Happy Birthday! (30/08/14)

I learned from Daniel Finkelstein's column in The Times that it's Denis Healey's birthday today and that this grand old Labour warhorse is a Virgo, like me.

So many happy returns Denis - 97 and not out takes some doing.

Daniel Finkelstein - The Times

A fault not in our stars

Happy birthday Denis Healey. He is 97 today. A fact I know partly because of my obsessive interest in the development of democratic socialist revisionism. And mainly because it is my birthday today as well.

Neither of us, Denis or I, would have made a good prime minister. You may have intuited this already. Your hunch, however, will be raised to the status of certainty upon learning that both of us are Virgos.

This is the theory advanced by Lord Healey’s son, Tim, in an article on his father’s great strengths and flaws. Apparently Virgos “are not known for an ability to handle public life”. To support his theory he points out that Andrew Bonar Law, a Virgo, “was the shortest-serving prime minister of the 20th century, which might give some credence to my theory that Virgos are unsuited to premiership”.

I must remember to send this to Professor R J Q Adams who, in his otherwise excellent biography of Bonar Law, advances the clearly less credible idea that the prime minister left office because his doctor told him he was about to die of throat cancer. Which he then did.