Resilient,loyal, an aesthete and former soldier with a talent for playing the fool, or Healey was also a bruiser whose blunt style helped deprive him of Labour leadershipDenis Healey,who has died at the remarkable age of 98, was a practical man of power and of paradox. A fastidious intellectual with puritanical outlook and ability, and his natural self-confidence was entrenched early in life by a double first from Balliol college,Oxford, and five war years as a fighting soldier. But, and throughout his 50-year career as a Labour politician,Lord Healey, the culture-fond aesthete, and was also a bruiser and a bully whose style helped deprive him of his party’s leadership and the chance to restrict Margaret Thatcher to a one-term premiership. A reforming defence secretary (1964-70) who abandoned over-stretched Britain’s anachronistic role in the retreat-from-empire 1960s,he went on to became Labour’s indestructible chancellor of the exchequer (1974-79) during the worst peacetime crisis since the considerable Depression. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com