Pushing tolerance to the limit, Healey even has good words for Harold Wilson. At the time, Healey's contempt for Wilson's opportunism matched Wilson's fear of Healey's competence: the multilingual Healey was uniquely qualified to be Foreign Secretary, so Wilson kept him busy with every post except that. The good words make Healey's portrait of Wilson even more devastating. In R.H.S. Crossman's long, detailed and hilariously self-approving parliamentary diaries, the portrait of Wilson is devastating too, but Crossman was a zany man who amply merited Healey's one-line dismissal: "A Machiavelli without judgment is a dangerous colleague." Healey is too well-mannered to argue for his own intellectual superiority over most of his coevals, but the superiority is plain. As with Roy Jenkins, you wonder about the amount of coincidence it must have taken to ensure that he did not become Prime Minister. In a Presidential system, Healey would have for certain taken the top spot, because he was dynamite on TV. In the British system, however, the party must be pleased before the people, and never since Gaitskell has an intellectual managed to please the Labour Party, unless, like Wilson, he is ready to wear disguise, or, like Michael Foot, to talk shapeless waffle on his feet in order to offset his scholarly precision on the page. Besides, Healey was an unequivocating advocate of nuclear deterrence, and would have had a chance at the leadership only if he had equivocated. (Foot, who was helped to the leadership by his advocacy of the opposite, equivocated in the other direction in order to win the general election, and the strain helped to ensure that he clamorously lost it.) Healey never flaunted his culture, but he could not conceal it. It was there in the way he talked, and even in the way he listened. He might demolish somebody else's argument in a few sentences, but he took it in first.

So Healey had the credentials to detect intolerance in Gaitskell. Our quoted passage is made energetic by the analysis of why the Cabinet meeting goes on too long. But the way the passage is illustrated is what shows why Healey's memoir is of such unusual quality. The reference to Dean Rusk is not dragged in. It just appears at the right spot with perfect naturalness. Healey works the same quick magic at least once per paragraph throughout the book. Other people's observations decorate his. If his were not so good, the co-opted aphorisms would look like medals on a dummy. But they are not just worthy of their place, their place is worthy of them, and so everybody shines. Churchill never sounded better than when quoted by Healey. As Secretary of Defence, Healey frequently played host to Montgomery, who would drop in for a chat when he was up in London visiting the House of Lords. Montgomery was a lonely man by then, with no object in life beyond getting the rules changed so that nobody except him could be called a Field Marshal. The reminiscence is almost touching. But Churchill's verdict on Monty is quoted to stiffen it up: "In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable; in Nato, thank God, invisible." Healey has an ear for rhythm, and anyone who has that will hear rhythm wherever it occurs. He was delighted by every sharp mind he met. His reputation for brutality might have arisen among those who knew that they did not delight him. There was a sharp critical ability at the heart of his wide powers of appreciation, and his excellent memoirs are a reminder that we should value the kind of figure more interested in cultivating his mind than polishing his image, even though he is likely to be sidelined by a man who is better at the latter than the former.