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Downing Street Diary: With James Callaghan in No.10

The end of old Labour

Bernard Donoughue
Cape, 562pp, £30,

Alan Watkins

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Downing Street Diary: With James Callaghan in No.10, by Bernard Donoughue

Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there was a tide in politics which prime ministers were powerless to resist. Lord Donoughue’s Downing Street diaries came later.

The first volume, on his days as a ‘special adviser’ to Harold Wilson, was dominated not so much by Wilson as by Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender. Indeed, ‘Marcia’s Tantrums’ would have served as a catchier subtitle than ‘With Harold Wilson in No. 10’. After a while, however, we grew tired of the endless stamped feet and slammed doors. With Callaghan, something like normal service is resumed.

But even Jim was not entirely conventional. He did not live in No. 10 but retained his flat in Kennington. When his wife, Audrey, was away, he made his own breakfast. Even so, he was devoted to her. The reason for this arrangement was that he did not get on with his sister. He could say that, in Kennington, he did not have the room to entertain her, whereas at No. 10 he had. The non-appearance of Callaghan’s mysterious sister, who never turns up, is straight out of one of Harold Pinter’s plays.

There are a few other small surprises too. For instance, Donoughue tells us that Callaghan did not like the police, largely because of his experience as home secretary — and even though for many years previously he had been parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation. The police, he said, were ‘often incompetent and corrupt’. This tendency to be easily irritated and even to be a bit of a bully, was perhaps well known, at least among politicians and journalists. But both groups contrived, in their various ways, to maintain the impression that he was avuncular ‘Sunny Jim’, though for much of the time he was not sunny at all, quite the reverse in fact, with good reason.