DURING THE past 20 years, Denis Healey has been one of the most entertaining figures in British public life. 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. "I enjoy my retirement, I don't particularly enjoy being retired, if you see what I mean. "Um... er... come on, lad. It is no > different than using words like foolishly or smartly or clownishly. 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 … ", Next week, Lord Healey and Edna, his wife of 55 years, are off to Greece on a freebie. Denis Healey: August 30th, 1917 - October 3rd, 2015. What are you then? Sort of. ... ‘Silly billy’ Mike Yarwood. The real Lord Healey 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.. "Brown. Trying to create a sense of common interest does involve getting people actually to work together on common problems. Whatever happened to silly billy? 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 … When asked who "his chums" were, he gets caught up in the word. Yes, yes, yes.". he says. 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. British Labour politician and former Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exechequer. He seems lost for a moment. ", The more he jokes, the less humour seems to emanate from Healey. 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 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. There are also continuous allusive references, for reasons best known to Pearce, to The Importance of Being Earnest, one of them, sadly, seriously inaccurate. I just supported the thing which I suppose David probably wrote.". Politics, he continues, has changed since "those days". We get lost in the kitchens on the way. As the Glasgow Herald reported in April 1978 "Chancellor Denis Healey tried to impersonate comedian Mike Yarwood during an election walk-about yesterday. Pearce proclaims in his introduction: "This is a political life", and so, grimly, most of it is. He says he hasn't. 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. 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. 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". Denis Healey in 1973. "You need people like Peter Mandelson with that ability to present things. "No," he says shortly. ... And "Silly Billy" became his catchphrase courtesy of impressionist Mike Yarwood. 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". "Do you want my clothes off?" He vacated his last cabinet post, as opposition spokesman for foreign affairs, in 1987. 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. The British nickname "Silly Billy" was also popularised in the 1970s by impressionist Mike Yarwood, putting it in the mouth of the chancellor, Denis Healey, who took the catchphrase up and used it … He loves culture, too, in a sense, otherwise he wouldn't be so interested in Italy. Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 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. “Whose a silly-billy then?” some would say, repeating back to him his catchphrase. He looks fierce for a moment. Thatcher: "Virago intacta", "la Pasionaria of privilege" or "That bloody woman". Gerald Kaufman is Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. 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. I've always been a loner. "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. Do politicians still have hinterlands? By Gerald Kaufman 31 March 2002 • 00:00 am . Tickling the ivories or simply wrinkling those bushy eyebrows, he has added enormously to innocent public pleasure. 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. One pigeon lands briefly on my head. When Big Ben strikes the hour, Healey looks at his watch. 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. Hey there! Denis Healey was one of the most memorable British politicians of the 21st Century. He was also a favourite target for impressionists, most notably for Mike Yarwood, who coined Healey's "Silly Billy" phrase. > > Sillily accurately states the behavior of being silly. I once shaved them off and my trousers fell down so I had to let them grow again. Gerald Kaufman reviews Denis Healey: A Life in Our Times by Edward Pearce. We are no longer one of the world's three great powers. 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. "One thing is still the same," he goes on sternly. The role was typically played as a stooge to another clown. Usage notes . You see it in Trollope. Hurd: "A tattered Talleyrand"; Howe: "a dead sheep". He watches my face to see the penny drop. Lord Healey’s catch phrase became “Silly Billy” which he adopted from the mimic Mike Yarwood and which he used against his critics. Welcome to the Digital Spy forums. [1] The act included playing the part of a fool or idiot, impersonating a child and singing comic songs. 'Silly Billy was a type of clown common at fairs in England during the 19th century. Even Prescott, he once said, had the face of a man "who clubs baby seals". 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." "A statesman is a dead politician." he says, as if alienated by the concept. 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. And he laughs, but his face hardly moves. So he doesn't watch the goings-on next door with his fingers twitching? Very different economy. "In the old days I used to get £5,000 a time. Silly Billy was a type of clown common at fairs in England during the 19th century. Four. This originated with Mike Yarwood's famous impression of him, although he later used it himself in parliament. Not even in euros. 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. "I don't hang out with people in that sense and never have. He looks engaged for the first time, enthusiastic. "I don't like champagne actually," he said, "I like whisky and ginger wine." Chums?" I tell him he's attained the status of statesman. "Come off it, dear," he says when once he might have hollered "silly bugger". 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. Exactly so. 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. "The only point of being a politician is to do things, not just to talk about them.". 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." He shows me out. 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. "Chris Smith is very interested in the arts. I'd rather spend time with my family." 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".. They were also common in London as a street entertainer, along with the similar clown Billy Barlow. 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. He calls the Blair, Brown, Prescott triumvirate the "Holy Trinity". Healey was anything but a 'Silly Billy'. "They're a perfect mix, really. Whoever would have guessed Healey would be on message? Saturday, January 09, 2021 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence. Politique Peuple. Healey joined the Labour Party. Denis Healey quotes. 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. Now he's leading the charge against the euro. ", Does he think Brown, unlike Healey, might make leader himself one day? Maybe the rhetorical putdown has been replaced by the spin? 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. 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. Now he's leading the charge against the euro. "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." Healey the front-bench politician was on the whole pretty boring. "That's right. When Mike Yarwood gave him the catchphrase “Silly Billy”, Healey made it his own. After spells of gout and diabetes, he has recently lost weight. And of course Gordon hasn't yet had the sort of crisis which the oil crisis produced for me. They were also common in London as a street entertainer, along with the similar clown Billy Barlow. Silly billy Denis Healey was the brilliant and brutal star of the Callaghan government. 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. ... Silly billy! The result is a chapter, halfway through the book, toe-curlingly called "En Famille", which provides four pages of somewhat embarrassing domestic intimacies. Does he enjoy retirement? A whisky mac, I say. 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. "This is just like a club really," he says after Lamont has gone, "much nicer, much less party than the Commons." Quotes #1. He was 98. 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. Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge. > > It is a silly billy word, as ex-chancellor Denis Healey would put it. I have my garden, my photography. There are many quotes from him.... they're in my book. Gerald Kaufman reviews Denis Healey: A Life in Our Times by Edward Pearce. 1. Denis Healey was the brilliant and brutal star of the Callaghan government. 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. Today, we're just settling for "dear". 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