Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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engagements in Britain and internationally, including the Berlin Phil-

harmonic and performing with the London Symphony Orchestra and sev-

eral leading US orchestras. One music critic described him as ‘impervious

to criticism’ but noted that ‘while some decried his efforts as those of an

amateur, his presence on the podium regularly created a sense of occasion

– and orchestras responded accordingly’. It has rightly been said that ‘music

freed emotions that he normally kept hidden’.

In 1988 he recorded works

by Beethoven and Boccherini, and his 1971 live recording of Elgar’s

‘Cockaigne’ Overture was released as a CD to mark his 80th birthday. He is

the only former prime minister who could choose some of his own musical

recordings when he appeared on Desert Island Discs. In 1985 he bought a

beautiful 18th century house, Arundells, in the cathedral close at Salisbury,

becoming an active supporter and fund-raiser for the restoration of the cathe-

dral. He would have liked to follow Macmillan in becoming Chancellor of

Oxford University in 1987 but the Conservative vote split – to the beneﬁt

of Roy Jenkins – and Heath came third in the poll.

He had considerable success in the 1970s with best-selling illustrated

books about sailing, music and travel, which brought in around £300,000

in a three-year period. He toured tirelessly to promote the books and hold

signings – he would joke that the unsigned copies of Sailing or Music were

the valuable ones. In 1985 he signed a lucrative deal with publishers for his

memoirs but dragged his feet over them and The Course of My Life did not

appear until 1998, 24 years after he left Number 10. Hodder and Stoughton

paid him £360,000 for the book, and the Sunday Times paid £220,000 for

serialisation rights. He is also said to have half-written but failed to deliver

a seminal book about Europe. The memoirs project almost ﬂoundered more

than once, and a large and ﬂuctuating team of researchers and writers helped

him over the years – Heath himself being no wordsmith. His memoirs received

some decent reviews and included some good stories and vignettes but were

considered overall rather dull, defensive and personally unrevealing.

Heath left £5.4 million in his will, most of it to a charitable foundation

to conserve and allow the public to visit his house in Salisbury. An element

of mystery, as John Campbell says, always surrounded his ﬁnances. A group

of businessmen helped with the cost of the large private ofﬁce and personal

staff he continued to maintain after he left Number 10. Heath was good at

getting others to pay for his travelling expenses and overseas trips. He

earned large fees on the international lecture circuit. Although he never sat

on a British company’s board, he was for 20 years a member of the public

review board of the international accountancy ﬁrm, Arthur Andersen. In

the late-1980s he made a series of television advertisements for English

cheese. Denis MacShane has written of his ‘occult ﬁnancial relationships

with China’. Heath is believed to have made substantial sums from busi-

ness interests there, as an adviser to a state-owned Chinese shipping ﬁrm

and as an adviser on China to investment funds run by Dresdner Kleinwort

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Benson, to the international conglomerate Jardine Fleming, and to a Saudi-

run think-tank.

Heath remained the political curmudgeon to the end. After New Labour

came to power in 1997, he thought Tony Blair was a ‘Thatcherite’ and

‘obviously far more to the right than I am’. In 1998 he joined Labour dissi-

dents in condemning the ‘dubious’ bombings of Iraq and criticised Blair’s

unequivocal support of Clinton and the US. Following the 9/11 terrorist

attacks he told Tony Benn that Blair should ‘pipe down. He’s pretending

he’s the leader of the whole world.’ In the build up to the Iraq war, he

phoned Benn in 2003 to ask him ‘how can we get rid of Blair?’ When Benn

noted that, apart from Spencer Perceval, we have never had any prime-

ministerial assassinations, whereas ‘American presidents seem to be assass-

inated quite frequently [sic]’, Heath replied: ‘not frequently enough as

far as the present one [George W. Bush] is concerned!’ He had wanted the

pro-European Ken Clarke to become Conservative leader and was deeply

disenchanted with the Tory party of William Hague and its visceral anti-

Europeanism. It was claimed Heath once described Hague as ‘a vulgar little

man’, and he said it was a ‘tragedy for the party’ he became its leader.

Hague never consulted him. Under Hague, he complained, the party was

even more right-wing than under Thatcher, and Heath’s comment in 1998

that if he was a young man today he would not join the Conservative Party

was widely publicised.

Living until he was 89 years old, Heath died at Arundells on 17 July

2005. His ashes were buried at Salisbury Cathedral. He had had the long-

est post-premiership of any 20th century prime minister (31 years and

four months – Alec Home, the next longest, living for one week short of

31 years after he left Number 10) and the fourth longest in British history.

But for all the interest and variety of his political and non-political activ-

ities after 1974, there remains a strong sense, as Dennis Kavanagh says, that

Heath’s ‘immense talents and energies had been wasted after his abrupt

removal from public ofﬁce’. He had, as John Campbell argues, ﬂaunted his

independence but had, through his own actions and views and because

of the actions and views of his successors, ended up in ‘the political dog-

house, condemned to a sort of internal exile’. It was, in Campbell’s words, ‘a

sadly wasteful evening to what had been a career of extraordinary dynamism

and purpose’. For a former prime minister to ‘cast himself in open and out-

right opposition to the leadership of his own party’ over such a long period

was indeed ‘a phenomenon unprecedented since the eighteenth century,

and bitterly resented by party loyalists’. There are some parallels with

Rosebery, but he publicly broke with his own party, while Heath continued

to sit in parliament under the colours of his. Heath would probably have

attracted much less ﬂak and odium had he quickly withdrawn from active

politics like Baldwin, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. To stay on the scene

and not to play a loyalist role, serving under successors – like Balfour and

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Home – invited trouble. Heath was neither a successful prime minister nor

a successful former prime minister.

Harold Wilson (left ofﬁce 5 April 1976)

The drivers of the Government Car Service – once described by Tony Benn as

‘the source of all information’ – immediately twigged that Harold Wilson

must be planning to resign when in April 1975 he ordered that in future all

former prime ministers were to have a car and driver for life. ‘The crafty

bugger must be preparing to get out’, was the message that went round the

drivers’ network in a ﬂash, ‘and then he’ll have a car for life’. Until 1970 even

the Leader of the Opposition did not have an ofﬁcial car, but Heath had

agreed one for Wilson when they swopped jobs that year. In 1975 Wilson

returned the favour when Heath was ousted as Tory leader but also made sure

that, when his time came, he would be provided for (he did not own a car of

his own). In June 1976 it was reported that of the ﬁve former prime ministers

then eligible to use ofﬁcial cars, only Wilson and Heath were doing so.

Wilson liked to boast he was the ﬁrst prime minister for nearly 40 years

(since Baldwin) ‘to go voluntarily – not defeated, humiliated in Parliament,

rejected by the electorate, or ill’, though in both cases there are qualiﬁ-

cations over the last point. Secure in the post he was in 1976, as his policy

adviser Bernard Donoughue points out, ‘unchallenged as leader of his Gov-

ernment and his party’. His announcement on 16 March 1976 that he

would resign the premiership, and stay just long enough for the Labour

Party to elect a new leader, was greeted with ‘shocked disbelief’. Even a

close Wilson ally, Barbara Castle wondered exactly what Wilson was up to

and thought there must be ‘more than had met the eye’. A media frenzy

built up with speculation about possible scandals, plots and conspiracies,

involving his controversial aide Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender, murky

business deals, Wilson’s links with Russia, or perhaps a big economic crisis

that was about to erupt. Even though rumours and suspicions persisted for

many years, the conspiracy theorists were wide of the mark. There was no

‘hidden motive or threat’ – Wilson genuinely wanted to retire, had been

planning his resignation for some time, and was not forced out.

Retiring early had been Wilson’s intention for some time. Had he won re-

election in 1970 at the end of his ﬁrst period in Number 10 (1964–70)

he would not have stayed as prime minister for a full term but gone

after about three years in the summer of 1973, having by then passed the

20th century record for continuous service as PM, then held by Asquith. He

was fairly open about this scheme, talking about it to Joe Haines, his press

secretary, and to Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn among Labour politicians.

But having lost to Heath he wanted to return to power ﬁrst and endured

a miserable period of Opposition (1970–74), though a further general

election defeat might have led him to call it quits.

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From the time he became prime minister again, on 4 March 1974, he

had a settled intention to remain no more than two years. The Queen, his

Downing Street ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ advisers, and a number of senior minis-

ters were all told what to expect or dropped hints or read the runes. Despite

a couple of last minute hiccups he stuck to his timetable and went just after

his 60th birthday. Wilson had been at the top for nearly 30 years (he ﬁrst

became a Cabinet minister in 1947) and felt he owed it to his wife Mary

– who intensely disliked political life – to get out before too long. However,

she asked him if he wanted to stay another year to enjoy the Queen’s Jubilee

in 1977, but he was clear he wanted to go. Once he had achieved his aim of

winning the 1975 Common Market referendum and keeping Britain in

Europe, he became bored and fed up with life as prime minister. He felt he

was facing the same old problems and reaching for the same old solutions,

lost his zest and appetite for ofﬁce, began to dread Prime Minister’s Ques-

tions and to need too many brandies beforehand, and after, and found the

job wearisome. Marcia Williams tried to persuade him to stay but other

close aides came to feel that physically, intellectually and psychologically

he was no longer up to the demands of the job. He was winding down over

his last year in Number 10, a shadow of what he had previously been, a

burnt-out case. He seemed often exhausted, and his health was not good,

with several attacks of what his doctor called ‘racing heart’. A civil-service

private secretary said he had had ‘heart attacks’ in 1975–76. His prodigious

memory and razor-sharp intellect were not what they were. The outside world

did not know that his mother, who had died in 1958, had had Alzheimer’s

disease and it is possible Wilson may have feared he could detect early signs of

it in himself. If so, Wilson deserves credit for realising he could and should

not carry on.

In his retirement announcement issued to the press Wilson stated he

would remain in parliament and support his successor – but would refrain

from offering ‘gratuitous advice’ – giving any help he could ‘apart from

accepting a ministerial appointment’. However, in his ofﬁcial biography,

Philip Ziegler – citing interviews with Marcia Falkender and James Callaghan

– says that when Callaghan became prime minister (Wilson’s preferred suc-

cessor) he offered Wilson the post of Foreign Secretary, though he appar-

ently did not expect him to accept it. Wilson had had enough and did not

want to stay in ofﬁce in any capacity, even in a non-departmental post

such as Lord President. There are claims that in November 1976 Callaghan

offered the Treasury to Wilson. Concerned that Healey was exhausted, the

prime minister was considering replacing the Chancellor at that time, and

also approached Roy Jenkins. How serious any offer was is uncertain. But it

is doubtful Wilson would have been equal to the demands of the job in the

middle of an economic crisis that IMF autumn. ‘Harold was a strange thought’,

mused Bernard Donoughue, then head of Callaghan’s Policy Unit, when he

heard the story months later.

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Wilson took considerable pleasure in becoming a Knight of the Garter,

the award being announced on 23 April 1976. In that most un-comradely

of parties, the Labour Party, there were left-wing sniggers and gripes. Tony

Benn thought it was ‘ridiculous’. ‘It is unnecessary’, claimed Bob Cryer MP,

‘because the respect in which he is held by the Labour movement is suf-

ﬁcient reward’. More serious and lasting damage to Wilson’s reputation

came from the publication the following month of his resignation honours

list. Three-quarters of the names passed without comment but immense

controversy surrounded the peerages and knighthoods to various business,

ﬁnancial and show-business ﬁgures who were neither noted Labour sup-

porters nor close to the former prime minister personally, as opposed to

Marcia Falkender. Stories circulated about the so-called ‘lavender list’,

written on her notepaper. The Palace and the Honours Scrutiny Committee

had queried and even vetoed some names and proposed awards. One

was later jailed and another committed suicide following fraud allegations.

A storm of media abuse and criticism broke over Wilson. He had always

regarded the honours system rather cynically as a useful tool of prime-

ministerial power. But while Wilson was not personally corrupt, the

resignation honours scandal was toxic, unsavoury and disreputable, and

left a cloud over his retirement.

Further trouble and damage to his image came in the controversy over

the so-called ‘Wilson plot’. While still prime minister, Wilson had become

convinced that right-wing rogue elements in the secret service – in cahoots

with the CIA, the South African secret service and other shadowy ﬁgures

– had been plotting against him, engaging in ‘dirty tricks’ operations, and

seeking to destabilise or even overthrow his government. When Liberal

leader Jeremy Thorpe resigned following a scandal in May 1976, Wilson

went to his defence, suggesting he was a victim of South African ‘smears’.

Then, when Wilson talked to two journalists (Barry Penrose and Roger

Courtiour) about his suspicions – ‘dark forces … were attacking our demo-

cracy’ – in the hope of putting pressure on the government to investigate

and to appoint a Royal Commission to examine the accountability of the

security services, the whole issue blew up in his face. Newspaper stories

about his claims and the journalists’ book The Pencourt File (1978) made

him appear deluded and paranoid. Prime Minister Callaghan told Benn

that Wilson was ‘just a Walter Mitty’; other insiders regarded his allegations

as bizarre or ‘mad’. An already tarnished ex-prime minister’s stock plum-

meted. Wilson soon regretted talking to the journalists, feeling they had

been used to discredit him, and took a Trappist vow on the subject. Only

much later – following the Spycatcher and Colin Wallace revelations – did it

emerge that Wilson had been on to something and there were legitimate

concerns about how far the security services had been fully under control

in his time. He was to some extent vindicated. ‘Wilson’s allegations of ille-

gitimate activities against him clearly had some foundation’, as Pimlott

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says. But that certain intelligence operatives could convince themselves

that someone with such conservative/monarchist views, allied to a shallow

and gimmicky radicalism, could really be a ‘red under the bed’, a KGB spy

or at the centre of a network of Russian agents, suggests they had not been

keeping Wilson under close enough surveillance.

Bernard Donoughue has written vividly about Wilson’s departure from

ofﬁce:

A plump little man in a slightly crumpled suit, apparently casting aside,

without a backward look, the famous house, the supreme ofﬁce which is

the ultimate objective of any British politician’s dreams. The sharp con-

trast with Margaret Thatcher’s tearful departure fourteen years later is

striking. As with much else, Wilson seemed not really to care …

‘Nothing sticks with him.’ Except for Mary and Marcia, personal rela-

tions did not usually survive beyond their current utility … He seemed

to have no regrets and no proud memories … I felt personal concern for

Harold Wilson as I saw him leave Number 10. I could not imagine what

he would do with his time, deprived of the ﬂow of crises and meetings

and papers and colleagues to manage, on all of which he thrived. He

had too few genuine personal interests to keep him busy and satisﬁed.

Chairing his coming Royal Commission [sic] on the City of London and

writing his colourless story of his administration would not be enough

… He had few real and permanent friends … He seemed to me to be dis-

appearing through that black door into a black hole …

In the diary he kept at the time, Donoughue wrote: ‘I don’t know how he

will cope in the real world of non-politics outside … He cannot go back to

being an active backbencher … He will be lost.’

Wilson ‘didn’t realize that retirement would be as traumatic as it was’,

a former close aide told Pimlott, ‘or that so much of his total existence

had been involved in the job.’ His biographer added ‘the discovery of his

waning news value came as a shock, on top of the wider disorientation of

his lost importance’. He quickly became what Benn called ‘a lonely isolated

ﬁgure’ at Westminster and in the Labour Party; the former premier had

‘absolutely shrunk’ and ‘disappeared from sight’, Benn was writing just

months after his retirement. For a few months Callaghan would occasion-

ally ring him up to consult him about one issue or another, but, as Ziegler

says, ‘Wilson never deluded himself that his reply was listened to with

great deference and little by little the habit died’. Being strongly pro-Israel,

he had told his successor he would back the government on every issue

but would watch its Middle East policy carefully. He went to Number 10 in

September 1976 with some complaints – Callaghan gave him just ﬁve min-

utes and was reportedly irritated by his lobbying. Far from regarding him

as a respected elder statesman, Labour MPs ignored him, treated him as an

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embarrassment, or actively disparaged him – ‘everybody uses the word

“shabby”’, Donoughue recorded in March 1977.

The idea he might come back into power one day – that there would be a

clamour in the party for him to return to take charge in a crisis – was given

some credence, particularly by left-wing ministers. Wilson himself, in a press

interview in March 1976, did not rule it out, saying only it would have to

be ‘a very great crisis indeed … a war situation or a situation I cannot envis-

age’. He said privately to a Number 10 aide he expected to receive the

‘doctor’s mandate to get the country out of the mess’ after he had retired. It

was fantasy politics. In 1978, he told Roy Jenkins he thought the political

outlook was bad, there was not much future for Callaghan’s government or

for the Labour Party, and that a coalition would be necessary – but then

said ‘he would bless it from the outside, but not serve’.

Wilson took on a number of ‘Great and the Good’ assignments imme-

diately after leaving Number 10. In July 1976 he became chairman of an

inquiry into the ﬁnancing of the British ﬁlm industry, a subject in which

he had been interested since the 1940s. A little later he became chairman of

a committee of inquiry into the workings of ﬁnancial institutions in the

UK. This inquiry was a way for the government to kick into the long grass

left-wing demands for nationalisation of the banks and City institutions.

The committee launched a series of detailed studies into aspects of the ﬁnan-

cial system, took three years over its work and came up with only limited

and cautious recommendations, ﬁnally reporting and disappearing largely

without trace in 1980, by which time a Conservative government had been

elected. Wilson enjoyed the work and found it fascinating, but he had not

wanted a radical report and was criticised from within the committee as

‘an awful chairman … very rambling, and often referring matters to sub-

committees which don’t exist’. He allegedly once turned up to a meeting

with a brief case containing nothing but his cigars.

Apart from the City inquiry he spent much time in his ﬁrst few years

of retirement on various writing projects. Two days after leaving Number 10

he started work on a book about the workings of the Cabinet, Number 10 and

Whitehall – the ﬁrst such book to be written by a former prime minister

– ﬁnishing it ten weeks later and seeing it published in October 1976. The

Governance of Britain suffers from the haste with which it was put together,

and shows Wilson to be a constitutional conservative, but is more interest-

ing than detractors often suggest. The following year (1977) he published

A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers with a tie-in television series, proﬁling

12 premiers. Wilson had been discussing this project, from which he made

an estimated £100,000, with David Frost, publishers and TV executives several

months before he had retired – which some close aides felt was dubious

practice when his planned departure was still a secret; Frost’s name was

struck off the resignation honours list because of his direct ﬁnancial involve-

ment with Wilson through this deal. It is a bland coffee-table book. Kenneth

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Morgan pointed out ‘some of his warmest praise goes to Tories, includ-

ing Pitt, Disraeli, and especially Churchill, with some incidental nostalgia

for the foreign policy of Palmerston’. In 1979 Final Term appeared, his self-

justiﬁcatory account of the 1974–76 government – a book the author him-

self admitted was ‘boring’. He had received a quarter of a million pounds

in 1970 for his book about the 1964–70 government and hoped for a

six-ﬁgure sum for this one too, but instead received only around £30,000.

In 1981 he published The Chariot of Israel, a survey of British and American

policy towards Israel in which his sympathies towards the latter state

and people are obvious. His ﬁnal book, The Making of a Prime Minister

1916–1964, published in 1986 when Wilson was on the downward path of

illness and decline, was anecdotal and ghost written.

Wilson made some money from speaking and lecturing in Britain and

the USA after he retired but this activity was curtailed as his health prob-

lems deepened. He made some unsuccessful forays into popular entertain-

ment. He appeared on the 1978 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special TV

show – ‘like some political Archie Rice in The Entertainer’, noted Bernard

Donoughue, ‘doing a song and dance for a few miserable pounds’. In

1979 he discovered that hosting a TV chat-show is more difﬁcult than it

looks, bombing as the host in a programme called ‘Friday Night, Saturday

Morning’ as he woodenly talked to guests Harry Secombe, Pat Phoenix,

Freddie Trueman and Tony Benn. He had said when he resigned he would

not ‘go into industry or take paid employment’. But it was revealed in 1990

he was a paid non-executive director of an import-export company special-

ising in East European trade, for which he had visited Romania in 1985,

perhaps being used to peddle some inﬂuence, open doors and promote trade

with the Ceausescu regime. Wilson had simple tastes and no interest in

amassing personal wealth. After his retirement he lived in a ﬂat in Victoria,

and the Wilsons had a small holiday bungalow on the Scilly Isles. At death

he left £420,000.

Wilson lingered on in a sort of political limbo after 1976, having only

a minimal political role. He spoke only occasionally in the Commons,

making only eight speeches, the last in 1981, before he stood down in

1983. Some of his political interventions were the opposite of helpful, as

when in 1979 he gave press interviews criticising Callaghan’s handling of

the ‘Winter of Discontent’ crisis and suggested he would have done better.

During the 1979 election campaign, in which he took little part, he crit-

icised Labour ministers and praised Mrs Thatcher, saying that Mary Wilson

might vote for her. He did not like the way the Labour Party was going. He

was contemptuous of the Bennite left and the ‘bed-sitter inﬁltrators’, con-

cerned about the adoption of a unilateral nuclear disarmament policy, but,

despite Shirley Williams once being a favourite of his as a possible suc-

cessor, not supporting those who broke away to form the SDP. He played no

part in the 1980 leadership contest following Callaghan’s resignation, but

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is known to have voted, eccentrically, for Denis Healey in the ﬁrst ballot

and the left-wing Michael Foot in the second. In 1983 after having given

another interview unhelpful to Labour’s cause to the Daily Mail just

before the general election, he moved to the Lords with a life peerage.

He spoke only a few times there, making speeches on higher education

in March 1984 (he was Chancellor of Bradford University until 1985) and

on unemployment in May 1984, his last (brief) intervention coming in

June 1986. To Neil Kinnock, Labour leader after 1983, Wilson was almost

an un-person, someone to be scapegoated for past failures and broken promises

when he was not being ignored.

Wilson lasted 19 years after stepping down but was robbed of what could

have been a more fruitful period in his life when he succumbed to Alzheimer’s

disease. He had several major operations for colon cancer in 1980 and

was never the same again. His memory had been going before then but

the decline accelerated afterwards. As the curtain of oblivion descended on

him, he could still be seen around the Lords, gently shepherded by his

wife, who nursed him devotedly, and a few old friends, but formal public

appearances became infrequent. Of his old political colleagues only Roy

Jenkins (who had defected to the SDP) still kept in touch with him. In the

1990s Mary Wilson decided it was time to retire from public life altogether

and the Scilly Isles became their sanctuary.

An almost forgotten ﬁgure

Wilson died, aged 79, on 23 May 1995 at St Thomas’s Hospital in London,

and was buried on the Scilly Isles.

James Callaghan (left ofﬁce 4 May 1979)

In old age James Callaghan (Labour prime minister 1976–79) said he would

not be surprised to be considered as the worst prime minister for more than

200 years. He felt he must carry the can for the ‘winter of discontent’ – the

widespread trades-union strikes that paralysed and helped destroy his gov-

ernment – and that he should have taken ‘more initiatives’ when he was in

Number 10. He was too harsh on himself. Historians and political scientists

have actually ranked him in a far-from-disastrous ‘mid-table’ position when

evaluating the performance of 20th century PMs. Given his economic and

political inheritance, he was a better prime minister than he was given

credit for in the immediate aftermath of his 1979 defeat. He was prime

minister for three years and 29 days, only four other 20th century premiers

having a shorter tenure of ofﬁce. But for his skills as a tough political ﬁxer,

his government could have crashed into the rocks long before 1979. After

losing a vote of conﬁdence in the Commons, the ﬁrst government to do so

for more than 50 years, he and his party went down to an emphatic defeat

in the ensuing general election, one which Callaghan never expected to

win. It was even, in some sense, a relief. As he later recalled: ‘As a matter of

fact, I didn’t mind leaving. Because I’d got to the stage when I thought,

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“well (a) we can’t win, (b) I don’t know what to do next anyway.” … I didn’t

want to stay on.’

Callaghan was 67 when he left Number 10. He was four years older

than Harold Wilson and he had expected to retire after two or three years

as Foreign Secretary until Wilson’s surprise resignation unexpectedly opened

the door to Number 10 for him. In the 1970s, as he moved into his sixties,

he was more mellow and relaxed, ﬁnding the satisfactions of family life

increasingly attractive, enjoying his farm, and comfortably off.

While

he was willing to take his chance when it came in 1976 and, until the ﬁnal

few months, enjoyed being prime minister, he seems psychologically to

have been more able to accept, and more reconciled to, the loss of ofﬁce

and power than some other prime ministers.

Had he followed his personal inclination in May 1979 Callaghan would

have resigned immediately as Labour leader, leaving the party to ﬁnd

a new leader. Having been in active politics for over three decades, it

would have been a natural time to bow out. Given the Conservative

majority of 43 and a likely normal term for the new parliament, he

would be in his early seventies at the time of the next general election.

But he was persuaded to stay on and unanimously re-elected. His 17 months

as Leader of the Opposition were, he would admit, one of the unhappiest

periods in his life. Within a week of the general election he told Denis

Healey he planned to stay on just long enough to ‘take the shine

off the ball’ for him,

by which he meant getting the party over the

immediate pain and bitterness of defeat, and standing up to the Left,

in the hope of smoothing the way for his preferred successor. The pre-

cedents were not encouraging. After 1951 Attlee had hung on at a roughly

similar age, trying to inﬂuence the succession, by blocking Morrison,

but the party descended into civil war and languished in Opposition for

13 years.

The decision to remain leader of the Labour Party was a mistake he later

regretted. Callaghan was unable to stop Labour tearing itself apart, with

left-right ideological feuding and battles over changes to the party’s con-

stitution designed to shackle the party leadership and MPs. He despaired at

Militant Tendency’s inﬁltration of local parties, and had to take on Trot-

skyist critics in his own Cardiff constituency. Both sides turned on him. He

faced personal insults from the Left, who treated him contemptuously as a

‘guilty man’ and traitor to ‘socialism’, and disowned his government’s record.

The social-democratic right thought he was too weak with the party, crit-

icising him as ‘the Labour Party’s Neville Chamberlain’ – hoping for ‘unity

in our time’ – and accusing him of selling out and of fatal and ineffective

appeasement of the superior forces of the Left and the trades unions.

He was against giving power to constituency activists to re-(or de-)select

MPs and unhappy about the idea of an electoral college for leadership

elections. Callaghan knew the Left and its activist cadres intended to use

Heath to Callaghan 191

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston