Premier whose consensual approach failed

James Callaghan: It was a matter of quiet satisfaction to James Callaghan, who died last weekend aged 92, that his record contained…

James Callaghan: It was a matter of quiet satisfaction to James Callaghan, who died last weekend aged 92, that his record contained one achievement that none of his fellow 20th-century British prime ministers could match.

He had held all four of the great offices of state: chancellor of the exchequer (1964-1967), home secretary (1967-1970) and the job he most coveted, foreign secretary (1974-1976), when Wilson's unexpected resignation opened the door to the premiership.

In that light it seems unjust that the moment for which he is still perhaps best remembered was one of his bleakest. In January 1979 Callaghan returned from a week of sun and statesmanship at a Caribbean summit to a chilly London's winter of discontent. "Crisis, what crisis?" was how the Sun's headline misreported the prime minister. What he did say was trouble enough: "I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos."

That comment, followed by electoral defeat and his party's spell in the wilderness, left a stamp of failure on the premiership. And to make it worse, the origins of the episode had been very much Callaghan's doing - his decision, in 1978, against the advice of his chancellor Denis Healey, to try to impose a further pay norm of just 5 per cent.

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It was he who also fatally deferred the expected election of October 1978 to the following spring. He hoped for some economic recovery, but the Winter of Discontent and a general sense that the unions were running the country did for his party and opened the way to 18 years of Conservative rule.

As home secretary during 1967-70 Jim Callaghan saw Northern Ireland move from being a detail in the workings of Whitehall to one of the most urgent problems facing the British government. As the civil rights campaign escalated in 1968, he came under pressure from Labour MPs to intervene directly in Stormont affairs.

The moment came in August 1969 when a beleaguered unionist government, overwhelmed by mounting street violence in Belfast and Derry, appealed to Callaghan to send in British troops "in support of the civil power".

The home secretary's decision marked a major shift in the control of security from Stormont to Westminster. The restoration of an uneasy peace in the subsequent weeks and months saw Callaghan exert increasing pressure on the unionist prime minister, James Chichester-Clark, and his cabinet to accelerate the reform programme.

The home secretary was the driving force behind the Downing Street Declaration of August 19th, 1969, which guaranteed full "equality of treatment for all citizens in Northern Ireland", regardless of politics or creed, while reaffirming the constitutional position. The declaration recommitted Stormont to introduce one-man-one-vote and a points system for housing allocation.

Two weeks after the "battle of the Bogside", Callaghan paid a high-profile visit to the North, meeting the unionist cabinet and making a memorable appearance in the still barricaded Bogside. Accompanied by the local MP, John Hume, he famously used a megaphone to address the eager crowd from the upper window of a terrace house, assuring them that "when it came to injustice, the Labour government could never be neutral."

All the while, the bluff home secretary was, in Brian Faulkner's phrase, "piling the pressure" on Chichester-Clark's cabinet for further reforms including the disarming of the RUC and the disbandment of the B Specials.

Callaghan was personally responsible for the appointment of Sir Arthur Young, a former London police chief as the new chief constable of the RUC, and placed two Whitehall officials in Belfast as Westminster's "watchdogs". While nationalists, long ignored by Stormont administrations, saw him as their protector, unionists disliked his forays into the North's "internal affairs".

In retrospect, Callaghan has been criticised by the veteran SDLP figure, Austin Currie, and others for not going further and abolishing the Stormont regime and introducing direct rule in August 1969. The continued existence of Stormont allowed the emerging Provisional IRA to depict the British army as the puppet of the "Orange Ascendancy" over the next three fateful years. In reply, Callaghan countered that British public opinion would not have been ready for such a momentous move in 1969.

There can be no doubt, however, that Callaghan was in favour of much more radical change in Northern Ireland in 1969-70, but was warned off by both Harold Wilson and the defence secretary, Healey, who felt that Chichester-Clark should be pushed "only as far as he wanted to go".

As a British nonconformist with a distant Irish background, "Gentleman Jim" was able to empathise with both Northern communities, though a realist about the deep-seated nature of the problem.

As early as September 1969 he could confide to his cabinet colleague Richard Crossman that there was no "quick fix". "He anticipated that the honeymoon [between the Catholic community and British troops] wouldn't last very long . . . The terrible thing was that the only solutions would take 10 years, if they would ever work at all."

Callaghan's responsibility for Northern Ireland ended when Labour was defeated in June 1970. Yet his continued interest in the situation was reflected in his book on the Irish crisis, A House Divided, published in 1973. As prime minister (1976-79) he appointed the security-minded Roy Mason as secretary of state.

As his minority government struggled for survival in 1979 he secured UUP support by agreeing to extra Westminster seats for Northern Ireland, angering the SDLP whose then leader, Gerry (now Lord) Fitt, helped to bring down the government.

In later years Callaghan seemed to favour an independent Ulster and was critical of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement as "a bone in the craw of the Protestants". History will see his contribution to Irish affairs as generally well-meaning, though historians may adjudge that he made a tactical blunder by not suspending the discredited Stormont regime in 1969 and thereby possibly averting later bloodshed.

Leonard James Callaghan was born in Portsmouth. His father, a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy, died when the boy was nine, leaving his mother to struggle on without the aid of a pension. His education was patchy and inadequate.

That, for purely financial reasons, he never went to university was one of the blights of his life. The Callaghans were Baptists, and through Sunday-school teaching he met his wife, Audrey, in Maidstone, Kent, where in 1929 he had found a job as a clerk in an Inland Revenue office. Here he became a smart, enthusiastic and disputatious trade unionist.

In 1936 he became a full-time union official. He was also now increasingly involved with the Labour Party and after naval service in the War in the 1945 Labour landslide he took Cardiff South from the Tories. By 1947 he was on the front bench as parliamentary secretary for transport. Later he prospered in opposition, first as spokesman on transport, then on fuel and power, and later as shadow colonial secretary and shadow chancellor.

He had stood without much success in 1960 as a compromise candidate for the deputy leadership, and was very much the outsider in the leadership contest with Wilson and George Brown which followed Gaitskell's death in 1963. With Labour back in office in 1964 with a tiny majority, Wilson installed him as chancellor. He inherited a negligently managed economy and a massive balance-of-payments deficit requiring an emergency budget with stringent public spending cuts.

In 1966 Labour was re-elected with a 100-seat majority. Callaghan returned to the Treasury and again was soon engulfed in a crisis that led to devaluation in October 1967. A straight job swap with Roy Jenkins made him home secretary where he was conservative rather han progressive.

Back in opposition in 1970 he served in various frontbench roles, and when Labour returned to office in 1974 Wilson gave him the foreign secretaryship and the chance to develop his interests: especially Africa and the Atlantic alliance. He engineered the successful result of the 1975 referendum which was supposed to settle for good Britain's place in the European Community.

And with Wilson's surprise resignation in March 1976, he became the overwhelming favourite for the succession. Once again he faced a burgeoning balance-of-payments crisis. Inflation had broken all records under Wilson, and the left was perpetually restive with a new leader too closely identified for their tastes with the party's right.

His chancellor, Healey, was forced in the autumn of Callaghan's first year to turn to the IMF for help and to pay the alarming price, in terms of severe public spending cuts, which the IMF demanded. But Callaghan adroitly pulled together a majority within the cabinet in support of the chancellor. Labour made progress under his stewardship. The carefully crafted pay policy agreed with trade union leaders was bringing inflation back under control. By January 1978 the rate was down to single figures for the first time since October 1973.

The pact with David Steel's Liberals had disposed of the constant threat that the government might collapse at any moment. By the autumn of 1977 Labour's recovery looked quite astonishing, with the party now level pegging in the polls with the Tories.

A year later Labour were well ahead. And then the dam burst, and Callaghan and his government, along with the gentler, consensual, non-confrontational approach that he represented, were swept away for good by the tide of triumphal Thatcherism.

He stayed on as leader after his defeat in May 1979, while the party indulged in a bout of vindictive blood-letting. Callaghan himself was the target of much of the vitriol.

His hand was forced by the party's decision to switch the choice of leader from the party's MPs to an electoral college, where unions and constituency parties commanded a clear majority. So he stepped down to ensure a contest under the old system. But the tactic failed: on November 4th, 1980, MPs chose Michael Foot rather than Denis Healey.

Callaghan remained in the Commons for a further seven years and then went to the Lords. He is survived by his two daughters, Margaret and Julia, and his son, Michael.

Leonard James Callaghan: born March 27th, 1912; died March 26th, 2005