Rob Blackhurst

Financial Times Weekend

April 22, 2006

'We have a shorthand. AWL: Aren't We Lucky' Rob Blackhurst finds the former chancellor and his wife in bucolic mood as they look out over today's political landscape

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If this is what the politician's afterlife looks like, Enoch Powell's claim that all political careers end in failure hardly seems to matter. It's the sunny first day of spring as I wend my way up the Healeys' drive towards a foursquare house on a hill overlooking the South Downs. A pair of rabbits frolic, lambs bleat and the daffodils are out. It could hardly feel more pastoral if a satyr and a pair of shepherds crossed my path.

A familiar figure appears at the kitchen window, nods and slowly raises a paw. In his 90th year, Lord Healeyof Riddlesden is sprattish compared with the well-upholstered frame that used to grace the ministerial Daimler when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer during the turbulent late 1970s.

Edna, his wife, opens the door. She walks with sticks after a knee operation but looks unlined.

I rhapsodise (it feels faintly rude not to) about the beauty of the location. "Yes," she says, with a faint west country accent that belongs to someone 30 years younger: "Denis and I have our shorthand round here. AWL: Aren't We Lucky."

After 60 years in Denis's shadow, Edna is at least attracting some attention these days. One of her books unearthed the neglected life stories of women married to famous men - Jenny Marx, (wife of Karl), Mary Livingston (wife of David) and Emma Darwin (wife of Charles). Her latest, Part of the Pattern: Memoirs of a Wife at Westminster, mixes Hardy-like descriptions of poverty amid the wood glades during her Forest of Dean childhood with breezy miniatures of the famous men she has known - from Harold Wilson to General Montgomery - and, of course, her life with Denis. Healey's trademark eyebrows, centrist politics and rumbustious sense of fun have made him one of the select band of politicians - alongside Mo Mowlam and, nowadays, Tony Benn - who reach the parts of public affection that others can't.

Edna concedes that he's hogging the limelight more than ever. "They still want to talk to Denis. But it doesn't matter. After all, he is extraordinary. And I'm, I suppose, unusual." At times, Part of the Pattern seems as veiled and discreet as a parish magazine but one of the needling stories it tells is the metamorphosis of the political spouse, from the 1950s, when the wives of cabinet ministers knitted on the conference platform next to their husbands, to now, when the wife of the prime minister is treated as first lady, with all the trappings of celebrity.

Despite Edna's default mode of cheery stoicism, there are passages in the book that seem impossibly sad, particularly after the war when Denis was a young-man-in-a-hurry, globetrotting as the Labour party's international officer, and she was stuck at home with young children. "When you have children, you are a bit sad anyway because you are always the lady at the sink." She says there was a "marvellous occasion when I was making supper and suddenly something snapped. I thought, I'll get in the car and drive down to the sea. I didn't know what I was going to do there - maybe look romantically at the moon - but I suddenly remembered I had put an apple pie in the oven and I turned back, laughing."

In a neat example of power behind the throne, it was Edna who coined the term "hinterland" to describe the interests outside politics necessary for sanity. However, the word is nearly always attributed to her husband: "That's my word. Denis usually corrects people. I said that Margaret Thatcher has no political hinterland."

I ask whether Denis was ever encouraging about her late-flowering career. She sighs. "He never discouraged me. I don't show him until right at the end because he's such a powerful personality that I'm afraid it might change the direction of what I'm doing and it wouldn't be me. And then he reads it with great surprise: 'This is good.' It never occurred to him that I could write."

There's a tap at the window. Lord Healey is pressed up against the pane and gurning - flicking his glasses up and down, Eric Morecambe-style and stretching his neck like a turtle. Edna raises a hand as if swatting a fly: "Go away. Not looking . . . It's like having a child."

Healey never became leader of the Labour party because he was unable to resist what Edna calls a "brutal facetiousness". In Part of the Pattern she describes her husband cutting into a conversation at an embassy function with the words "Don't talk to her - she doesn't know anything." That must have wounded, I say. "He doesn't mean it but it goes right home for a moment because I was very aware I didn't know much about finance or international affairs. And this habit is one of the reasons why he never became prime minister."

Indeed, Denis the Menace christened Margaret That–cher "that bloody woman", while John Prescott had "the face of a man who clubs baby seals" and his most famous comment, that part of a speech made by Geoffrey Howe was "like being savaged by a dead sheep" is now in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. On cue, Denis shuffles into the room. His outfit includes a Franz Ferdinand-style grey corduroy jacket and trainers.

"Were you wanting something, my darling?" asks Edna sweetly. "I'm going to sit here because he wants to have a word with me," replies Denis. His voice is silky and muffled, with random flat Yorkshire vowels seeping into his Oxford English, like a northern Alistair Cooke. He'd be perfectly cast doing a voiceover for Pooh Bear. I had planned to interview them jointly but Edna's having none of it. "I'd rather deal with him alone for a moment. You come back," she says firmly.

Denis doesn't want to be dispatched. He's here to make trouble. "You've dribbled down the front of your blouse," he tells Edna, entirely falsely. She shoos him away. He beseeches her in his best Oliver Twist Cockney: "You're going to say some nasty things about me, aren't you?" "Off you go. Put on another jacket for the photographer," she replies crisply, like a Norland nanny dealing with an obstreperous charge. He goes into broad comedy Yorkshire: "Shurrup . . . don't talk to me like that . . . he'll put it down in't paper that you're rude to me."

Out of earshot, Edna says that Denis has become more obsessive about order and tidiness as he's got older. She sees this as a hangover from his way of coping with a killing workload. "Great men have to put things in compartments. They can only get by through concentrating totally - and other things have to be put aside. For instance, when the pound was falling, all that he wrote in his diary was: 'Lovely day, pound falling.' And a few days later, in the middle of the crisis, he wrote: 'Went to the National Gallery to choose paintings for my office.'"

This compartmentalisation extended to their marriage. Her maxim - which would give the people at Relate a seizure - was "a problem shared is a problem doubled". Edna sees in Tony Blair the telltale signs that occur when a politician has stayed on too long: "There is something in the eye that is wild. I call it the horse's eye. You get wound up and can't find a time to go - you're waiting to go on a good note, like a breakthrough in Northern Ireland. But they don't come round very often."

At 88, Edna is writing continuously - perhaps still compensating for those years when she was consumed by raising the children - while it's Denis who is in carefree retirement, jovially padding around, delving into his library of 15,000 books and taking photos of anyone who crosses the threshold. He now re-emerges with an immaculate jacket. With his best old-codger-below-stairs voice ("Mi'lady") he falls to his knees and kisses her hand before showing me his photo albums. He flicks at high velocity through pictures of Ernie Wise, Charlie Dimmock and Ronald Reagan with Neil Kinnock in the Oval Office. Most surprising is a toothy, early-20s Condoleezza Rice in a pair of shorts hugging Denis on the side of an Italian mountain. Edna wants him to put these together in another book - Healey's People - but I suspect he's enjoying relaxation too much.

Edna leaves to change for the photographer and Denis turns serious. I ask him if Gordon Brown - the next Labour chancellor after Healey left number 11 Downing Street in 1979 - ever asks for his advice. "No, he's not bloody daft. I think he's the best chancellor we've ever had - even better than me - and the sooner he takes over from Blair, the better."

Healey made his name when he appeared in his army uniform at the 1945 Labour Conference to denounce the upper classes as "selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent".

"When I started in politics," he says, "the working class wore cloth claps and the toffs wore top hats. Now, the big inequalities have gone because of political action by Labour and the Liberals." If he were young again he would go into academia rather than politics, he says.

He's magnanimous about his former enemies. "Everyone mellows. When you're over 80 all your contemporaries are your friends." What, even Thatcher? "Yes, I gave her a hug the other day. She quite likes it, I think." Even Tony Benn, his former nemesis, has become friendly. I ask whether he ever wakes up in a cold sweat thinking about the winter of discontent, the IMF and the plummeting pound? Healey surveys his acres of garden, stretching as far as the eye can see, and snorts with derision. "Oh no. No bloody fear."

Edna Healey's 'Part of the Pattern: Memoirs of a Wife at Westminster' is published by Headline Review at Pounds 25