James Callaghan

In November 1980, James Callaghan retired as leader of the Labour Party. He had been on the front line of British politics for many years and was the only person to hold all of the four great offices of state. However, his premiership is seen as a failure, the last gasp of Keynesian social democracy being smothered by the oncoming advent of Thatcherism. This book offers a timely reappraisal of Jim Callaghan's premiership and time as Leader of the Opposition in 1979–80.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

Callaghan term in office was dominated by industrial unrest, culminating in the ‘Winter of Discontent’, laying the foundations for Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979

During the course of the Twentieth Century, nineteen men and one woman - from Robert Cecil, Third Marquis of Salisbury to Tony Blair - have occupied the post of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

`Callaghan is a symbol of our present age as well as our past, New Labour as well as Old. He links the age of Clem Attlee and that of Tony Blair.' Kenneth Morgan 'This is a classic political life, critical, well-balanced, compellingly written' Brian Brivati, The Times 'It is hard to see how the book could have been better done' Alan Watkins, The Spectator 'A superb portrait and a fascinating work of historical scholarship that will become a classic text' Ben Pimlott, The Guardian 'Callaghan was regarded as the epitome of the Labour Party's right-wing establishment. Yet Kenneth Morgan's biography reveals him to be far more interesting and far more complex than that.' Gerald Kaufman, Daily Telegraph This fascinating biography, written by leading historian Kenneth Morgan, tells the story of a man who had a unique political career. Starting in humble circumstances, James Callaghan went on to hold all the major offices of state: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and,for three tumultuous years, from 1976 to 1979, Prime Minister. This meticulously researched study takes the reader from the age of Attlee to the days of New Labour under Blair.

Jim Callaghan's career in British public life is unique. Starting in humble circumstances and then moving into trade union office and parliament at a young age, he went on to hold all the major offices of state: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and, for threetumultuous years, from 1976 to 1979, Prime Minister. This book covers every aspect of his career and sets it against the background of challenge and decline in British history in the second half of the twentieth century. From decolonization in Africa, the devaluation of the pound, the crisis in industrial relations, challenges in Northern Ireland, to entry into the European Community and the winter of discontent, new light is shed on Callaghan's role in international and domestic affairs. So too his relationshipswith Gaitskell, Bevan, Wilson, Brown, Jenkins, Barbara Castle, Healey and Benn, with the trade union movement, with colonial nationalists and with foreign leaders such as Ford, Kissinger, Carter and Schmidt. Kenneth Morgan employs hitherto unused primary material to illuminate every aspect of British political and public life from the 1930s to the present time. Extensive interviews have been conducted with British and overseas leaders. The continuities and ruptures of the Labour movement and the UnitedKingdom from the age of Bevin to the era of Blair are thus dramatically illuminated.