Be warned: the mighty Air Force Blue blows away all before him

I was both delighted and unsurprised that Denis Healey made it to 98. One day in the 1970s I took him to lunch at L’Epicure. As he encouraged the waiter to pile his plate higher and higher from the hors-d’oeuvre trolley, my astonishment must have been plain because he grinned and declared: ‘Don’t worry about me — both my parents lived into their nineties.’ Another time, Mrs Oakley and I were in a dusty square in Collioure in south-west France when music began blaring from a loudspeaker to advertise a nearby circus. We looked up to see — along with toothless old ladies in black and pipe-smoking locals playing a vicious game of boules — Denis Winston Healey, in the kind of baggy, knee-length khaki shorts worn in the 1960s by holidaying British males, dancing solo in the dust with a dreamy expression on his face. Denis Healey didn’t care what people thought of him and everything he did he did with confidence.