ST. GEORGE OF THE CENTER. Leonard James Callaghan, 64, is the London bookies’ favorite (9 to 4 last week) to succeed Wilson, and many politicians agree. A shrewd political strategist, Callaghan has two main assets as a potential party leader: broad popularity and the “bottom,” as the British call it, to put renegades in their place. “Sunny Jim” is also the only politician among the eggheads in the party’s highest councils whose background reflects that of most Labor voters. The son of a Royal Navy chief petty officer, Callaghan quit school at 15 to support his widowed mother. He entered politics through union elections, eventually rose through Labor’s ranks to hold all three of the major Cabinet posts: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Office Secretary and, since 1974, Foreign Secretary, where he renegotiated Britain’s Common Market membership with finesse.
His term as Chancellor was less distinguished. Casting himself as a sort of monetary St. George, he led the costly and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to stave off devaluation of the British pound during the first Wilson government in 1967. At the time, one of his Cabinet colleagues complained: “Jim was a pushover for the treasury mandarins. He simply did not have the intellectual equipment to overrule their traditionalist advice.” But Callaghan has a shrewd sense of grass-roots opinion, and in the words of one junior minister, he “knows what the ordinary bloke will wear and not wear.” He enjoys more union support than other contenders, keeps a firm hand in the party machinery, and has well-placed supporters in key constituencies up and down the country. Says a Cabinet colleague with grudging admiration: “Jim is the nearest thing this country has to a Tammany Hall pro.”
ELOQUENT MANDARIN. Roy Jenkins, 55, currently Home Secretary, is the most eloquent right-of-center voice in the Labor leadership. He has the allegiance of a hard core of Labor intellectuals who are fed up with the political opportunism of the Wilson era and admire Jenkins’ courage. He also has considerable appeal among the broader liberal community outside the party. In the early 1970s, when the Common Market was most unpopular, Jenkins risked a promising career by his unflinching advocacy of Britain’s joining Europe.
Yet many Laborites regard Jenkins as a cultural snob with no taste for the rough give and take of either domestic or international politics. The son of a Welsh coal miner who became parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Jenkins was a student at Oxford’s Balliol College, where he took first honors in politics, philosophy and economics. He also acquired an upper-class “mandarin” accent, excellent French and a taste for claret and opera—none of which are especially valued by the party’s old guard.
HIT MAN. Denis Healey, 58, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a tough infighter with a deserved reputation as Wilson’s “hit man.” Says one ministerial colleague: “In getting what he wants, he’s like a Sherman tank blasting opposition out of the way.” The Healey style and philosophy are perhaps best summed up by his reaction to John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, a book that greatly impressed him. “It wasn’t the nice, goody-goody thing you’d expected. Instead, almost all of his cases were men who became moral shits in the interest of the political good.”
The son of a poor Yorkshire schoolteacher, Healey won a scholarship to Balliol, where he took a double first in classical studies and philosophy and had a brief fling with the Communist Party. He became head of labor’s international secretariat at 28 and played a key role in framing the Attlee government’s opposition to Stalin’s imperialism. Despite a strong radical streak, Healey as chancellor has stood for a kind of aggressive orthodoxy, and has managed to get labor leaders to agree to —and even applaud—an anti-inflation program that includes pay curbs.
CIVILIZED FIREBRAND. Michael Foot, 62, the firebrand radical with the flowing white mane who inherited Aneurin Bevan’s mining constituency of Ebbw Vale, was brought into the Cabinet as Employment Secretary by Wilson to buy peace with the unions and the party’s left wing. It was an inspired idea. Sensitive to the devastating impact of runaway inflation on workers’ wages, Foot helped Healey and Jack Jones, leader of the powerful Transport Workers Union, to forge the much praised plan to limit pay increases.
Although the normally voluble Foot did not discard his left-wing views, he decided to put the fight against inflation first—a gesture that has earned him high marks among center Labor M.P.s.
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