James Callaghan
Labour Party
Image credit: James Callaghan prime minister of the United Kingdom, Photo: Christian Lambiotte, 1975. © European Communities, 1975/EC, CC By 4.0
James Callaghan
There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.
Labour Party
April 1976 - May 1979
5 Apr 1976 - 4 May 1979
Image credit: James Callaghan prime minister of the United Kingdom, Photo: Christian Lambiotte, 1975. © European Communities, 1975/EC, CC By 4.0
Key Facts
Tenure dates
5 Apr 1976 - 4 May 1979
Length of tenure
3 years, 29 days
Party
Labour Party
Spouse
Audrey Moulton
Born
27 Mar 1912
Birth place
Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
Died
26 Mar 2005 (aged 92 years)
About James Callaghan
James Callaghan was Prime Minister between 1976-79. He was a shrewd and effective politician and was generally well liked. But he was unable to resolve Britain’s deep economic and industrial relations problems during the late 1970s. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 doomed his premiership.
James Callaghan was the son of a First World War navy veteran who died when he was just 9 years old. His mother received a pension from the first Labour government in 1924, and she became a Labour supporter. When he turned 17, he got a job at the Inland Revenue, where he both met his future wife and became involved in trade union politics. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Navy as a naval intelligence officer, initially in Whitehall and then on the aircraft carrier HMS Activity in the Far East.
Elected Labour Party MP for Cardiff South in 1945, he became a minister in 1947. During the years of opposition (1951-64) he became associated with the Gaitskellite faction of the party, opposing policies like unilateral nuclear disarmament. In 1963, upon Gaitskell’s sudden death, Callaghan ran for party leadership, but had to settle for third place.
During Wilson’s 1964-70 government, Callaghan served as first Chancellor (1964-67) and then Home Secretary (1967-70). When Wilson returned to office in 1974, Callaghan was appointed as Home Secretary again. It was Callaghan that Wilson asked to renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership of the EC before the referendum of June 1975.
Wilson retired in 1976, and Callaghan announced his intention to run for Labour leader and Prime Minister. He defeated Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Denis Healey, and Anthony Crosland.
Callaghan’s premiership was difficult. He had to deal with a divided Labour Party, Cabinet splits, a weak economy, and no real majority in Parliament.
In late 1976, the government approached the IMF for a loan, with Callaghan persuading the Cabinet to agree to the terms, which involved sharp spending cuts. He also negotiated with the trade unions to accept limited pay restraint.
With the situation apparently stabilised, many expected Callaghan to call an election in late 1978. He did not do so. That winter, the unions demanded large pay rises, and went on strike when they could not be met. The ensuing ‘Winter of Discontent’ doomed Callaghan’s government. After being defeated in a Vote of No Confidence in March 1979, an election was called, and Callaghan was defeated.
At the time, and after, Callaghan reflected on the defeat as a turning point in British politics, where the old order was changed. In time, this would become a widely held perspective on 1979.
Callaghan continued to play a role in politics, becoming Father of the House in 1983. He was raised to the House of Lords in 1987. He died in 2005.
Callaghan is the only person to have held all four Great Offices of State, having served as Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, and Foreign Secretary. He was also the first Prime Minister since Churchill not to have attended university. He is the only Prime Minister to have served in the Royal Navy.
James Callaghan was generally known as ‘Jim Callaghan’ and was nicknamed ‘Sunny Jim’ because of his optimism and sense of humour. Even at the end of his premiership, he was personally more popular than Margaret Thatcher, though the Conservatives were more popular than Labour.
Premiership
Callaghan had received advanced notice of Wilson’s resignation. When Wilson resigned and a leadership election was called, Callaghan (duly prepared) defeated a strong field of candidates, mostly by virtue of being perceived as a centrist candidate and able to attract support from across the party.
However, once Callaghan entered Number 10, he found that the legacy from Harold Wilson was a bad one. Britain had severe economic problems, with inflation running at 26%.
In 1976, the government asked the IMF for a loan of £3.9 billion. In return the IMF negotiators demanded heavy cuts to government expenditure. In an intense series of meetings, Callaghan persuaded the Cabinet of the necessity of these measures. Denis Healey subsequently announced reductions in public expenditure in the Commons on 15 December 1976.
That autumn, he told the Labour Party conference:
‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’
To compound matters, Callaghan had no majority. In 1977, he concluded a pact with the Liberal Party. As part of these proposals, the government enacted referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1979, with the first achieving a narrow majority, but not enough of the voting population participated for it to pass, and the second being rejected.
By 1978, it seemed that the worst of the economic troubles were over. The economy began to recover with both inflation and unemployment falling. Living standards started to rise.
Callaghan’s main decision for the autumn of 1978 was whether he would call an election. But he decided against it. At the Trade Union Congress that year, he quoted a music hall song ‘waiting at the church’ in his speech, and said that there would be no election until 1979. At that point, Labour was still marginally ahead in the polls, and many historians have since argued that he made a mistake. Callaghan’s strategy was to hold union pay rises down and hope that the economic recovery would become larger the following year.
However, the unions did not accept this, and pushed for much larger pay rises. The winter of 1978 saw strikes by public sector unions across the country. This became known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Callaghan’s easy going manner was pilloried by the press when he returned from the Guadeloupe Conference in early 1979 and told reporters that the idea of ‘mounting chaos’ was ‘parochial’ compared to other countries’ problems. The Sun famously ran the headline ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, though supporters of Callaghan were keen to point out that he never uttered those exact words.
On 28 March 1979, Callaghan’s government fell to a vote of no confidence. He was defeated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the subsequent election.
Parliament
Callaghan was MP for Cardiff South from 1945 to 1987 (the constituency was also known as Cardiff South East and Cardiff South and Penarth).
Callaghan inherited the parliamentary situation at the end of the October 1974 election. Then, Harold Wilson had led Labour to a narrow victory, winning 18 seats and finishing with 319, providing Labour with a majority of 3.
But, by 1977, due to by-elections and defections, this majority had disappeared. That year, Callaghan formed a pact with the Liberal Party. Over four days of discussions, Callaghan agreed terms with the Liberal leader David Steel in March 1977. For a year, the arrangement worked well, but Liberal plans for electoral reform were thwarted, as were Liberal hopes for an income tax cut. In May 1978, Steel announced that the pact would end in September.
The fall of the government, on 28 March 1979, is one of the most dramatic days in British political history. Michael Foot made one of his greatest speeches when summarising the debate for the government. But, amidst parliamentary dramatics, the motion was lost by a single vote.
Personal life
Callaghan married Audrey Moulton in July 1938, on her 23rd birthday. She died on 15 March 2005, and he died 11 days later. They had three children, including Margaret Callaghan, Baroness Jay, a Labour peer.
Key Events
Key Insights
Social Mobility and Prime Ministers
For the first two centuries of the British premiership, the Prime Minister tended to emerge from a privileged background. References Clement Attlee, As it Happened, (London, 1954). James Callaghan, Time & Chance (London, 1987). John Major, The Autobiography, (London, 1999)....
Margaret Thatcher
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