James Callaghan(1912–2005)

Leonard James Callaghan was born at Portsmouth on 27 March 1912, only son of an Irish-descended Royal Navy chief petty officer who had served at Jutland. The family lacked the money for university; he left school at seventeen in 1929 to take a junior tax inspector's post at the Inland Revenue, the standard professional civil-service entry for a working-class Portsmouth household of the period.

The Inland Revenue years gave him the institutional training and the trade-union apprenticeship. He joined the Inland Revenue Staff Federation as a junior official in 1932 and rose by 1936 to be its assistant general secretary at twenty-four, learning the working procedures of negotiation and Labour-movement policy. He joined the Labour Party in 1931.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1942, was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1943, and served in the East Indies Fleet to 1946. Adopted as Labour candidate for Cardiff South before his demobilisation, he won the seat in the 1945 Attlee landslide and held it for forty-two years to 1987. He had married Audrey Moulton in 1938, a marriage of sixty-six years, and Cardiff and South Wales were the family's home for the rest of their lives.

He held, in turn, all four of the great offices of state. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964 to 1967, Home Secretary from 1967 to 1970, the tenure that put the Race Relations Act 1968 on the statute book, Foreign Secretary from 1974 to 1976, running the EEC renegotiation and the 1975 referendum that confirmed British membership, and Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979.

As Prime Minister he took office on Harold Wilson's resignation in 1976 and ran a minority Labour government through the Lib-Lab pact and the 1976 IMF package. He served two further years as Labour leader, then sat as a backbencher to his retirement in 1987 and accepted a peerage as Baron Callaghan of Cardiff and the Garter. He died at his Sussex home on 26 March 2005, one day short of his ninety-third birthday. He remains the only person in British political history to have held all four of the great offices of state. The Callaghan name, the Munster patronymic Ó Ceallacháin, he carried from a Portsmouth Royal-Navy family into that unique distinction.