James Callaghan

Biography

James Callaghan was born in Portsmouth in 1912 into a working-class family. He left school early, worked as a tax inspector in the Inland Revenue and became a trade union official in the 1930s, and served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Elected Labour MP for Cardiff South in 1945, he was parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Transport from 1947, where he promoted zebra crossings, and then parliamentary and financial secretary to the Admiralty.

When Labour returned to power in 1964, Harold Wilson made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. He struggled with balance-of-payments deficits and pressure on sterling until the pound was devalued in November 1967, when he moved to the Home Office and oversaw the deployment of troops to support the police in Northern Ireland. As Foreign Secretary from 1974 he renegotiated Britain's terms of membership of the European Communities and backed the Yes side in the 1975 referendum, becoming the only person to hold all four Great Offices of State.

Callaghan succeeded Wilson as Labour leader and prime minister in April 1976. His government took a large loan from the International Monetary Fund during the 1976 sterling crisis and relied on a pact with the Liberals. After the strikes of the 1978–79 Winter of Discontent, it lost a confidence vote by a single vote on 28 March 1979, and Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives won the election in May. He led the opposition until 1980, was Father of the House from 1983 and entered the House of Lords as Baron Callaghan of Cardiff in 1987. He died in 2005, the longest-lived former British prime minister.