There are so many memories of Jim Callaghan crowding in on me as I write this piece, but one stands out above all for what it says about this remarkable man. A few months after he had asked me to become foreign secretary I was called out in the middle of a cabinet meeting because suddenly one of my children had become seriously ill.
That afternoon, after spending some hours in Great Ormond Street hospital, of which his wife Audrey was chairman of the governors, I felt I must return to the Commons for prime minister’s questions as Jim was due to speak about the Foreign Office. I slipped in next to him on the front bench feeling completely drained. He said nothing but immediately put his hand firmly on my thigh and kept it there for a while. It was more than a gesture of comfort. I felt a transfusion of strength. That single response did more for me that day than any words could possibly have done. I know of nobody else who could instinctively have got it so right.
It would have been very easy for Jim — himself a former foreign secretary — dealing with someone so young to have interfered and taken into No 10 Downing Street all the key foreign policy decisions. In fact I was amazed how he consciously chose not to interfere. On one occasion Jim actually bothered to ring me up to apologise for fixing up a meeting with the then president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, an old friend of his, who had rung up in a fury because the Rhodesian armed forces had flown in and attacked a guerrilla camp on the outskirts of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.
We agreed I would accompany him for a meeting in Kano, Nigeria, with Kaunda. Flying over the Sahara in a VC-10, the prime minister’s doctor, who was also his local GP, came into our compartment and without any ceremony asked the prime minister to drop his trousers and bend over. He proceeded to give him the gammaglobulin injection against hepatitis. Without demurring Jim obliged with only one condition — that the same thing should be done to me.
There was an underlying informality about Jim that stemmed from his time in the Royal Navy during the war. It left him with a warm regard for the armed services and particularly the navy and it was noticeable that he enjoyed chairing the defence and overseas policy committee of the cabinet, particularly when the chiefs of staff came in uniform. They sensed that his heart was with the services and he demonstrated this on many occasions.
First and foremost in October 1977, when he was one of the first to query Argentine activity in the southern Atlantic and took a hands-on approach to the deployment of a nuclear-powered submarine and two frigates. This meant that we were in a position to intervene if negotiations went wrong and the Argentinians suddenly decided to invade the Falkland Islands. To this day
I believe that if he had still been prime minister in 1982 the islands would never have been invaded.
Another example of his steadiness and seriousness about defence matters was a determination that, though he did not feel able to make a decision over a successor to the Polaris submarine missile system until there had been an election in 1979, he ensured that either he or, as it turned out, Margaret Thatcher, had every piece of information necessary to make such a decision. He had cleared the way for continued American co-operation on any successor system with President Carter at Guadaloupe.
Indeed the whole manner of his handing over power to Margaret Thatcher was an example for all future prime ministers. He was graceful and dignified in defeat. He left her a personal letter about nuclear questions. People often recall his reflective words, as polling day approached, to his senior policy adviser: “You know there are at times, perhaps once every 30 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. I suspect there is now such a sea change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”
He was a Labour man to his roots and in the greatest crisis in his prime ministership during the winter of discontent there was one very poignant moment when in the cabinet someone suggested he should make a broadcast and confront the trade unions. He replied that he had frequently contemplated doing so but couldn’t convince himself that afterwards the situation would be improved. In fact he probably underestimated how a call from him to the traditional values of trade unionism would have influenced many in the Labour movement, particularly as we reached the stage when even the dead were not being buried. He was ready to confront the trade unions but he was not ready to risk a confrontation that would devastate the Labour party. And that was perhaps his Achilles heel.
Nevertheless he faced up to the necessity to respond to the International Monetary Fund in 1976 soon after he became prime minister and with Denis Healey was the first to give monetary discipline the weight which was then applied through the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher.
This provided the basis for the reversal of our relative economic decline and the long period of sustained economic growth which we enjoy today.
When the historians look back on Jim Callaghan’s career I suspect that he will be credited for giving the country in the 1975 referendum on the European Community the opportunity to demonstrate the wholehearted support for British membership that was never present in 1972 when we joined.
The referendum was not won by those of us who had supported entry in 1971 but by Wilson and Callaghan, who had opposed the terms of entry and through the device of renegotiation had been able to demonstrate in a pragmatic common-sense way that it was in Britain’s interest to remain.
As the years passed Jim became almost an enthusiast for British membership but he was always careful in his approach. In 1978 he masterminded the strategy of formally joining the European monetary system while staying out of the all important exchange-rate mechanism, thereby establishing a precedent for our opting out of the euro currency at the time of Maastricht.
Yet as I look back I believe Jim Callaghan will be remembered for something else. He fulfilled each of the four great offices of state with progressively greater skill and judgment. He ended as a prime minister who earned the respect of even those who disagreed with his politics. He believed in cabinet government and presided over a happy ship where colleagues from left and right of the party could exchange views with a measure of trust and confidence that we have not seen under any prime minister since. This can be called old-style politics or old Labour if one wishes but I would prefer to call it honest government.
When I saw him last summer in his East Sussex farmhouse he spoke of the past and of the present with generosity and a twinkle in his eye. As I left I knew not for the first but sadly for the last time that I had been with a good man who has had a huge influence on my life.
