Denis Healey Articles

Ed Balls’ Speaking Out will be regarded as one of best written and readable political autobiographies of his generation. It is not in the class of Denis Healey’s The Time of My Life, though there are some interesting parallels between Balls and Healey – serious...

I interviewed Denis Healey as part of the research for my biography of Aneurin Bevan in February 2011. He immediately seized on Bevan’s remark that ‘the right kind of leader for the Labour party is a kind of dessicated calculating-machine’. While Clement Attlee was...

Labour can no longer let its intellectual conservatism hold it back, writes David Butler Labour finds itself within a gilded cage of intellectual conservatism. The party must understand and offer solutions to a range of complex issues: the productivity puzzle and...

Labour must not leave the field to the Tories as it did in the 1980s The period from Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 to Labour’s utter rout in 1983 has come under renewed scrutiny. Moderates have sought to use it as a dire warning of what happens when the Bennites...