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Denis Healey.
An eye for a quip. Denis Healey. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
An eye for a quip. Denis Healey. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Denis Healey’s 10 most celebrated quotes

This article is more than 8 years old

Former Labour chancellor, who has died, leaves behind some choice observations on Westminster and politicians

Healey’s first law of politics: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

To a reporter in 2000:

A statesman is a dead politician. I am in the home of the living dead which is betwixt and between. The House of Lords.”

On Margaret Thatcher:

That bloody woman.”

On debating with Geoffrey Howe:

Like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

On John Prescott:

He has the face of a man who clubs baby seals.”

To a reporter in 1997:

Yes I have been on a diet, but not the Nigel Lawson one. I don’t want to look like death warmed up.”

In a newspaper interview in 1997:

Being chancellor is not a woman’s job. There’s a difference between the sexes, and people who don’t know that don’t know what people are like with their clothes off. So there.”

While campaigning for Tony Benn in the 1984 Chesterfield byelection:

Healey without Benn would be like Torvill without Dean. I can’t get the bugger off my back.”

Speaking in the House of Commons in February 1990:

While the rest of Europe is marching to confront the new challenges, the prime minister [Margaret Thatcher] is shuffling along in the gutter in the opposite direction, like an old bag lady, muttering imprecations at anyone who catches her eye.”

However, he denied ever having said, as chancellor:

I want to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak.”

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