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An Element of Unfairness

Ross McKibbin: The Great Education Disaster, 3 July 2008

... were the subject of constant press attack, and these criticisms were given some respectability by James Callaghan, now prime minister, who announced in a speech in Oxford in 1976 that in his view teacher training, the curriculum, classroom practice and (by extension) the comprehensives themselves were fair game. Even more unsympathetic to the ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Ed Balls, 22 September 2016

... as foreign secretary under Edward Heath. These are the lucky ones. A different fate awaited Jim Callaghan, who drifted into a burdensome obscurity after losing the 1979 election and resigning as Labour leader the following year. There is a sad letter from him in the LRB archive, responding in 1991 to a piece by Ross McKibbin praising his and Harold ...

Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58) 
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More
Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin 
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More
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... annual showpiece. Inside the Brighton Centre, a hulking, rather worn building which was opened by James Callaghan in September 1977, shortly before the close working relationship between unions and Labour governments collapsed, seemingly for good, the conference hall was quiet and two-thirds full. The upstairs galleries had been curtained off, and an ...

Enemies of Promise

Angus Calder, 2 March 1989

Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 
by Clive Ponting.
Hamish Hamilton, 433 pp., £15.95, February 1989, 0 241 12683 5
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James Maxton 
by Gordon Brown.
Fontana, 336 pp., £4.95, February 1988, 0 00 637255 4
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Forward! Labour Politics in Scotland 1888-1988 
edited by Ian Donnachie, Christopher Harvie and Ian Wood.
Polygon, 184 pp., £19.50, January 1989, 0 7486 6001 1
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... inherits the Red Clyde. Elsewhere in Britain traditions have been ‘breached’ by the Wilson-Callaghan years when Labour’s chief raison d’être appeared to be to ensure that moderate trade-unionists and liberal dons got their share of chauffeur-driven transport and expenses-paid trips. Clive Ponting’s survey of the first phase of the ...

The Mercenary Business

Jeremy Harding, 1 August 1996

... set up in 1980 in partnership with two other former political researchers – Jenny Jeger for James Callaghan, and Wilf Weeks for Edward Heath. The benefits of Steel’s familiarity with African affairs were no doubt clear to Buckingham. There was still optimism in the air as Heritage prepared to go into Angola. But on the eve of elections which ...

Living with Monsters

Ferdinand Mount: PMs v. the Media, 22 April 2010

Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v. the Media 
by Lance Price.
Simon & Schuster, 498 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84737 253 6
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... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan ...

Diary

Clive James, 21 October 1982

... While thinking its top man the living end. Scargill and Benn say let’s break Tebbit’s law. Jim Callaghan less bluntly says that too. Israel and Syria might go to war. The boggled mind wonders what else is new. In Berne the Polish Embassy’s front door Is opened while some breakfast is pushed through: The terrorists are hauled out bearing traces Of the ...

The Card-Players

Paul Foot, 18 September 1986

Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings 
by Chris Mullin.
Chatto, 270 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 7011 2978 6
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... Five of them had been arrested as they tried to get on a ferry to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, a prominent IRA member who had blown himself to pieces planting a bomb in Coventry. They had left Birmingham by train less than half an hour before the bombs went off, and the bombs were planted within a few hundred yards of Birmingham’s New ...

Say what you will about Harold

Christopher Hitchens, 2 December 1993

Wilson: The Authorised Life 
by Philip Ziegler.
Weidenfeld, 593 pp., £20, September 1993, 0 297 81276 9
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... of the July deflationary measures and the headlong rout of all the promises made by Wilson, Callaghan and Jenkins, to say nothing of Crosland and Healey, and come to that Castle and Peart. Anyway, those of us who still remember Wilson’s crushing of a revolt by underpaid and exploited seafarers, and his later lame excuses for the collapse of the ...

Fairyland

Bruce Bawer, 2 May 1985

Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald 
by James Mellow.
Souvenir, 569 pp., £15.95, February 1985, 0 285 65001 7
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Home before Dark: A Personal Memoir of John Cheever 
by Susan Cheever.
Weidenfeld, 243 pp., £10.95, January 1985, 0 297 78376 9
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... screenplays, notebooks and minor stories, but written Brobdingnagian lives of John O’Hara and James Gould Cozzens), produced a sloppy, simple-minded, adoring doorstop of a biography entitled Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. André Le Vot, a French scholar, followed in 1983 with a graceful English translation of his stately, sensitive and painstakingly ...

Grieve not, but try again

N.A.M. Rodger: Submarines, 22 September 2016

The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945 
by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks.
Allen Lane, 823 pp., £12.99, June 2016, 978 1 84614 580 3
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... into defensive ‘bastions’ in home waters under the ice. In The Silent Deep, Peter Hennessy and James Jinks recount the history of the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945. Naval history as such is a new departure for Hennessy, but in his extensive writings on politics and society, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and intelligence and state secrets, he ...

Ponting bites back

Tam Dalyell, 4 April 1985

The Right to Know: The Inside Story of the ‘Belgrano’ Affair 
by Clive Ponting.
Sphere, 214 pp., £2.50, March 1985, 0 7221 6944 2
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... privilege of having proper and fruitful conversations with the Dame (Evelyn Sharp), the late Sir James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Trimble’s virtues, 7 October 2004

... a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d packed a ...

Is this successful management?

R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989

One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 570 pp., £16.95, April 1989, 0 333 34439 1
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... prospects, replied that it didn’t much matter because no government could be worse than the Callaghan one they’d got. A similar, wrong-headedly cavalier attitude was apparent across wide sections of the Labour movement, which accordingly felt free to indulge in fratricidal strife, just as the German Communists and Social Democrats had in the early ...

Real Thing

John Naughton, 24 November 1988

Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television 
by Michael Cockerell.
Faber, 352 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 571 14757 7
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... nothing to build on, save recordings of press conferences and soporific statements about Europe. James Callaghan’s spell in office was short and bitter and does not warrant much of Mr Cockerell’s time, though he does let slip one fascinating scoop. This is the news that Callaghan had a serious plan, up to and ...

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