Thank God, then, for the pigeon. We meet on the terrace at the House of Lords where the crumbs of a previous collation are causing some feathered excitement. One pigeon lands briefly on my head. Healey, who has been sitting immobile like an old cat missing a few teeth, bored and indifferent to the mice frolicking at his feet, opens his red-rimmed blue eyes a little wider. "I asked him to come along," he says, eyebrows twitching like antennae. "I said, 'I've got a bird out here who needs going over.' "
Ostensibly, we have met to discuss Labour and the single European currency. Lord Healey, a member of David Owen's New Europe group, left his Sussex garden recently to speak out, along with Nigel Lawson - "of all people" - against joining. He's been on Sky the day before this interview, "though you get paid for that". He's always been pro-Europe, anti-euro, "and my views have just been confirmed by what's happened and I'm always interested when you get someone like Eddie George saying it's a mistake". But he won't be drawn any more than that, won't discuss the ferrets fighting in a bag, apart from to say that Hague stole that phrase from someone, "probably from me".
"It's a boring subject," he says. And as for being involved in the New Europe group and its "hard-hitting" white paper: "I say 'involved'... I just supported the thing which I suppose David probably wrote."
He thought, he adds, that the interview was to be about "this sudden interest in aged obesity". After spells of gout and diabetes, he has recently lost weight. There is still a sizeable stomach under the jacket of his shiny blue suit, but there is a empty envelope of skin between his neck and his chin. "Do you want my clothes off?" he says. I tell him he's attained the status of statesman. He says he hasn't. "A statesman is a dead politician." What are you then? "I'm in the home of the living dead which is betwixt and between. The House of Lords." And he laughs, but his face hardly moves.
He is 82 now and it is eight years since the politician believed by many to be the great Labour leader we never had - "brilliant and brutal" in the words of the Guardian's Hugo Young - gave up his seat as MP for Leeds East. He vacated his last cabinet post, as opposition spokesman for foreign affairs, in 1987. It is 21 years since he was active in government, as chancellor of the exchequer at the time of Margaret Thatcher's 79 election victory. It is even 11 years since he wrote his bestselling autobiography, The Time of My Life, a work which earned him £150,000 and which he refers you back to at intervals as if all activity stopped there. It is a long time to hang out in your hinterland and, Healeys living as long as they do (his father died at 92, his mother at 99), there is more time to come.
Does he enjoy retirement? "I enjoy my retirement, I don't particularly enjoy being retired, if you see what I mean. But I'm quite active. I'm reading Charlotte Brontë at the moment. I have my garden, my photography. I paint a bit, though none of my pictures are worth much. Occasionally I even talk to young ladies who work on newspapers." He enjoys the Lords, thinks Margaret Jay is "a very able woman, very attractive too". He stops a passing Norman Lamont for a chat. "This is just like a club really," he says after Lamont has gone, "much nicer, much less party than the Commons." So he doesn't watch the goings-on next door with his fingers twitching? "No," he says shortly. "The only point of being a politician is to do things, not just to talk about them."
He calls the Blair, Brown, Prescott triumvirate the "Holy Trinity". "They're a perfect mix, really. Each has qualities the other lacks. Prescott is extremely down to earth and very much in touch with how ordinary people think. Blair is a charismatic figure with a silver tongue and..." There is a pause. He seems lost for a moment. "Brown. Brown has a very powerful mind and I think he's a very good chancellor, and a prime minister who doesn't have a good chancellor is finished." He was a "pretty good" chancellor himself, he adds, though everybody in the party hated him "because you have to deny them all the time" and there was that spot of bother with the IMF.
"That was the most tiring time I ever had, negotiating what I thought were the most lenient conditions and then trying to get your cabinet colleagues to agree when they don't regard them as lenient. But it's a very different world now. Very different economy. We are no longer one of the world's three great powers. And of course Gordon hasn't yet had the sort of crisis which the oil crisis produced for me. But..." he adds, and one can't ignore the little smile, "that is always a possibility."
Does he think Brown, unlike Healey, might make leader himself one day? "He doesn't have the face for it."
Politics, he continues, has changed since "those days". "The public meeting is finished so you only really meet politicians now if you go to their surgeries and very few people do that, and otherwise they're just faces on the box so they feel more distant." Do politicians still have hinterlands? "Chris Smith is very interested in the arts. Tony loves travel. He loves culture, too, in a sense, otherwise he wouldn't be so interested in Italy. But it's a busier job now, so much faster..." There are fewer jokes, too, he says, far fewer people being savaged by dead sheep, or nuzzled by old rams.
"Disraeli made brilliant jokes and humour and wit have always played a major role in politics. You see it in Trollope. There are many quotes from him.... they're in my book. But now you don't get people deliberately making people laugh. People get laughed at despite themselves." Maybe the rhetorical putdown has been replaced by the spin? He looks fierce for a moment. Whoever would have guessed Healey would be on message? "You need people like Peter Mandelson with that ability to present things. I hardly know Alastair Campbell but I have a great sympathy for him because he spent some of his childhood at Keighley where I was brought up.
"One thing is still the same," he goes on sternly. "There has always been a tradition of thinking that politicians are nastier than other people. But in my experience - and I have lived in many different worlds, politics, the arts, contact with the church though I'm not a believing Christian - at the top of any profession you have exactly the same kind of jungle war. It's true that if a bishop stabs another in the back you can't see the blood flowing down because he wears a red surplice, but that's the only difference. When people are competing for fame or position, then it's a jungle war."
Next week, Lord Healey and Edna, his wife of 55 years, are off to Greece on a freebie. Healey has to go to a meeting in Thessalonika - "Oh, it'll be about everything that is happening in the world with a lot of Europeans, Americans, Japanese and Arabs, that sort of thing." He's not being paid, which galls a little. "In the old days I used to get £5,000 a time. Not bad, hmm? Though not as good as advertising. I spent half an hour once just sitting there, pretending I wasn't, with somebody else's hands making scrambled egg with smoked salmon for Sainsbury's and I got £50,000." They used his eyebrows on buses once. "Can't remember what for. They're very useful eyebrows. I once shaved them off and my trousers fell down so I had to let them grow again. You don't believe me, do you dear?"
The more he jokes, the less humour seems to emanate from Healey. When asked who "his chums" were, he gets caught up in the word. "Chums? Chums?" he says, as if alienated by the concept. "I don't hang out with people in that sense and never have. I've always been a loner. I'd rather spend time with my family." He missed out on a lot of his children's childhood (two girls and a boy), and can't remember how many grandchildren he has. "Um... er... come on, lad. Four. We've got four."
Lady Healey, he tells me, is writing two books at the moment, one about Emma Darwin, the other about "the wife of that champagne socialist called Denis Healey". He watches my face to see the penny drop. "I don't like champagne actually," he said, "I like whisky and ginger wine." A whisky mac, I say. He looks engaged for the first time, enthusiastic. "That's right. Exactly so. Yes, yes, yes."
When Big Ben strikes the hour, Healey looks at his watch. He isn't, he reminds me, being paid. Not even in euros. He shows me out. We get lost in the kitchens on the way.
