251. Unlucky Jim

In 1976, Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party and British Prime Minister. He was a competent politician, though not an outstanding one. He did his job well, but he was far from up to taking on an adversary as forceful as the leader of the Conservative Party, Maggie Thatcher.

Callaghan’s was the last government of the post-war consensus, based on a belief in a generalised social democracy, seeking to provide the social services needed to ensure that everyone could count on a safety net when one was needed, and built on a foundation of Keynesian economics. Thatcher rejected both social democracy and Keynesianism, which she held responsible for the decline of Britain, militarily, economically and even morally. Her objective was to end the postwar consensus and look for a radically new type of politics (and economics).

The other huge innovation she oversaw was an entirely new approach to communication in politics. Using a remarkably talented advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, she and the Conservative party ran devastating campaigns against her opponents. The most famous was focused on a poster of a queue of people in front of a banner marked ‘Unemployment Office’ and with the legend ‘Labour isn’t working’.

As well as her powerful and effective campaigning, Labour was brought low by a series of errors made by Callaghan, many of which played into her hands. It was just possible that he might have won an election in 1978, or at least done less badly, but he lacked the foresight to call it (a mistake he later acknowledged). That meant that he went through the season of strikes that came to be known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and, instead of choosing the timing of the election himself, was forced to call one when Thatcher brought in a no confidence motion in the Commons, carried by just one vote.

The subsequent election, on 3 May 1979, saw the Conservatives win a solid majority of 43. Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. And, as we’ll start to see next week, launched herself on a programme of radical change.

Illustration: Rubbish piling up in the streets as a result of the municipal workers' strike of the during the 'Winter of Discontent'. Public Domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License