Political Commentary
Callaghan: an instinct for the jugular
Patrick Cosgrave
During that dreadful weekend after the election, when Mr Heath was trying his hardest to hold on to office with the aid, if he could get it, of the Liberals, Mr Harold Wilson preserved a statesmanlike silence which redounded greatly to his credit thereafter. In fact, the Leader of the Labour Party, hungry for the Prime Ministership, and angry at the prospect of being cheated of it, was prepared at one stage to keep a pre-arranged television date on the Sunday. Mr Callaghan urged him not to do so, saying, "The eye of the nation is on the worm. Let them watch it wriggling on the hook." In the flat cruelty of those sentences there is a side of Mr Callaghan — a side of his effectiveness as a politician, as well as a side of his personality — which too often escapes the public gaze. It was evident again not only in the studied offensiveness of his conduct at the EEC ministerial conference at Luxembourg, but in the calculated snub to an ineffective little man named Berkouwer, the President of the European Parliament, whom he could not find time to meet.
Poor Mr Berkouwer, as is the way with EEC politicians, immediately held a press conference to say what a boor Mr Callaghan was, and added that the Foreign Secretary was clearly ignorant of international law if he thought Britain could play ducks and drakes with the treaty of accession, while denouncing the threat of British withdrawal from the Community as "a blunt announcement of an open breach of contract." The palpable ignorance of this statement itself justified the administration by Mr Callaghan of a rude shock to the complacent Europeans for, first, as ministers of the then government repeated again and again to Parliament during the passage of the EEC Bill, no parliament can bind its successors and, second — as was confirmed to me recently by no less an authority than Lord McNair, formerly our brightest luminary at the Hague — the first principle of international law is that it does not exist unless it is enforceable. (This may. encourage you to feel that international law is thus a silly subject; and you may be right; but there it is.) Anyway, what he subsequently dubbed "rough diplomacy" was clearly a weapon used by Mr Callaghan after much thought and consideration, and not with the arrogant stupidity attributed to him.
The personal point, of course, is that Mr Callaghan clearly enjoyed the whole business. His good humour was all too much in evidence when he confronted a reproachful Sir Alec Douglas-Home in the House of Commons and suggested that, if the smooth diplomacy Sir Alec appeared to be recommending was what had produced the treaty of accession in the first place, then perhaps there was no harm in trying a little of the rough stuff. Again, when he first spoke out openly against the EEC — early in the life of the Heath government, at the Southampton Itchen byelection — bonhomie oozed from every crevice in his battered face, and the rage of his critics was all the more heated because of that bonhomie. Only rarely does he show snappishness, and then he is less effective. Normally his method consists of a bland statement of what nearly everybody around him finds outrageous or at least unfair, delivered with unctuous good humour, followed by a loss of temper on the other side, and a subsequent dawning of the realisation that Mr Callaghan has again arrived exactly where he wants to be. As to his cruelty when he can employ it, his self-satisfied mien when he triumphs, and the air with which he now savours a political situation — rather in the manner of a connoisseur savouring the bouquet of some old wine — these are clearly influenced to some extent by the memory of his dismal and humiliating experiences at the Treasury. Mr Callaghan was quite probably the worst — his only competitor is Mr Jenkins — Chancellor since the war, if not throughout the century. It was not wholly his fault: he came to the wrong high office with very little experience, and it was a job in which a powerful body of civil servants highly skilled at the business of emasculating the political will of ministers set about a man who is not at home with technicalities, let alone with economics, with a will and with success. (Mr Callaghan resolved that this would never happen to him again — witness his rough tactics to put the Foreign Office mandarins in their place.) Not to put too fine a point on it Mr Callaghan, during the first few months of the life of the 1964 government, panicked, and E800 million — the whole of the deficit which the Tories had been accused of creating — was lost across the exchanges in a wild outburst of frightened dealing.
At the Home Office he built a new and contradictory reputation — the bringer of balm to Ulster Catholics, the hammer of the Ulster Protestants; the hammer, too, of the Kenyan Asians; the liberal reformer, full of heart in abolishing the death penalty and turning into a final repeal what had been a period of moratorium. In some ways he was resting himself and finding himself — finding himself not so much within himself as in regard to his role. Thus, when a distinguished journalist visited him just before the death penalty was done away with, he found Mr Callaghan musing on just this subject. "What would be your view," asked the Home Secretary, "if I did away with the death penalty altogether?" The journalist explained that he thought it would be a severe breach of ethics, since Parliament's decision to have a period of
STpehcetator April 13,1 1 trial without any executions had been I solemnly taken. He added, however, that, leader writers would undoubtedly feel di rently, and would hail Mr Callaghan 1 great penal reformer. The Home Secret chuckled, and observed: "If I have the lea writers then I don't need you." That was the cruelly cynical side Of man. Another side was shown in his e contacts with Ulster, events regarded 0 such remarkably unjustifiable complacenc),1 . his book on the subject. There Mr Callag," became an instant folk-hero to the Cath°' and to all intents and purposes ignored j Protestants, who rapidly (and not wit,' without justification) became the butts ,01 offhand manner. But, while he basked in affection of the Catholics time was slipping and, before he left his office, both the IRA1 the Protestant militants were on the mare, will be seen in the retrospect of his histor) a remarkable missed opportunity: perh only Mr Callaghan could have had the P° to swing around, not the Protestants, everybody then saw the necessity of 4:101 ' but the Catholics, to co-operation: but he not have the vision or the constructiven
His antennae, thus, are unbelievably a
i rate and effective within a fairly narrow a Beyond it, they flap wildly around his 11 and tell him little. He is, as one devoted laghan watcher put it to me, almost wil,' devoid of any real power of mind or anal) the Itchen speech I mentioned earlier Wa rubbishy hotch-potch of prejudice, but effect on his audience was incredible. On other hand, said the same observer, he has finest political mind, in the tactical sense, any leading figure of his time. With Dr! singer, he understands that the acid to, any foreign policy is its domestic acceptah! — and domestic here means its acceptabl within the Labour Party. He neither knee nor cares much, about continental or servative reactions as long as he can persa the Labour Party to follow him in whate direction he chooses. He is no sort of P,.° maker, no architect of new tomorrows: 0. just the supreme professional, with an inst for the jugular. And this combination of qualities and fects may well make him a Foreign Secret of historic note. He has, in a fashion un0 in a man of middle-age who has already4, dergone his prostate operation, an astonisP capacity to learn from his own experiett and an extremely unusual confidence in own instincts. He also now grasps that business of a senior minister is to give, overall direction to his department, ra' than become immersed in its details a theologies. Like many men of hi S age. 0 rience, and character he now at last sees possibility of doing something historic' making a real impact on the course of evei through exploiting, rather than submerg the basic nature and character of his P,e, nality. He has become, like Simenon's dent, a patriot of the deepest kind, 1.410„ losing his cynicism, his cruelty or his too' nue. His return to the heights of politics the general acknowledgement of the fact ) he fought a brilliant campaign during tiled election, all give him the greatest satisfac`, and the greatest confidence for the trials; lie ahead. He might yet — supposing accident to befall Mr Wilson — become r:o Minister, but I doubt if that thought gr'ep preoccupies him. For the moment it likely that the Foreign Office will be his job, and he intends to make his final 111 with it. The role that he himself anclie cumstance have thus conspired to provt.° him is therefore a remarkable one and in nd charging it, partly because he understa „ so well, he will be invulnerable to anY.'ii cism he cares about. It is an ama,Zir gloomy prospect for pro-Marketeers, 10„t role can only be discharged by an change in the whole constitution of the '
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