JAMES CALLAGHAN’S personal achievement was by any standards formidable. He had the least formal education of any prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald.

Among subsequent Labour leaders he was still more isolated, preceded by three graduates (all from Oxford) and succeeded by three.

In addition he was perhaps the nearest approach to a prime minister of working-class background in the 250-year history of the office. The only rivals, MacDonald and David Lloyd George, had ambiguities of origin that defied class classification. Even with Callaghan there were streaks of ambiguity which set him apart from, say, Ernest Bevin.

His father was a chief petty officer. There was no hint of even self-gained privilege in his schooling. “Elementary and Portsmouth Northern Secondary Schools”, his Who’s Who entry ran.

His first job was as a tax officer in the Inland Revenue and he served in the navy during the war. Despite this exceptional provenance, Callaghan made his way up the political ladder determinedly, skilfully, occasionally ruthlessly, by the most orthodox of routes.

He was a politician’s politician: an MP at 33 for a seat to which he came fresh as a young ex-service candidate and which returned him to parliament for 42 years; a junior minister in his late thirties; an effective figure both in the Labour machine and on its front bench in the 13 years of opposition; a compromise candidate for the leadership when Gaitskell died; and then head of all the great departments of state — Treasury, Home Office, Foreign Office, a sweep unequalled by anyone who subsequently became prime minister, at least since Palmerston — before succeeding Harold Wilson in 1976.

He was prime minister for a little more than three years, longer than Anthony Eden or Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not much shorter than Edward Heath, just about the same time as Neville Chamberlain.

With the “winter of discontent” his premiership did not end happily — few do; but it began well — most do; and he survived the difficult middle period with skill and authority. He was an improvement on Wilson’s later years and in sharp contrast with the position 15 years before when he had seemed an inadequate chancellor.

There were few who thought his personality and temperament were not up to the job, yet it would be difficult to say his premiership will rank high.

First, it was not so much too short as ill-placed at the end of the Wilson era. It bears much the same relationship to this as the premiership of Chamberlain (who was also perceived as an improvement) did to the Stanley Baldwin years.

There will be no “age of Callaghan” to look back upon. It will be subsumed into the Wilson age. In a sense this is unfair, for they were very different men. Yet there is a certain rough justice about it.

As Labour party leader Clement Attlee controlled the recalcitrant team with authority which worked because there was then an inherent balance. Hugh Gaitskell, courageously, pulled hard on the bits. Wilson let the team run where it liked.

Callaghan proclaimed discipline but was in practice easy- going with the left. The result was Michael Foot as successor, the breakaway SDP, and the disaster for the party of the 1983 election. His public record was therefore that of a most skilful politician who attained all the highest offices. To what extent did his other qualities enable him to perform with credit in these offices as well as to attain them? His intellectual qualities were not spectacular. He had none of the erratic, quicksilver brilliance of his old rival George Brown. Nor had he the constructive vision of Bevin.

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