LABOUR’s chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey is rightly regarded as a heavyweight among post-war politicians. An ardent communist at Oxford before the second world war, Healey was among the brightest of his generation — schooled in Marxist dialectics and the anti-fascist political culture of that era, trained by the Communist Party in a period when intellectuals were drawn to a party whose main cadres were factory workers and miners and whose heroes fought in the International Brigades.

His communism did not survive the war which saw him promoted through the ranks. He was demobbed as a major and, still in uniform, told delegates to the 1945 Labour Party conference: “the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent.”

The Cold War saw him as top functionary of the Labour Party’s international department at a time when this body marched in lockstep with British and US intelligence services as these organisations collaborated with the operatives of the Gehlen nazi intelligence apparatus in a futile effort to stem the advance of socialism in the countries that had been liberated by the Red Army. A not subsidiary function was to advise on the management of Britain’s colonies.