Britain’s last conservative prime minister

FORTY YEARS AGO, IN NOVEMBER 1980, James Callaghan resigned as leader of the Labour Party having lost the general election the previous year. He neither could — nor wished to — hold out any longer and his party duly bifurcated into that led by Michael Foot and the Gang of Four’s breakaway SDP.

The four decades since Callaghan’s departure have scarcely changed settled perceptions of him: his three years in office ushered in 18 years of the Tories. But he was more than the last authentically, unmistakably, “old Labour” prime minister. Such were his party politics. In his attitudes and instincts, he was more like the last Edwardian to occupy Downing Street.

In this, he led by example. A family man, contentedly married to his wife, Audrey, whom he had first met when she was a Baptist Sunday school teacher, Callaghan’s formidable ambition was fixed on politics as an end in itself. Exposed ankles could swing across his field of vision without