The invisible wife

WHEN Lady Healey walks into a room, the last thing you think about is her age.

Which is odd. She’s obviously not young – but there is, nevertheless, something incredibly youthful about her; something effervescent. Something rare that allows you still to glimpse, alongside the (beautifully coiffeured) white hair and the essential walking stick, the slip of a child dancing through Forest bluebells; a teenage girl offering a cold cheek for a first chaste kiss on a starlit walk home from Coleford Chapel.

We’re in the Speech House Hotel (swishly transformed from its spit-and-sawdust days of Lady Healey’s childhood) where she’s lowering herself carefully into a comfortable chair, looking pretty stylish in a bright pink ‘mac’.

“Oh,” she grumbles cheerfully, “I forget I’m a lame old woman. I said to my doctor the other day, ‘I suppose I’m not so bad for 78’. He said to me, ‘Lady Healey, you are 88!’

“I said, ‘My God! So I am!’”

If the last thing you think about is her age, then the first that inevitably springs to mind is her famous husband. Healey is a name that conjures up one image: the extravagantly eye-browed former Chancellor of the Exchequer for whom impressionist Mike Yarwood coined the catchphrase ‘Silly Billy’; the wit who once famously likened the experience of being lambasted by Geoffrey Howe to being ‘savaged by a dead sheep’.

For 40 years and 11 general elections, Lady Healey stood beside her husband as a silent onlooker to British history. While he was at the forefront, it was her job – as an ‘invisible’ MP’s wife – to organise the removal men when the family’s official residence changed overnight; and to ensure that neither the piano nor the children’s hamster got damaged in the process.

You can read the full version of this article in the September issue of Cotswold Life, on sale from August 23rd, or go to our subsscription offer on the Home Page.

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