... TV impressionist Mike Yarwood coined the catchphrase "Silly Billy", which Healey had never actually said until that point. Each has qualities the other lacks. Tickling the ivories or simply wrinkling those bushy eyebrows, he has added enormously to innocent public pleasure. He was a "pretty good" chancellor himself, he adds, though everybody in the party hated him "because you have to deny them all the time" and there was that spot of bother with the IMF. "Do you want my clothes off?" There are many quotes from him.... they're in my book. [1] The act included playing the part of a fool or idiot, impersonating a child and singing comic songs. Denis Healey quotes. ... ‘Silly billy’ Mike Yarwood. It is no > different than using words like foolishly or smartly or clownishly. Sort of. Thank God, then, for the pigeon. We meet on the terrace at the House of Lords where the crumbs of a previous collation are causing some feathered excitement. Does he enjoy retirement? Toggle Calendar. "I don't hang out with people in that sense and never have. Politique Peuple. But now you don't get people deliberately making people laugh. "It's a boring subject," he says. Quotes Denis Healey. "Come off it, dear," he says when once he might have hollered "silly bugger". But his traumatic experiences during the Italian campaign provide an explanation of his aversion to warfare and bloodshed which I find profoundly moving and entirely to his credit. he says. "One thing is still the same," he goes on sternly. Healey was anything but a 'Silly Billy'. Exactly so. "Hurry up, dear," he says, never before a stranger to the "sod off". Politics, he continues, has changed since "those days". He calls the Blair, Brown, Prescott triumvirate the "Holy Trinity". This buoyant, cheeky character scarcely appears in this book. One pigeon lands briefly on my head. There are also continuous allusive references, for reasons best known to Pearce, to The Importance of Being Earnest, one of them, sadly, seriously inaccurate. But I'm quite active. When an opponent criticised him and said "Denis Healey would sell his own grandmother", his deputy at the Treasury leapt to his defence with "No, he would get me to do it for him" Mike Yarwood invented "Silly Billy" as a catchphrase for his impersonation of Healey. Healey the front-bench politician was on the whole pretty boring. Now he's leading the charge against the euro. Denis Healey - who has died at the age of 98 - was the last of the great post-war generation of political "big beasts" who dominated British government in the 1960s and 70s. Denis Winston Healey, poet, photographer, highbrow thug, has called people a lot of names over the years. Four. When Big Ben strikes the hour, Healey looks at his watch. Hurd: "A tattered Talleyrand"; Howe: "a dead sheep". Usage notes . DURING THE past 20 years, Denis Healey has been one of the most entertaining figures in British public life. "That's right. However, the reality was that when it came to politics and public life, Lord Healey was no ‘silly billy’ as Yarwood suggested. I tell him he's attained the status of statesman. Though not as good as advertising. When people are competing for fame or position, then it's a jungle war. "The only point of being a politician is to do things, not just to talk about them.". Teatime quiz The Chase is one of ITV’s biggest hits, hosted by Bradley Walsh and featuring Chasers Anne Hegerty and quiz show veteran and general know-it-all Mark Labbett He missed out on a lot of his children's childhood (two girls and a boy), and can't remember how many grandchildren he has. Healey as a man, however, is scintillating - a delightful conversationalist with a wicked sense of humour. Healey was constantly ridiculed for his eyebrows and falsely known for calling people ‘silly billy’s’, a phrase he only began using after seeing the impressionist Mike Yarwood use it as part of his Denis Healey … Healey's first job, which launched his encounters with the innumerable people whose names in subsequent years he inveterately dropped - whether anyone else had heard of them or not - was as International Secretary of the Labour Party. Welcome to the Digital Spy forums. Denis Healey, British politician, was known for using the term as a catchphrase. Denis Healey: August 30th, 1917 - October 3rd, 2015. He stops a passing Norman Lamont for a chat. Accordingly, readers are treated on the same page to the ungermane opinions of Dr Marcello Caetano, a Prime Minister of Portugal in the 1970s, and of a voter in Lincoln about a former Conservative candidate for the constituency, Jonathan Guinness. Very different economy. "Brown. "Chris Smith is very interested in the arts. 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