Denis Healey was one of the most entertaining lunch guests I’ve ever had

Denis Healey and my father Deryk Vander Weyer — a big cheese at Barclays and spokesman for the high-street banks during Healey’s chancellorship — had a lot in common. Both were clever, cultured, iconoclastic products of good Yorkshire grammar schools; both wartime majors and post-war socialists (my father finally turned right when he began to appreciate the merits of Margaret Thatcher); both formidable in argument. ‘Now then, young Deryk,’ the then chancellor used to say, only half joking, ‘You’re the man to run the state bank for us after you’re all nationalised.’

Thirty years later, the mellower Healey of old age came north to Helmsley to give a talk about his photography. On the strength of the 1970s connection, I invited him to lunch: he was one of the most entertaining guests I’ve ever had, radiating bonhomie and mischief, flirting gallantly with my widowed mother, ranging wide across literature and history, battling gamely through blank moments of short-term memory failure.