THERE was a tragic element to James Callaghan’s career. His life was devoted to the trade union movement and to the Labour Party but in the end he was powerless to prevent the one from tearing the other apart. It was his fate to have to stand impotently on the sidelines as the organised muscle of British trade unionism put on a display of such brow-beating and bullying that the public resolved to keep the political wing of the labour-industrial movement out of office for the next four general elections. Even when Tony Blair returned to No 10, it was as leader of a party virtually unrecognisable from the one over whose defeat and effective self-annihilation the last Labour Prime Minister had presided.

But, paradoxically, Callaghan was by no means an inconsiderable Prime Minister. He possessed both gravitas and popular appeal and, although by the time he succeeded Harold Wilson in April 1976 he had been a Labour MP for more than 30 years, his performance in the top job surprised and impressed even those who had been his more hostile colleagues.

He was, in fact, much better at being Prime Minister than at any of the other very senior government jobs that he held. This may have been partly because the legacy of economic and political difficulties which he inherited required a firm judgment and the exercise of authority rather than any display of dexterity or nimble footwork. He may never have had the guile of Wilson but he brought to No 10 something more important — the ability to convince both critics and supporters (all, in fact, but the mindless militants who eventually brought his Government down) that, even in dealing with such a vexed question as incomes policy, he said what he meant and meant what he said.

Callaghan’s career as Prime Minister can be divided into two parts. Until October 1978 he was as much in control as it was reasonable to expect, given the challenge and the hazards he faced. His Government made many mistakes, but his own personal performance was never anything but formidable. Yet after he “ducked” an October 1978 general election — an election that even most of his Cabinet thought he was going to call — both his touch and his luck seemed to desert him.

Most crucially, there were the ugly public sector strikes of the early months of 1979 which, in the eyes of a resentful electorate, effectively destroyed Labour’s claim to be able to “handle” the trade unions. Then his Government crumbled — losing a vote of confidence on the floor of the House of Commons — in face of the ignominious results of the Scottish and Welsh referendums on devolution. The Prime Minister’s besetting sin may never obviously have been hubris — complacency was more like it, as reflected in the famous apocryphal remark, “Crisis, what crisis?” — but it was certainly nemesis that overtook him. It was a brutal end to a premiership that, on the whole, had served the country well for much of the time.

Leonard James Callaghan was born in Portsmouth, the son of a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy. His father was Irish and his mother, a widow when she married for the second time, came from Plymouth. Apart from four years in Brixham, where, having retired from the Navy, his father had become a coastguard, he was brought up almost entirely in Portsmouth. When the young Callaghan was nine, his father died and his mother was forced to take her son and daughter to live in a succession of rented rooms. He thus knew poverty at first hand in a way that no previous postwar Labour leader had done.

Nevertheless, thanks to a £2-a-term grant from the Ministry of Pensions, Callaghan was able to move from the local primary school to Portsmouth Northern Grammar School, which he left at 17 to start work as a junior tax officer in the Inland Revenue. He was quite bright enough to have gone on to university — the lack of an academic background always rankled with him afterwards — but the straitened circumstances of the family ruled that sort of option out.

Stationed at Maidstone, he was introduced to the writings of Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and, largely by accident, became a delegate to the area meetings of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation. Before long he had been elected a branch secretary and a member of the union executive. In 1936 he was appointed the union’s assistant secretary and resigned his Civil Service post.

Two years later he married a domestic science teacher from Maidstone, Audrey Elizabeth Moulton. He had joined the Labour Party in 1931 but his main energies were devoted to the union, in whose service he was becoming a skilled and effective negotiator.

It was the war which swept Callaghan into Labour politics. In 1942 he joined the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman, and served with the East Indies fleet, then stationed in Ceylon. Later, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the RNVR and served in the Admiralty. By the last year of the war it was clear that a general election could not be long delayed. Harold Laski, who had spotted him through his white-collar union activities, urged him to go into Parliament.

In 1944 he was adopted as prospective Labour candidate for Cardiff South, and in the Labour landslide of July 1945 he was elected to the House of Commons. John Parker, Under-Secretary at the Dominions Office, asked him to act as his Parliamentary Private Secretary. Five months later, in December 1945, he was one of a small group of Labour rebels who voted against the American loan agreement.

The next day he honourably resigned his position as PPS. But this was no permanent setback to his career (his boss lost his job a few months later, anyway). Callaghan went on to speak frequently in the House and was chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Defence and Services Committee.

From 1947 to 1951 he was a junior minister, first, 1947-50, at the Ministry of Transport and then, 1950-51, at the Admiralty, where he was Financial Secretary. He was brisk, competent and increasingly effective at the dispatch box. But he was not a leading figure and, if Labour had remained in government, it might have taken him years to rise much higher on the ministerial ladder.