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“... is impossible and that this is historically demonstrated by the disasters of the Wilson and Callaghan governments from 1964 on. This is a powerful argument because it has only to be insinuated, not made explicit; it needs merely to reinforce what are already a number of conventional wisdoms. It will be the Conservatives’ trump. What has been ...”

“... Bernard Donoughue records something said by James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, just before the 1979 General Election, as the two men were driving home to Downing Street in the official Rover: You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do ...”

“... plots against him within the Labour Party, particularly when he thought they emanated from James Callaghan, and he knew that George Brown, his old leadership rival, had attempted to enlist MI5 support against him and some of those who were close to him. Callaghan, who is sometimes said to have used the Labour Party ...”

“... There is a sea change in British politics – the sort of slow but irresistible movement which Jim Callaghan detected when the tide was flowing the other way in 1978.’ Yes, I think that covers everything. First announcing, with his usual gift of phrase, that ‘the facts behind the figures’ are what count, Hattersley proceeds to list a series not of facts ...”

“... goods nobody wanted at prices nobody could afford. That was the image which precipitated Callaghan’s downfall. Yet it was under Labour that Edwardes was appointed to create Slim-Line Leyland. All Eric Varley wanted to know was that Edwardes was not tarred with the Apartheid brush. Once that was settled Varley – and ...”

“... to see the Home Secretary. Roy Jenkins rose from his chair and said: ‘Well, it’s all over, Callaghan is appointing Crosland.’ He nodded to a handwritten envelope addressed to the President of the French Republic. I knew that it contained a letter declaring his willingness to become President of the European community. We talked for a while, and I ...”

“... But the Conference proceedings remain the set-piece around which the jamboree revolves. As Lord Callaghan took his place on the platform to hear Neil Kinnock, he will have recalled with a shudder the 51st Annual Conference of the Labour Party, held just up the coast at Morecambe in 1952. The young Jim Callaghan spoke ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony Benn, his planning ...”

“... He has written a long list of books about Wales, the Labour Party, Lloyd George, Wales, Jim Callaghan, Wales, the Labour Party, and just occasionally, to spice things up, about the Labour Party and Wales. He is not just fascinated by this little world but sentimental about it. Take Michael Foot’s marriage to Jill Craigie. Although Craigie wasn’t ...”

“... a sadistic buffoon and could never have been tolerated even by the long-suffering Labour Party. John Wheatley was the intellectual and organising genius behind the Clydesiders, but you have only to watch the surviving newsreels to see why Maxton had to be the leader of that group, and you only have to study Maxton’s confused utterances to see how he could ...”

“... Sixth Fleet would have hit any more.’ Healey and Gilmour – and indeed Edward Heath and James Callaghan – may be thought to have spoken for those two-thirds of poll respondents who decided that Mrs Thatcher had been guilty of a brutal misjudgment: and for the many people who believe that she overrode a rational understanding on the use of ...”

“... the cruddy world of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the Whig dogs ...”

“... hard at work in August 1980 when the immaculate Cecil Parkinson visited Videla in Buenos Aires. As John Simpson and Jana Bennett of the British Broadcasting Corporation relate in their excellently-researched but somewhat inhibited book, the one-time Secretary for Trade and Industry had brought two messages for leaders of the Junta. The first was that Britain ...”

“... beyond serving with mutual embarrassment for a year as Michael Foot’s PPS in 1974, and when Callaghan offered him a job (under Hattersley!) he preferred to hold himself free to oppose the Government’s devolution schemes for Wales and Scotland. This was the one major policy rebellion of Kinnock’s career. Leading the ‘No’ campaign in Wales, he put ...”