HE was only a possible contender for the title of best prime minister the Labour Party never had, but there is absolutely no doubt that Denis Healey was one of the wittiest and most intelligent ministers the party ever produced.

His death at the age of 98 brings to an end a long life well lived by a man who had what so many politicians nowadays so obviously lack – substance, a hinterland, an experience of living outside the Westminster bubble.

In short he was a “lad o’ pairts”, to use a good Scottish phrase, his wisdom gained at the school of hard knocks.

The worst hard knocks came during the war – he witnessed the death of friends and colleagues – when former pacifist Healey really was a hero, mentioned in dispatches for his role as beach master for the bloody assault on Anzio.

Major Healey’s MBE in 1945 was awarded for military service, and he could have stayed on in the Royal Engineers and become a colonel, but he chose the battlefield of politics.

To that theatre of verbal war he brought a rare wit, as well as an avid curiosity about his many interests outside politics – photography, music and reading, particularly crime fiction and biographies.

His own autobiography, The Time of My Life, is one of the better examples of a political memoir, but in terms of words it is for his aphorisms and witticisms, as well as devastating put-downs, that he will perhaps best be remembered.

Healey was not afraid to take on the seniors in his own party, once saying of Aneurin Bevan that he thought “the best way to win friends and influence people is to kick them in the teeth”. Always on the right wing of the party, despite being a former Communist, Healey was in the forefront of the internal strife against the Militant Tendency, saying: “No election would be won if we go on ideological ego trips or accept the clapped-out dogmas which are now being trailed by the toy-town Trotskyists of the Militant group.”

The old bruiser – “it has never been my nature to turn the other cheek” – enjoyed taunting the left, once saying: “Karl Marx himself preferred a glass of claret to the mug of tea affected by some of his recent converts.”

He really did invent Healey’s Law of Holes – “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging” – and gave Margaret Thatcher a couple of nicknames, “bargain basement Boadicea” and “the Great She-Elephant,” adding “she has an impenetrably thick hide, she is liable to mount charges in all directions and she is always thinking on the trot”.

Mind you, he also quipped about Thatcher on her negative attitude to Europe that she was “shuffling along in the gutter in the opposite direction, like an old bag lady, muttering imprecations at anyone who catches her eye”.

He said that debating with Tory opponent (and long-time friend) Geoffrey Howe was “like being savaged by a dead sheep”, but was equally caustic about his own side, saying that John Prescott “has the face of a man who clubs baby seals”.

He had a word of advice for those who played fast and loose with their tax obligations: “The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.”

He did not start out calling everyone “a silly billy”, but when the impressionist Mike Yarwood made it his catch phrase, Healey enjoyed the joke and took it up with gusto.

Healey was fortunate to be at his peak in an age when blandness was not de rigueur for politicians. He made politics real and genuine, and sometimes even fun.