Edna and Denis Healey

Edna's political life with Denis

Edna Healey has been married to former Chancellor Denis Healey for more than 50 years and has seen power and opposition from the inside, writes Gerald Isaaman

Part of the Pattern: Memoirs of a Wife at Westminster by Edna Healey, Headline, £25 order this book

DENIS Healey, ebullient as ever, sat at the piano in the Hampstead Community Centre. “Roll out the barrel, We’ll have a barrel of fun,” he sang, as he pumped the keys, during the 1960s election campaign for Labour MP Ben Whitaker.
That’s one memory.
Another is sitting in the elegant yellow drawing room at No 11, interviewing Edna Healey, then wife of Chancellor Denis, about Lady Unknown, her stimulating biography of the visionary Victorian philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, inspired by the fact that the Healeys’ then home was perched on what had been part of the garden of the banker baroness’s former Highgate estate.
But what was life really like in the confines of Holly Lodge Gardens – and in Downing Street – during those dangerous days for Harold Wilson’s government, when inflation flew through the roof and Denis suffered agonising toothache to add to the stress of holding together the nation’s fragile finances.
How was it that two amazingly determined people, from humble beginnings climbed the treacherous political tree that brought high office for Denis, now Lord Healey, and admiration and fame for his biographer wife, Lady Healey?
Denis didn’t make it to the very top, losing the fight for the leadership of the Labour Party to Michael Foot, Hampstead’s own man of principle, when Jim Callaghan disappeared, but at least outing Tony Benn from the deputy’s role as the standard bearer of the militant right.
And we all recall the political disaster that followed, before the arrival of Neil Kinnock and New Labour, love it or hate it, when Tony Blair filled the power vacuum.
You will find subtle and fascinating answers in Edna Healey’s memoirs. For the Healeys are a remarkable couple, real people unrecognisable as the cartoon characters of the media, which feeds so ravenously on rife speculation, under-mining the democratic process, and equally frightening off anyone with true talent to seek a career at Westminster. This book helps restore some of the balance and the sanity missing from today’s accusing headlines, mainly because the Healeys belong to an earlier generation, one that saw Hitler come to power, witnessed the atrocities of World War II, vowed it wouldn’t happen again and set out deliberately to improve the fortunes of the workers whose sacrifice won the war but didn’t give them the joy of peace.
The Healeys don’t have some special inheritance. You need to go back to 1918 when Edna was born in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, the daughter of a quarry crane driver with a passion for music, but whose school had no library where she could study for university.
She describes it as a privileged childhood compared with the hard-pressed mining families of the Forest, who were turned away from church because they were so scruffy. The two-day Coleford Fair was the highlight of the year and Bon Marche, in Gloucester, provided a delectable meal for just ninepence.
From that enclosed world, where they picked hazelnuts and chestnuts in the Forest every autumn, she made it to Oxford, in 1936, where her contemporaries included Ted Heath, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum.
Of Ted Heath, in later life, she reveals: “Sitting next to Ted presented a challenge: after one such experience Audrey Callaghan swore she would never go through it again – he had not spoken one word to her. Often he was quite rude to his neighbours. I once saw him across the table fall fast asleep during the soup.”
Handsome, dark-haired Denis, impressed her when he gave a lecture on Picasso, but she had another boyfriend, brilliantly went off to Paris with him but never made it into the same bed. Romance had to wait until Edna headed for Denis’s native Yorkshire, to work as a teacher, fell in love with the dazzling dales, and Denis too.
Then came the march of progress as an MP, moving to a flat in Kentish Town before making it up the hill to Highgate, becoming part of Gaitskell’s Hampstead set, frowned on by left-wing local socialists who hated Gaitskell’s belief in the bomb, and even produced a resolution telling him to go (my Ham and High scoop of the day).
But there were compensations, like visiting Premier Chou En-Lai in China who, because of his insomnia, debated politics with Denis for four hours in the middle of the night, while Edna sat passively silent.
She tells her endearing, stories with compassion, sensitivity, warmth and refreshing honesty, and without the rabid rancour that so often split Labour’s ranks, and led to the defeat of a divided party. And may well do so again.
The simple pleasures of pushing her children in the pram on Hampstead Heath and walking among the dazzling daffodils and bluebells in her beloved Forest echo through her poignant memories.
She was – and is – so much more than part of the pattern of a doyen politician’s life, something significantly more than a mere wife at Westminster. She may not have become first lady at No 10, but she remains the First Lady of the Forest.