75 Facts About Denis Healey

Denis Healey was a Member of Parliament from 1952 to 1992, and was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983.

Denis Healey attended the University of Oxford and served as a Major in the Second World War.

Denis Healey was later an agent for the Information Research Department, a secret branch of the Foreign Office dedicated to spreading anti-communist propaganda during the early Cold War.

Denis Healey was first elected to Parliament in a by-election in 1952 for the seat of Leeds South East.

Denis Healey moved to the seat of Leeds East at the 1955 election, which he represented until his retirement at the 1992 election.

Denis Healey stood for the leadership of the Labour Party in the election to replace Wilson in March 1976, but lost to James Callaghan; Callaghan retained Healey as Chancellor in his new government.

Denis Healey stood a second time for the leadership of the Labour Party in November 1980, but narrowly lost to Michael Foot.

Denis Healey died in 2015 at the age of 98, having become the oldest sitting member of the House of Lords, and the last surviving member of Harold Wilson's first government formed in 1964.

Denis Winston Healey was born in Mottingham, Kent, but moved with his family to Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire at the age of five.

Denis Healey's parents were Winifred Mary and William Healey.

Denis Healey had one brother, Terence Blair Denis Healey, known as Terry.

Denis Healey's father 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.

Denis Healey's paternal grandfather was a tailor from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland.

Denis Healey there became involved in Labour politics, although he was not active in the Oxford Union Society.

Also while at Oxford, Denis Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 during the Great Purge, but left in 1940 after the Fall of France.

At Oxford, Denis Healey met future Prime Minister Edward Heath, whom he succeeded as president of Balliol College Junior Common Room, and who became a lifelong friend and political rival.

Denis Healey was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford in 1940.

Denis Healey left the service with the rank of Major.

Denis Healey 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.

Denis Healey decided against taking up a senior scholarship at Balliol, which might have led to an academic career.

Denis Healey became secretary of the international department of the Labour Party in 1944, becoming a foreign policy adviser to Labour leaders and establishing contacts with socialists across Europe.

Denis Healey was a strong opponent of the Communist Party of Great Britain at home and the Soviet Union internationally.

Denis Healey was a member of the Fabian Society executive from 1954 until 1961.

Denis 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.

Denis Healey was one of the leading players in the Konigswinter conference that was organised by Lilo Milchsack that was credited with helping to heal the bad memories after the end of the Second World War.

Denis Healey met Hans von Herwarth, the ex soldier Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin and future German President Richard von Weizsacker and other leading West German decision makers.

Denis 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.

Denis Healey was a moderate on the right during the series of splits in the Labour Party in the 1950s.

Denis Healey was a supporter and friend of Hugh Gaitskell.

Denis Healey 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.

Denis Healey thought Wilson would unite the Labour Party and lead it to victory in the next general election.

Denis Healey didn't think Brown was capable of doing either.

Denis Healey was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Defence after the creation of the position in 1964.

Denis Healey was responsible for 450,000 British Armed Forces uniformed servicemen and women, and for 406,000 civil servants stationed around the globe.

Denis Healey was best known for his economising, liquidating most of Britain's military role outside of Europe, and cancelling expensive projects.

Denis Healey cut defence expenditure, scrapping the carrier HMS Centaur and the reconstructed HMS Victorious in 1967, cancelling the proposed CVA-01 fleet-carrier replacement and, just before Labour's defeat in 1970, downgrading HMS Hermes to a commando carrier.

Denis 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 Denis Healey announced that the two large British fleet carriers HMS Ark Royal and HMS Eagle would be scrapped in 1972.

Denis Healey authorised the removal of the Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago and authorised the building of the United States military base at Diego Garcia.

Denis Healey was appointed Shadow Chancellor in April 1972 after Roy Jenkins resigned in a row over the European Economic Community.

Denis Healey became Chancellor of the Exchequer in March 1974 after Labour returned to power as a minority government.

Denis Healey's tenure is sometimes divided into Healey Mark I and Healey Mark II.

When Harold Wilson stood down as Leader of the Labour Party in 1976 Denis Healey stood in the contest to elect the new leader.

On 12 June 1979 Denis Healey was appointed a Companion of Honour.

Denis Healey 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 leader in November 1980, Denis Healey was the favourite to win the Labour Party leadership election, decided by Labour MPs.

Denis Healey 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".

Denis Healey argues Labour MPs were looking for a figure from the left who could unite the wider party with the leadership which Healey could not do.

Denis 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.

Denis Healey attracted just enough support from other unions, Constituency Labour Parties, and Labour MPs to win.

Denis Healey was Shadow Foreign Secretary during most of the 1980s, a job he coveted.

Denis Healey believed Foot was initially too willing to support military action after the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina in April 1982.

Denis Healey accused Thatcher of "glorying in slaughter", and had to withdraw the remark.

Denis 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.

Denis Healey had declined to run as leader to succeed Foot as well as standing down as deputy leader.

Denis Healey was a founding member of the Bilderberg Group.

Denis Healey was interviewed on his role as a co-founder of the Bilderberg Group by Jon Ronson for the book Them: Adventures with Extremists.

Denis Healey publicly opposed Blair's decision to use military force in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In March 2013 during an interview with the New Statesman, Denis Healey said that if there was a referendum on British membership of the EU, he would vote to leave.

Denis Healey had never said it until that point, but he adopted it and used it frequently.

On 14 June 1978, Denis 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 Denis Healey was featured on This Is Your Life in 1989.

Denis Healey married Edna May Edmunds on 21 December 1945, the two having met at Oxford University before the war.

Denis Healey was an amateur photographer for many years; he enjoyed music, painting and reading crime fiction.

Denis Healey sometimes played popular piano pieces at public events.

Denis Healey was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project.

Denis Healey was buried alongside his wife in the graveyard of St Andrew's Church, Alfriston.

In 2004, Denis Healey became the recipient of the first Veteran's Badge.

Denis Healey is credited with popularising in the UK a proverb which became known as Denis Healey's First law of holes.

Denis Healey is the only Chancellor Of The Exchequer to have appeared on BBC One's Morecambe and Wise Show.

Denis Healey was portrayed by David Fleeshman in the 2002 BBC production of Ian Curteis's The Falklands Play.

Denis Healey appeared on The Dame Edna Experience in the song and dance number "Style" alongside actor Roger Moore.

Denis Healey was satirised in the ITV series Spitting Image, his caricature mainly focusing on his famous eyebrows, with the real Denis Healey appearing in the twelfth episode of the programme's first series in 1984 briefly noting the show was late covering that year's European elections.

In 1994, Denis Healey appeared in a TV advertisement for Visa Debit cards.

Denis Healey had appeared in an advert for Sainsbury's in the previous year.