Healey at 90

There is an interview with Denis Healey, on the eve of his 90th birthday, in the Daily Telegraph. He is a tad too far to the right for me, but obviously a clever guy (He has 16,000 books, “making one of the finest private libraries in the country”. I can’t see Thatcher with 16,000 books, unless they are old copies of Readers Digest). I always liked Healey’s sense of humour (e.g. comparing Thatcher to Castro: “all that’s missing is the beard”). He has the measure of Blair: "He has enormous personal charm but I wouldn't call him a communicator. He's a bullshitter, and very good at it. Almost everything he did after 2002 has been a disaster. He has left Brown all the problems to sort out." He is a long term opponent of the war in Iraq and argues the readiness to go to war by Blair is due to ignorance of what war means: “"My generation nearly all did at least five years' fighting. It gives more sense of how war happens, of the importance of planning and interdependence." The chaos in Iraq was, he thinks, “totally foreseeable”.