The Time of My Life

"That’s right. Denis Healey is such an interesting person and he tells such nice anecdotes in the book. He’s not exactly a lost politician now, but I suspect if you talk to the 18-year olds that I’m teaching, a lot of them wouldn’t even have heard of him. But Denis Healey was a really important figure from 1945 right through to the mid-1980s. He held a succession of major cabinet ministries, and was right at the centre of lots of the key economic and political debates at the time. The Time of My Life is another book where you’re getting an insider’s account. You’re going behind the stage and seeing what he really thought about things at the time. Obviously, he’s writing with axes to grind—but that actually makes it more entertaining, because he’s got some pretty delicious pen portraits of people he’s argued with over the years. He also has some good observations, looking back at things with the benefit of hindsight, which it’s always good to see politicians doing. There are probably two. A personal one is about when he was offered the Chair in International Politics at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He tells a story about going up there on the train from London and realizing how far, even in a small country the United Kingdom, Aberystwyth is from anywhere. By the time he arrived on the train, he decided that no matter what else happened, he was going to turn down the job. I did my undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth and never had money for the train. I’d always be trying to hitchhike on a Friday afternoon to go to visit friends—including my now wife—in London. I was the world’s worst person to pick up, with long student hair and a dangly earring. I have these memories of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere in the Welsh countryside. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other part of The Time of My Life that stands out for me—and I pick up on it in 12 Days that Made Modern Britain— is some of the stories around the 1976 economic crisis and the IMF bailout. His right take is that much of that crisis was driven by bad figures prepared by the Treasury. Those figures were revised a year later and shrank the size of the public deficit problem. The whole country went through this profound economic and political crisis—which, you can argue (and I do in my book), was a key a key turning point for Britain. History might have turned anyway, but Healey talks with utter contempt about those in the Treasury who just got the numbers wrong. At one point, he even goes so far as to wonder aloud whether their political inclinations had led them to give him figures that weren’t accurate. We argue all the time in politics and economics about numbers, and treat them as sacrosanct. But invariably, they are just best guesses. Yes, and starting with the Second World War, which we’ll come to in a minute. He was part of a generation of politicians (that we’ve now come to the end of) who were absolutely defining in British politics. We’ve lost that generation now, and that’s just the passage of time, but I do think it’s worth remembering, when we look back on history at its impact. These were people whose early political memories were of the war, for whom it was a decisive factor in their outlook. World War Two was a defining moment in setting the post-war consensus. For someone like Edward Heath, the experience of fighting for and with Europe was absolutely seminal and underpinned why Europe was so important to him. He was probably the only truly pro-European Conservative leader. But I would say there’s no denying the war also gave rise to a strain of arrogant nationalism—often on the left and sometimes on the right—that you can see feeding into Brexit: ‘We won the war. We intervened to stop other countries fighting each other. They need to integrate, because the problem was theirs, and we don’t and didn’t because we emerged triumphant.’ That was a dominant strain of thinking in early attitudes towards the European Union. It was someone else’s problem to sort out. The consequence of that is that we came into Europe very late and with our tails already between our legs because our vision of being a superpower had been so discredited."