Pompous and Partial

The Time of My Life

Denis Healey

Penguin 1990

Another disappointment in a season of disappointments. I pick this paperback up. It's been hanging around for years, ten, fifteen. I like Denis Healey. I like politics books. Somehow, I never got around to reading it. Well, someone at a charity shop told me they needed books, so as one of many it's time to at least skim read it and let it go. I read one page. It's entirely pompous. Obnoxious, humourless. I'm not reading this, I think to myself. Be fair give it a go, I weaken, though honestly it's a waste of time. Well, I gave it a go, and the more I read, the less I like Denis Healey, who those of my generation might remember as a Big Beast of British politics who was one of the 'fun' ones, the sort you think they don't make them like that anymore, who was on the right of the Labour party, was Secretary of Defence in the 60s and Chancellor in the 70s, and never made it to party leader or Prime Minister. Now, that's far from all there is to his quite intriguing CV and if someone unsparingly put it all together it might be very interesting. 

Instead, here we have The Time of My Life, and it certainly is 'my life', it's never about his constituents or anyone else's human concerns, it's all about how 'brilliant' Denis Healey is. A strange state of affairs for a communist then socialist, or maybe not. Other people don't exist as people: a select few are important enough to exist in 'Healey's World' as character sketches committed to a diary to be regurgitated in the eventual autobiography, either as a competent and committed but essentially minor and interchangeable functionaries who Healey deigned to make use of and even befriend, or as political or intellectual rivals to be paid a backhanded compliment and a lament that, while talented, they were sadly deeply flawed in such and such a way. Of course, almost all of them were close friends; the man must have hundreds upon hundreds of friends by the count in this book, so enchanting is he. There's no natural feel to any of this, it doesn't flow at all, it's like reading a spreadsheet (maybe these days you could get an AI to turn your diary entries into an autobiography: Source text: Healey diaries; Style: boastful; Insert: quotes from Big List of Clever Quotes, random). Or rather, a mix of spreadsheets of different things to boast about: books, opera, art, people; it's like everything is an object for conspicuous consumption. "When I agreed to meet a lobby from the College of Heralds I was surprised to find it led by my old friend Miles Fitzalan Howard, now the Duke of Norfolk" (p.403) is typically closely followed by, "My friend Wilfred Baumgartner, for example, moved without difficulty from being Governor of the Central Bank to Finance Minister, to head of the great chemical company, Rhone Poulenc, without abandoning his wide range of cultural interests, which included a close friendship with Sophia Loren and her husband, the film producer Carlo Ponti" (p.405). So it goes on (I was waiting for Healey to mention his acquaintance with Sophia Loren somewhere, somehow the attraction of the moth to that star power seemed inevitable, sadly I guess he had to settle for being a friend of a friend).

The frustration is that it should all be a fascinating overview of a dynamic part of recent history written by a charming personality, at least that's what I had in my mind, and I still halfway enjoy parts of the book. But I'm really having my doubts. There are certain passages that feel very slippery, like you might want to check some facts and figures before moving on, "I was wrong – but not very wrong," being about the most self-critical thing he is prepared to say. As well as the persistent interjections of books and quotes and artists and operas ("I first saw it at Oxford in Gertrude Stein's book on Picasso"), there's a steady flow of self-effacing remarks such as "I had to carry a disproportionate share of the European burden." Could someone not have told him that constantly showing off is going to have the reverse of the effect intended. What was he even so insecure about? He was obviously smart and capable. Did he have to be the smartest guy in the world and never get anything wrong? Did he feel himself in the shadow of Harold Wilson? There are certain passages which give you the impression that numbers might not have been his strong suit, which might be something of a disadvantage to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He doesn't really seem to be an original thinker (perhaps if you drop enough names with enough frequency you can avoid thinking at all), but not every manager is going to invent a new tactical system. Maybe it was being a quasi-outsider. His 'philosophical hero' Karl Popper apparently wasn't particularly modest either. Whatever it was, he seems to feel the need to be constantly conspicuously clever. Honestly, I think you'd be much better off reading Edmund Dell, for example, to see what was going on at the time, rather than the guy who's cribbing his jokes off Neil Kinnock. 

And the Oscar for Namedropping goes to:

"I remember Humphrey Bogart poking his head round a door during a visit to entertain the American forces – a tiny little man, who conveyed none of the power of his film personality." (p.59) 

Missed vocation as tennis commentator:

"Victory in war, as in politics, often goes to the side which makes fewer or less serious mistakes, not to the side with the greatest positive virtues." (p.60)  

Actually a great plan:

"I spoke with total confidence, based largely on total ignorance." (p.67)  

"We had both had affairs during our years of separation." (p.69, natch)  [Was it really necessary to make it patently obvious with whom?]

On Hugh Dalton:

"His pettiness and occasional meanness of spirit are no less evident in his diaries... he could be brutally cruel to men his own age, especially if he saw them as potential rivals." (p.78)  

The Collapse of British Power was published in 1972:

"Recent American research has shown that as early as ^1880, the British Empire was producing an economic return lower than investment in Britain itself, while to preserve it the British taxpayer was paying two and a half times more for defence than the citizens of other developed countries." (p.280)

There's an obvious lesson here somewhere:

"He was familiar with the spectacle of Britain abandoning its military bases as soon as they were completed." (p.283)

"Driving home after a vote one night I ran into the back of a parked car at Cambridge Circus. Swelling with pride in my sense of civic duty, I drove up to the police station in Tottenham Court Road to report the accident. As I opened my offside door, another car ran into it. I was trembling with fury when I spoke to the Sergeant on duty. He wrote down my report and as I turned to go, a taxi-driver who was also at the desk said: ''Ere, this fellow's drunk.' The breath test showed a positive result... Within the day I was cleared of being drunk; the urine test showed me far below the danger limit [...] [I] suffered a misfortune." (pp.348-349)  ["Of all the samples that could be given in a drink driving case, urine is the least common. This is because Police guidance advises that urine should only be taken as a last resort, due to the complicated nature of the procedure, the time it takes to collect an evidential urine specimen and the inaccurate and unreliable results often provided by laboratories... There is no immediate option to provide a urine specimen at the police station." 🤔]

"If I had been given accurate forecasts in 1976, I would never have needed to go to the IMF at all. I found it difficult to blame the Treasury for these mistakes, though others did." (p.381)

"When I had my routine medical check-up, the doctor and nurse together found it impossible to get any blood out of me, confirming all the popular myths about chancellors." (p.384) [I laughed]

"On a Saturday I would drive the few miles into Tunbridge Wells, and return with a haul of second-hand books from Hall's Bookshop. Before long I had collected so many that we had to think of finding a larger house." (p.386)  [Hall's is still there and worth a visit, it seems]

"The trade unions' unwillingness to limit their wage increases to what the nation could afford not only damaged the prospect of combining growth with low inflation, but also took the distribution of the nation's wealth out of my hands." (p.392)

Labour in 1978:

"Political history is full of cases where governments become 'dizzy with success'." (p.398)

In retrospect, perhaps, a superlative blurb from the Economist is the opposite of an indication of a well-written book. 

© Bryn Roberts 2023

Published 22 July 2023