James Callaghan
James Callaghan was prime minister of the United Kingdom from April 1976, when Wilson resigned and the Labour MPs chose him over Foot, to May 1979, when Thatcher beat him, the only person to have held all four great offices of state, the tax inspectors' union official from Portsmouth who never went to university, Sunny Jim, the reassuring uncle of the television age. His three years were the sterling crisis of September 1976, in which the chancellor Healey turned back from Heathrow and the government took a loan of nearly four billion dollars from the IMF on terms that cut public spending and ended, in his own words to the party conference that year, the option of spending your way out of a recession, which was the end of the Keynesian consensus announced by a Labour prime minister before Thatcher had a chance. There was the Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78 that kept the minority government alive, the devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales of March 1979 that failed. There were the Grunwick strike and the fire brigade's strike met by the army's green goddesses. There was the decision in autumn 1978 not to call the election that the polls said he might have won, and the five per cent pay policy the unions broke. There was the winter of discontent, the lorry drivers, the gravediggers of Liverpool and the rubbish in Leicester Square, from which he returned from a summit in Guadeloupe in January 1979 tanned and was reported, in a headline he never said, to have asked crisis, what crisis. The vote of no confidence of 28 March 1979, lost by one after the Scottish nationalists withdrew their support and an Irish MP abstained, was the last such vote to bring down a government. He was born in Portsmouth in 1912, the son of a naval petty officer who died when he was nine, left school at seventeen for the Inland Revenue, and ran the tax officers' union. He served in the navy in the war, and sat for Cardiff from 1945 for forty-two years. He was Wilson's chancellor from 1964 to 1967, resigning after the devaluation he had fought. He was home secretary who sent the troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969, and foreign secretary from 1974 who renegotiated the European terms. He led the party for a year after the defeat. He went to the Lords in 1987 as Lord Callaghan of Cardiff, and farmed in Sussex. He died in March 2005 at ninety-two, eleven days after his wife Audrey of sixty-six years, the day before his birthday. The country he handed to Thatcher was the one she said she had rescued. His own view was that there had been a sea change, and that it was for her.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
