Tributes were paid to the "startlingly brilliant" writer and film-maker Edna Healey who has died, aged 92.
Healey, the wife of the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey, died of heart failure in the early hours of yesterday morning.
She was the first from her Gloucestershire grammar school to go to Oxford University, where she met her husband, and graduated to become a teacher before going on to balance the duties of a professional political wife with a successful career.
During the 1987 election her husband rowed with the TV-am presenter Anne Diamond when questioned over Edna's use of private health insurance for a hip operation.
She was the author of several books. Her first, Lady Unknown – a biography of the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts – was published in 1978 and won a Yorkshire Post Literary Award. Labour's former deputy leader Lord Hattersley said this was the best of her books.
She made two film documentaries – Mrs Livingstone, I Presume and One More River: The Life of Mary Slessor in Nigeria.
When she published Part of the Pattern: Memoirs of a Wife at Westminster, Healey revealed she was the real author of the term her husband was thought to have coined to describe the need for politicians to have interests outside politics. "That's my word," she told an interviewer. "Denis usually corrects people. I said that Margaret Thatcher has no political hinterland."
Hattersley said: "She was a splendid woman but in many ways subjected herself to Denis. She very much wanted to be his 'helpmate' – she looked after and indulged him – but she also had an intellect that she knew it would have been criminal to waste and so she pursued projects.
"She was also a woman of great courage and temperament, coping for many of the past years with great illness."
The former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, said: "I remember we all went to Moscow in what must have been 1984 and it was the winter time because it was so cold. We were travelling by train from Moscow to what was then Leningrad.
"We were walking down the platform and I started to hum Lara's Theme from Dr Zhivago and before I knew it Denis was waltzing with Glenys and I was waltzing with Edna.
"She was in her 70s but beautiful even then. She was startlingly brilliant. An outstanding woman. And utterly devoted to Denis, and he to her. They worshipped each other."
• This article was amended on 23 July 2010. The original said Edna Healey had attended a Yorkshire grammar school. Her school was in Coleford, Gloucestershire. This has been corrected.
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