trebling of the world oil price in 1973.

A layman in economics, Healey's political training had been in international affairs and defence. The book was written in 1989, unknowingly on the very eve of the revolutions in eastern Europe, and its long treatises on nuclear strategy appear today somewhat dated. But as the book's title suggests, Healey applied his talents within the paradigm of his own age, and by so doing distinguished himself from other clever men of his generation - such as Enoch Powell, Tony Benn, and Michael Foot - whose response to the same challenges was to attach themselves to romantic ideals of one sort or another. Healey is a romantic, but never an eccentric.

Well-known is his devotion to his "hinterland" of art and literature, music, travel, and photography. His passion for culture has informed every passage of his long life, and the book evokes it well. Healey himself wonders whether his failure to capture the premiership was attributable to a trimming of his ambition in the knowledge that there is more to life than politics. That may be. Another factor, which Healey does not discuss, might be the use that he made of the war years, serving with distinction and valour on the beaches of Anzio whilst the future Labour leaders, Gaitskell and Wilson, were learning the ways of Whitehall as temporary civil servants.

Yet another factor, suggested by Edward Pierce in his essay on Healey in The Lost Leaders, is the arrogance which set Healey apart from his fellow Labour MPs, and which encouraged them in 1976 to prefer as Wilson's successor the homely trade unionist Callaghan to the aloof Balliol alumni Healey and Jenkins. Certainly Healey's prose, although not as fluent as Jenkins', is charged with a similar pomposity: the highest accolade that Healey can bestow on one of his fellow men - and he bestows it on many - is that he is "brilliant".

The book makes plain why Healey wished to enter politics - politicized during the 1930s, a witness at first hand of pre-1939 Nazi Germany, he sought to combat totalitarianism and to contribute to peace. Less clear is why he joined the Communist Party as a youth, or, for that matter, why he settled later with Labour. His contemporary Ted Heath had much the same political education but chose differently, and there is nothing from Healey of the kind of indignation at the other abiding image of the Thirties - the Depression - that might have pushed a Yorkshire grammar-school boy into the arms of the Left. On questions of social justice, Healey is silent; nor does he disclose any view on religion. This is a pity. The book's main flaw is that it affords no glimpse of the moral underpinning of Healey's politics. Without that, we have no counterpoint to Jenkins' view of his rival - that he carried only light ideological baggage on the heaviest of gun-carriages.