he says. Welcome to the Digital Spy forums. Politique Peuple. He looks fierce for a moment. I would have been ready to take on trust the expertise he accumulated in this position without being made to plough through acres of his stodgily unreadable memoranda: yet Edward Pearce, the author of this biography, showing no mercy, prints vast wodges of them. "I enjoy my retirement, I don't particularly enjoy being retired, if you see what I mean. Denis Healey - who has died at the age of 98 - was the last of the great post-war generation of political "big beasts" who dominated British government in the 1960s and 70s. Mike Yarwood invented "Silly Billy" as a catchphrase for his impersonation of Healey. "Come off it, dear," he says when once he might have hollered "silly bugger". ... ‘Silly billy’ Mike Yarwood. Sort of. I spent half an hour once just sitting there, pretending I wasn't, with somebody else's hands making scrambled egg with smoked salmon for Sainsbury's and I got £50,000." When people are competing for fame or position, then it's a jungle war. To get on in the party, he disguised his cultural hinterland, played up his "silly billy" image and dumbed himself down, not fully revealing his true nature until his memoirs. Demonstrating his wide reading of French literature, but with no relevance whatever to any single moment in Healey's life, Pearce offers in a footnote a generous recommendation of Marcel Ayme's novel Uranus. "You need people like Peter Mandelson with that ability to present things. When asked who "his chums" were, he gets caught up in the word. One example typifies many: Pearce states that Anthony Wedgwood Benn increased the Labour majority in the 1984 Chesterfield by-election when, in fact, he reduced it. Does he enjoy retirement? Denis Healey, who has died aged 98, was the polar opposite of that perception. Previous Month Next Month January February March April May June July August September October November December. The most important, indeed indispensable, achievement in Healey's public career was not his period as Secretary of State for Defence (exhaustively and exhaustingly chronicled here) nor his near-disastrous spell as Chancellor of the Exchequer (when, on the basis of inaccurate figures supplied by the Treasury, he put Britain into pawn with the International Monetary Fund), but his defeat of Wedgwood Benn in 1981 for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party which, if Wedgwood Benn had won it, would have led ineluctably to the party's destruction. "I don't like champagne actually," he said, "I like whisky and ginger wine." He's not being paid, which galls a little. And of course Gordon hasn't yet had the sort of crisis which the oil crisis produced for me. We meet on the terrace at the House of Lords where the crumbs of a previous collation are causing some feathered excitement. "Can't remember what for. Healey, who has been sitting immobile like an old cat missing a few teeth, bored and indifferent to the mice frolicking at his feet, opens his red-rimmed blue eyes a little wider. I've always been a loner. Healey adopted it and used it to put down opponents. "The public meeting is finished so you only really meet politicians now if you go to their surgeries and very few people do that, and otherwise they're just faces on the box so they feel more distant." Blair is a charismatic figure with a silver tongue and..." There is a pause. "No," he says shortly. It is no > different than using words like foolishly or smartly or clownishly. A whisky mac, I say. He seems lost for a moment. He isn't, he reminds me, being paid. Gerald Kaufman reviews Denis Healey: A Life in Our Times by Edward Pearce. Healey the front-bench politician was on the whole pretty boring. The act included playing the part of a fool or idiot, impersonating a child and singing comic songs. Prescott is extremely down to earth and very much in touch with how ordinary people think. ... TV impressionist Mike Yarwood coined the catchphrase "Silly Billy", which Healey had never actually said until that point. The real Lord Healey Politics, he continues, has changed since "those days". Even Prescott, he once said, had the face of a man "who clubs baby seals". You can be silly, > you can do silly things, or you can do things sillily. Hey there! But his traumatic experiences during the Italian campaign provide an explanation of his aversion to warfare and bloodshed which I find profoundly moving and entirely to his credit. Now he's leading the charge against the euro. We've got four. Usage notes . He says he hasn't. Denis Healey was one of the most memorable British politicians of the 21st Century. "Brown. Dennis Healey (Silly Billy) Enregistrée par Lichfield In-Pictures. He was a "pretty good" chancellor himself, he adds, though everybody in the party hated him "because you have to deny them all the time" and there was that spot of bother with the IMF. Healey was constantly ridiculed for his eyebrows and falsely known for calling people ‘silly billy’s’, a phrase he only began using after seeing the impressionist Mike Yarwood use it as part of his Denis Healey … Whoever would have guessed Healey would be on message? he says, as if alienated by the concept. 7: When an opponent criticised him and said "Denis Healey would sell his own grandmother", his deputy at the Treasury leapt to his defence with "No, he would get me to do it … However, the reality was that when it came to politics and public life, Lord Healey was no ‘silly billy’ as Yarwood suggested. The book's most revealing disclosure about Healey's life is the account of his battle experiences as an army officer in Italy during the war, in which he was exposed to the kind of danger and witnessed suffering which must have stayed with him for life. There are many quotes from him.... they're in my book. He calls the Blair, Brown, Prescott triumvirate the "Holy Trinity". 'Silly Billy was a type of clown common at fairs in England during the 19th century. He loves culture, too, in a sense, otherwise he wouldn't be so interested in Italy. Healey as a man, however, is scintillating - a delightful conversationalist with a wicked sense of humour. > > It is a silly billy word, as ex-chancellor Denis Healey would put it. When people of a certain age think of Denis Healey, what comes into their minds are visions of a man with a burly figure and bushy eyebrows who was often impersonated by the comedian Mike Yarwood. Ostensibly, we have met to discuss Labour and the single European currency. 1. I have always wondered why a toughie like Healey should have shrunk from war in the Falklands, the Gulf, Kosovo and Afghanistan; he backed, to my mind, the wrong policies every time. "Chums? Very different economy. ", Next week, Lord Healey and Edna, his wife of 55 years, are off to Greece on a freebie. Now he's leading the charge against the euro. But it's a very different world now. "That's right. There is still a sizeable stomach under the jacket of his shiny blue suit, but there is a empty envelope of skin between his neck and his chin. Four. It is 21 years since he was active in government, as chancellor of the exchequer at the time of Margaret Thatcher's 79 election victory. Denis Healey, British politician, was known for using the term as a catchphrase. Trying to create a sense of common interest does involve getting people actually to work together on common problems. He enjoys the Lords, thinks Margaret Jay is "a very able woman, very attractive too". Today, we're just settling for "dear". Gerald Kaufman is Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. [1] The act included playing the part of a fool or idiot, impersonating a child and singing comic songs. He missed out on a lot of his children's childhood (two girls and a boy), and can't remember how many grandchildren he has. Healey was anything but a 'Silly Billy'. Chums?" "That was the most tiring time I ever had, negotiating what I thought were the most lenient conditions and then trying to get your cabinet colleagues to agree when they don't regard them as lenient. Denis Healey was the brilliant and brutal star of the Callaghan government. ", Lady Healey, he tells me, is writing two books at the moment, one about Emma Darwin, the other about "the wife of that champagne socialist called Denis Healey". He was also a favourite target for impressionists, most notably for Mike Yarwood, who coined Healey's "Silly Billy" phrase. I just supported the thing which I suppose David probably wrote.". He was 98. Not even in euros. The House of Lords." It's true that if a bishop stabs another in the back you can't see the blood flowing down because he wears a red surplice, but that's the only difference. Thank God, then, for the pigeon. Do politicians still have hinterlands? Whatever happened to silly billy? He looks engaged for the first time, enthusiastic. Though not as good as advertising. Lord Healey’s catch phrase became “Silly Billy” which he adopted from the mimic Mike Yarwood and which he used against his critics. Healey was of course far from a 'silly billy' but Mike Yarwood, a funny impressionist of the sixties, coined the phrase and it just stuck. But then, even more sadly for a work of record, this volume is littered with factual errors. "Um... er... come on, lad. "I'm in the home of the living dead which is betwixt and between. They used his eyebrows on buses once. "Do you want my clothes off?" You see it in Trollope. People get laughed at despite themselves." This buoyant, cheeky character scarcely appears in this book. "There has always been a tradition of thinking that politicians are nastier than other people. Healey joined the Labour Party. There are also continuous allusive references, for reasons best known to Pearce, to The Importance of Being Earnest, one of them, sadly, seriously inaccurate. It is therefore especially sad that tundra-like tracts of this almost interminable official Life should be so gruesomely unreadable: the style pretentious, even the punctuation - replete with hundreds of superfluous commas, hyphens and exclamation marks - a travail. But..." he adds, and one can't ignore the little smile, "that is always a possibility. Lord Healey, a member of David Owen's New Europe group, left his Sussex garden recently to speak out, along with Nigel Lawson - "of all people" - against joining. > > Sillily accurately states the behavior of being silly. Saturday, January 09, 2021 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence. Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey, PC (born 30 August 1917), is a British Labour politician, regarded by many as "the best Prime Minister we never had".. It is even 11 years since he wrote his bestselling autobiography, The Time of My Life, a work which earned him £150,000 and which he refers you back to at intervals as if all activity stopped there. You don't believe me, do you dear? When Mike Yarwood gave him the catchphrase “Silly Billy”, Healey made it his own. ... And "Silly Billy" became his catchphrase courtesy of impressionist Mike Yarwood. By Gerald Kaufman 31 March 2002 • 00:00 am . If you’d like to join in, please sign in or register. Yes, yes, yes.". Tickling the ivories or simply wrinkling those bushy eyebrows, he has added enormously to innocent public pleasure. He vacated his last cabinet post, as opposition spokesman for foreign affairs, in 1987. "Chris Smith is very interested in the arts. Tony loves travel. So he doesn't watch the goings-on next door with his fingers twitching? Hurd: "A tattered Talleyrand"; Howe: "a dead sheep". Silly Billy was a type of clown common at fairs in England during the 19th century. This originated with Mike Yarwood's famous impression of him, although he later used it himself in parliament. It had actually been coined by the impressionist Mike Yarwood, but Denis had adopted it as his own. Denis Healey: August 30th, 1917 - October 3rd, 2015. "The only point of being a politician is to do things, not just to talk about them.". But it's a busier job now, so much faster..." There are fewer jokes, too, he says, far fewer people being savaged by dead sheep, or nuzzled by old rams. Quotes Denis Healey. But he won't be drawn any more than that, won't discuss the ferrets fighting in a bag, apart from to say that Hague stole that phrase from someone, "probably from me". Maybe the rhetorical putdown has been replaced by the spin? I'm reading Charlotte Brontë at the moment. "Hurry up, dear," he says, never before a stranger to the "sod off". Accordingly, readers are treated on the same page to the ungermane opinions of Dr Marcello Caetano, a Prime Minister of Portugal in the 1970s, and of a voter in Lincoln about a former Conservative candidate for the constituency, Jonathan Guinness. ", Does he think Brown, unlike Healey, might make leader himself one day? He watches my face to see the penny drop. "This is just like a club really," he says after Lamont has gone, "much nicer, much less party than the Commons." Healey has to go to a meeting in Thessalonika - "Oh, it'll be about everything that is happening in the world with a lot of Europeans, Americans, Japanese and Arabs, that sort of thing." Silly Billy (plural Silly Billies) An epithet used in mild teasing for a silly person, or one who has just done something of a foolish nature. There are reasons to be cheerful in November’s GDP figures, Six ways to get through the winter lockdown (and even enjoy it), Dutch government resigns over childcare subsidies. The result is a chapter, halfway through the book, toe-curlingly called "En Famille", which provides four pages of somewhat embarrassing domestic intimacies. It is a long time to hang out in your hinterland and, Healeys living as long as they do (his father died at 92, his mother at 99), there is more time to come. He stops a passing Norman Lamont for a chat. But in my experience - and I have lived in many different worlds, politics, the arts, contact with the church though I'm not a believing Christian - at the top of any profession you have exactly the same kind of jungle war. But it is not just Healey whom Pearce quotes or cites: people Healey may perhaps have met, or even pretty certainly never did meet, also earn references, sometimes prolonged. ... Silly billy! I tell him he's attained the status of statesman. Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey, CH MBE PC FRSL (30 August 1917 – 3 October 2015) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979.. He's been on Sky the day before this interview, "though you get paid for that". "They're a perfect mix, really. Quotes #1. He thought, he adds, that the interview was to be about "this sudden interest in aged obesity". DENIS HEALEY chats about the budget with Nick Owen and Anne Diamond. Denis Healey quotes. 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. “Whose a silly-billy then?” some would say, repeating back to him his catchphrase. Link/Page Citation Byline: Brian Reade pays tribute to Denis Healey, who died on Saturday, aged 98 There is much talk these days of politicians being bland careerists with little experience and few interests outside the Westminster bubble. Exactly so. Denis Healey in 1973. "It's a boring subject," he says. Each has qualities the other lacks. "One thing is still the same," he goes on sternly. ", The more he jokes, the less humour seems to emanate from Healey. "I don't hang out with people in that sense and never have. He shows me out. Denis Winston Healey, poet, photographer, highbrow thug, has called people a lot of names over the years. What are you then? They're very useful eyebrows. "Disraeli made brilliant jokes and humour and wit have always played a major role in politics. We get lost in the kitchens on the way. Teatime quiz The Chase is one of ITV’s biggest hits, hosted by Bradley Walsh and featuring Chasers Anne Hegerty and quiz show veteran and general know-it-all Mark Labbett Not bad, hmm? "He doesn't have the face for it.". The role was typically played as a stooge to another clown. "I asked him to come along," he says, eyebrows twitching like antennae. One pigeon lands briefly on my head. "A statesman is a dead politician." He is 82 now and it is eight years since the politician believed by many to be the great Labour leader we never had - "brilliant and brutal" in the words of the Guardian's Hugo Young - gave up his seat as MP for Leeds East. As the Glasgow Herald reported in April 1978 "Chancellor Denis Healey tried to impersonate comedian Mike Yarwood during an election walk-about yesterday. Brown has a very powerful mind and I think he's a very good chancellor, and a prime minister who doesn't have a good chancellor is finished." After spells of gout and diabetes, he has recently lost weight. Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge. "In the old days I used to get £5,000 a time. It can't be created by law, that's why I disagree with the liberal approach becuase it's essentially a lawyer's approach. They were also common in London as a street entertainer, along with the similar clown Billy Barlow. I'd rather spend time with my family." I paint a bit, though none of my pictures are worth much. I would guess that his publishers (who did us all a favour when they, as Pearce acknowledges, "coaxed me into reducing [it]") grew frantic as they hacked their way through the thickets of this impenetrable text and eventually screamed to Pearce, "For God's sake, lighten it up." I hardly know Alastair Campbell but I have a great sympathy for him because he spent some of his childhood at Keighley where I was brought up. Occasionally I even talk to young ladies who work on newspapers." He's always been pro-Europe, anti-euro, "and my views have just been confirmed by what's happened and I'm always interested when you get someone like Eddie George saying it's a mistake". I once shaved them off and my trousers fell down so I had to let them grow again. They were also common in London as a street entertainer, along with the similar clown Billy Barlow. "I said, 'I've got a bird out here who needs going over.' But I'm quite active. Denis Healey, a dexterous British socialist politician who used leadership positions to downsize his country's empire by militarily retreating from Asia in the 1960s and accepting harsh terms for an international loan in the 1970s, died Saturday at his home in Alfriston, Sussex, in Britain, after a short illness, his family announced. Denis Healey Lord Denis Healey at home in Alfriston, East Sussex in 2012 He diefied Benn - but now the real 'Silly Billies' have hijacked his beloved party By Stephen Pollard, political biographer And he laughs, but his face hardly moves. Denis Healey - who has died at the age of 98 - was the last of the great post-war generation of political "big beasts" who dominated British government in the 1960s and 70s. Pearce proclaims in his introduction: "This is a political life", and so, grimly, most of it is. But now you don't get people deliberately making people laugh. British Labour politician and former Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exechequer. Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Healey's first job, which launched his encounters with the innumerable people whose names in subsequent years he inveterately dropped - whether anyone else had heard of them or not - was as International Secretary of the Labour Party. I have my garden, my photography. Silly billy Denis Healey was the brilliant and brutal star of the Callaghan government. When Big Ben strikes the hour, Healey looks at his watch. We are no longer one of the world's three great powers. Thatcher: "Virago intacta", "la Pasionaria of privilege" or "That bloody woman". ". Gerald Kaufman reviews Denis Healey: A Life in Our Times by Edward Pearce. This key episode in Healey's life and his party's history gets 12 pages out of 634. When an opponent criticised him and said "Denis Healey would sell his own grandmother", his deputy at the Treasury leapt to his defence with "No, he would get me to do it for him" Mike Yarwood invented "Silly Billy" as a catchphrase for his impersonation of Healey.