Major Healey and Captain Jenkins at the 1945 Labour Conference

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Major Denis Healey and Captain Roy Jenkins photographed on the seafront with fellow delegates during the Labour Party conference in Blackpool, May 1945. This photo was published in the 9 June 1945 issue of Picture Post.

A little on the wartime careers on their wartime careers from Wikipedia.

Denis Healey

After graduation, Healey served in the Second World War as a gunner in the Royal Artillery before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. Serving with the Royal Engineers, he saw action in the North African campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily (1943) and the Italian campaign (1943–1945) and was the military landing officer ("beach master") for the British assault brigade at Anzio in 1944. He was twice mentioned in dispatches during this campaign.

Healey became an MBE in 1945. He left the service with the rank of Major. He declined an offer to remain in the army, with the rank of Lieutenant colonel, as part of the team researching the history of the Italian campaign under Colonel David Hunt. He also decided against taking up a senior scholarship at Balliol, which might have led to an academic career.

Roy Jenkins

During the Second World War, Jenkins received his officer training at Alton Towers and was posted to the 55th West Somerset Yeomanry at West Lavington, Wiltshire. Through the influence of his father, in April 1944, Jenkins was sent to Bletchley Park to work as a codebreaker; while there he befriended the historian Asa Briggs.

Denis Healey: The Best Prime Minister Labour Never Had?

While Britain watched The Great British Bake Off, BBC2 showed this excellent documentary on the career of Denis Healey.

You can now view it on BBC iPlayer, and I urge you to do so.

The still above shows Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and a young Jeremy Corbyn during the 1981 deputy leadership election in which Healey narrowly defeated Benn and quite possibly saved the Labour Party.

It seems Corbyn is determined to ensure that achievement is only temporary.

Denis Healey (1917-2015)

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W.G. Grace died at Mottingham in Kent in 1915. Two years later Denis Healey was born there.

Healey was one of the giants of politics in the early 1970s when I started to take an interest in it.

The best tribute and analysis of his career I have seen today is that by Michael White in the Guardian:

By 1945, Healey had already packed in a lifetime of experiences denied to future generations. A beach master in charge of logistics (US actor Lee Marvin was another) at the bloody Anglo-American Anzio landings in Italy (1944), Maj Healey would turn down a lieutenant colonelcy as well as an Oxford fellowship to study the philosophy of art in favour of politics. 

After making a ferocious class warrior’s speech at Labour’s pre-election conference in 1945 (“Your speech may have cost us victory,” he was warned) he narrowly failed to win Tory Pudsey in Clem Attlee’s landslide. 

Losing a marginal seat was probably a lucky escape. He became instead international secretary of the Labour party, nominated by party grandees Hugh Dalton, Harold Laski and Nye Bevan. 

It was a hugely important post when British Labour’s prestige was at its peak in the ruins of post-war Europe, and Healey quickly became a key adviser to the new foreign secretary, the powerful but unlettered Ernie Bevin, writing a stream of pamphlets articulating Bevin’s position against the neutralist and pro-Soviet Left.

Six of the Best 518

Why did the pollsters get it so wrong at the general election? A special extended edition of the Polling Matters podcast tries to find out.

"It is a strategy that ignores the potential that is in 100% of today’s labor force, 98% of next year’s, and a huge number of people who will be around for the next half-century." Ricardo Hausmann questions the orthodoxy that education is the key to economic growth.

David Hencke says cutting councillors in Newcastle upon Tyne is a dangerous move to dilute democracy.

 The Labour leadership election of 1976 was contested by Tony Benn, Jim Callaghan, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. Alwyn W. Turner looks back.

Elizabeth Day talks to Alistair McGowan about his experience of portraying Jimmy Savile in a new play.

Rebecca Mead on the appeal of Middlemarch.

Seven MPs elected at the 1955 general election are still with us

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Today is the 60th anniversary of the 1955 general election, won by the Conservatives under Anthony Eden.

The BBC Politics channel has announced that it will be showing the results programme this evening (though it is currently showing a live feed from Stormont).

Discussion on Twitter day seems to have concluded that seven MPs elected in 1955 are still with us:

• Lord Balniel (Conservative)
• Sir Richard Body (Conservative)
• Robin Chichester-Clark (Ulster Unionist)
• John Eden (Conservative)
• Denis Healy (Labour)
• Tom Mitchell (Sinn Fein)
• James Ramsden (Conservative)

John Eden (the nephew of Anthony Eden) and James Ramsden were already MPs, having both been elected at byelections the previous year.

Robin Chichester-Clark was one of the few members representing a Northern Ireland constituency to be a British government minister since the Government of Ireland Act 1920 - his PPS was Norman Tebbit.

When he was elected Tom Mitchell was serving a sentence in HM Prison Belfast following an IRA raid on British Army barracks in Omagh, County Tyrone.

Thanks in particular to @ConHistGrp and @AmIRightSir on Twitter.

"Beith be not proud though some have called thee mighty"

One of the most attractive things about Paddy Ashdown is that - in Denis Healey's famous formulation - he has a hinterland. That is, a whole range of interests beyond politics.

Today I came across an old Independent article in which he wrote of love for the poetry of John Donne:

Since the age of 16, I have had a copy of the complete poems of John Donne somewhere close at hand. For me, that was a watershed year. I had not been a good student – at best strugglingly average, to the despair of my father. In truth the classroom interested me far less at this age than the rugby pitch, the athletics field and the girls at the local Bedford high school. 

One evening a friend I admired but thought quite weird persuaded me, against my strong inclination, to go with him to the school poetry society run by one of the masters, whom I regarded as equally weird, John Eyre. The evening changed my life – quite literally. For that night I walked through a door opened by Donne into a world of poetry and literature I had never even known existed and have spent a lifetime joyously exploring ever since. The moment may have been life changing for me. ... 

After school, as a young Royal Marines officer involved in the war in Borneo, I took a leather-bound copy of Donne's poems which my wife had given me everywhere I went, until the ravages of jungle damp and termites dismantled it into a collection of mouldy pages. It has been replaced many times since.

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England:

I recall that Paddy Ashplant put his love for Donne to good use during the contest to elect the first leader of whatever name our party had in those days.

Many though Alan Beith was the frontrunner, but Ashplant began his speech to the first hustings by looking his opponent in the eye and declaiming:

Beith be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so.

This was widely counted as something of a zinger, and poor Beith's campaign never recovered from the blow.

Paddy Ashdown foresees the end of Iraq and rise of Kurdistan

I recall Denis Healey saying amid the turmoil in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s something to the effect that it was not the settlement of 1945 that was breaking down but that of 1918.

And as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disappeared from the map, it became clear he was right.

On the Guardian website (and I assume in tomorrow's paper) Paddy Ashdown suggests that a similar process is now taking place in the Middle East:

What is happening in the Middle East, like it or not, is the wholesale rewriting of the Sykes-Picot borders of 1916, in favour of an Arab world whose shapes will be arbitrated more by religious dividing lines than the old imperial conveniences of 100 years ago.

As part of these changes, Paddy foresees the Kurds in northern Iraq (bolstered by Western aid) breaking away to form an independent state.

When I was secretary of York Liberal Students around 1979-80 we had a recruiting leaflet. One of the causes it backed was an independent state for the Kurds.

This policy had been inherited from officers who had since left university, but we kept it on the leaflet - even if none of us could have pointed to where Kurdistan would be on a map.

Whoever wrote that leaflet probably envisaged Kurdistan breaking away from Turkey rather than Iraq, but I thought of it when I read Paddy's article.

1945 Liberal candidate Arthur Walter James is still with us

There has been some discussion today of surviving candidates from the 1945 general election.

It seems that there is one Liberal still with us - (Arthur) Walter James who fought Bury.

There are three Labour candidates still alive: John Freeman, Denis Healey (who did not get into the Commons until 1950) and one other, whose names escapes me.

The answer is in today's Times Diary, so if you have it to hand please leave the name in the comments.

Later. Thanks to the Labour History Group on Twitter for telling me that the fourth 1945 candidate still with us - there may be others, of course - is Jeremy Hutchinson, who is now Liberal Democrat peer Lord Hutchinson of Lullington,

The Group also pointed me to an article that Walter James wrote for the Sunday Times when he turned 100.

Edmundo Ros: I didn't know he was still alive until he died

Yesterday Stephen Williams, the Lib Dem MP for Bristol West, marked the death of Edmundo Ros. It is always good to see that an MP has a hinterland, as Denis Healey once termed it.

And, as I have often discussed with Disgruntled Radical, it is sad when you do not realise that someone is still been alive until you hear of their death - if you see what I mean.

To counter this, The Oldie has a feature called "Still With Us", which carries profiles of people you might think are dead but are not. Until the other day, Edmundo Ros would have been a good subject.

As ever, the Daily Telegraph has the best obituary.