(The autobiography of the only politician this century to ...)
The autobiography of the only politician this century to have held the four posts of Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor and Prime Minister. He conveys the reality of government: the problems, the decisions, the challenge, the crises and gives portraits of friends and rivals, including Harold Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Presidents Ford and Carter.
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Original name in full Leonard James Callaghan. He was born at 38 Funtington Road, Copnor, Portsmouth, United Kingdom on 27 March 1912. He was named after his father, also James Callaghan, who was a Royal Navy Chief Petty Officer. His mother was Charlotte Callaghan. His paternal grandmother was Jewish.
He attended Portsmouth Northern Secondary School (now Mayfield School). He gained the Senior Oxford Certificate in 1929, but could not afford entrance to university and instead sat the civil service Entrance Exam.
Callaghan entered the civil service at age 17 as a tax officer. By 1936 he had become a full-time trade-union official. After serving as a lieutenant in naval intelligence during World War II, he entered Parliament in 1945, representing the Welsh constituency of Cardiff South. Between 1947 and 1951 Callaghan held junior posts at the Ministry of Transport and at the Admiralty. When Harold Wilson’s Labour government was formed in 1964, Callaghan was named chancellor of the Exchequer. In this capacity he helped secure in 1966–67 international agreement to a system called Special Drawing Rights, which in effect created a new kind of international money. He resigned from the Exchequer in 1967, when he was forced to devalue the pound sterling. He then served as home secretary until 1970. In Wilson’s second government in 1974, Callaghan was named foreign secretary; and in 1976, upon Wilson’s resignation, Callaghan succeeded him as prime minister, largely because the Parliamentary Labour Party considered him the least divisive candidate.
Throughout his ministry (1976–79), Callaghan, a moderate within the Labour Party, tried to stem the increasingly vociferous demands of Britain’s trade unions. He also had to secure the passage of unpopular cuts in government spending early in his ministry. His reassuring public manner came to be criticized as complacency when a series of labour strikes in 1978–79 paralyzed hospital care, refuse collection, and other essential services. In March 1979 his government was brought down by a vote of no confidence passed in the House of Commons, the first such occurrence since 1924. At the subsequent general election, Callaghan’s party was defeated. On October 15, 1980, he resigned as leader of the Labour Party, to be succeeded by Michael Foot. He was created a life peer in 1987 and published an autobiography, Time and Chance, the same year.
He was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980. Callaghan is to date, the only British politician in history to have served in all four of the "Great Offices of State", having been Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964–67, Home Secretary from 1967-70, and Foreign Secretary from 1974, until his appointment as Prime Minister in 1976.
(The autobiography of the only politician this century to ...)
He married Audrey Elizabeth Moulton, whom he had met when they both worked as Sunday School teachers at the local Baptist church, in July 1938 and had three children – one son and two daughters.
