farm was sold for a reported £1.5 million in 2005. He benefitted from rising
property values, having originally bought the farm for £20–30,000, and
had made prudent investments, setting up a personal limited company
(‘Leaderwise’) to manage his investments after his retirement from the lead-
ership. ‘I don’t think he had an enormous amount of pure cash’, his bio-
grapher Lord Morgan told the press, ‘he didn’t go in for the after-dinner
circuit or get much money for his biography.’ Morgan says he did not turn
to lucrative business directorships or consultancies but instead was involved
with a range of charitable, educational and environmental good causes,
including being president of a housing association in Cardiff, president of
Swansea University for nine years, a joint president of the Royal Institute of
International Affairs, and serving on the Forte Trust. He had close long-
term links with the controversial, pyramid-selling Welsh financier Julian
Hodge, and had been a director of his Commercial Bank of Wales in the
early 1970s. Prudently, he avoided any ‘lavender notepaper’-type storm
by not offering Hodge a peerage in his resignation honours, though he
felt he deserved one. Through his fundraising for the Cambridge Overseas
Trust, helping Commonwealth students with scholarships and bursaries, he
was introduced – by Jimmy Carter – to the Middle Eastern financier Agha
Hussan Abedi, who gave large sums to the Overseas Trust, but whose bank,
BCCI, collapsed in 1991 in a major international financial scandal, with
billions of dollars missing amid accusations about money-laundering and
fraud. Unfortunately Callaghan had been temporarily employed as a BCCI
adviser and had received in 1987 some travel and other expenses, which he
had not declared in parliament’s register of MPs’ interests. Morgan suggests
the BCCI association was unwise, careless and embarrassing.
43
John Smith had been close to Callaghan when a minister in his Cabinet
and continued to see him when Leader of the Labour Party 1992–94, saying
he found his advice helpful. But after 1994, when Tony Blair, became party
leader, Callaghan was not enthusiastic about the direction the party took,
unhappy about the weakening of the union link and the drift to the right.
As New Labour distanced itself from the party’s past, its traditions and
its working-class roots, Callaghan spoke for many in the party when he
protested about the much-used ‘Old Labour’ label, describing himself in a
1996 interview as ‘Original Labour’. There was a sense that New Labour
kept him at a distance to avoid unhelpful reminders of the ‘Winter of Dis-
content’. ‘Yes, I’ve been blotted out of the photographs’, Callaghan would
say. He conveyed his concerns privately and gave some advice to Blair on
managing a government, which would seem to have been ignored, judg-
ing from Blair’s informal and highly-personalised Number 10 methods.
After Blair won office – and Callaghan liked to say he wished he had had
a similar majority – the former prime minister called in for advice about
an EU summit was Lady Thatcher, not Callaghan. In 1990, John Major
– new to Number 10 – had called Callaghan in to discuss the handling of a
Heath to Callaghan 195