By 1977, by-elections and defections meant the Labour government James Callaghan inherited from Harold Wilson had lost the small majority it had won in 1974. To restore power, Callaghan brokered a “Lib-Lab pact” with the Liberal Party. Here, the former NS editor Paul Johnson rages against Callaghan’s jilting of the left. George Monaghan
It was Harold Wilson’s dearest wish that Labour should become “the natural party of government”. Well – he has got it. After last week’s cavortings at Westminster, any pretence that Labour is concerned with political, social and philosophical objectives – that it is a party of idealism and integrity – must now be abandoned. It has become an organisation of like-minded careerists for securing government office. How they get there, and what they do there, is of very little importance; scarcely of any importance at all. The object is power; or, if not power, at least the trappings and rewards of office. Labour has become the party of Tammany Hall.
For what Harold Wilson tended to overlook, when talking about a “natural” governing party, is that Labour has long been the “natural” party of local government in large areas of the country. There, for decades, it has held power and dispensed its goodies; and there, for decades – not everywhere but in many conurbations where its power has been perpetuated – the corrosion of office has eaten ever deeper into its ideals and standards, so that now in too many places for the party’s health the stench of corruption fills the air. One stream of thought in the party has always urged that Labour’s grip on local government should set the pattern for power at a national level, and that the risks should be accepted. For many years Herbert Morrison held this view. But it should be added that Morrison was, himself, a one-man anti-corruption crusade. And he came from a generation of Labour leaders who were quite content to live in a modest semi-detached, or a council property, and did not expect to have country manor houses, farms and all the other trappings. Even so, the Morrisonian approach to politics was successfully rebuffed at Westminster: if Gaitskell and Bevan agreed on nothing else, they agreed on keeping Morrison out.
Today the mantle of Morrison has descended on Jim Callaghan. And last week was his apotheosis. He has successfully torn the ideological guts out of the Labour Party and hurled them into the dustbin. The party is now dead; a lifeless corpse; but (he thinks) it will serve its turn in a mummified condition, so long as nobody expects it to speak, or walk or actually do anything. If words are required from the mummy, then Tammany Jim will do the talking. He is good at it. So long as Jim is not expected to discuss issues, or principles, or ideals – any of those awkward matters which get in the way of efficient Tammany administration – he is a very sound performer. I’m thinking of a moment on TV ten days ago, when Jim was saying how he’d prefer a solid government majority to the present uncertainty, etc. Well in that case, said a reporter, why don’t you have an election? Now, now, now, said Jim, you won’t expect me to comment on that question will you – ho, ho, ho. And, for the benefit of the viewer, he switched on that menacing capo di mafia smile with which we are all becoming familiar.
Of course Jim was lucky. De-gutting the Labour Party could only have been carried out as it was, in a swift and ruthless operation, against the clock, with ministers and MPs of all parties so paralysed with fear of losing their jobs and their seats that, in effect, they decided to “leave it all to Jim”. Indeed, it is perfectly clear that Jim deliberately created the cliff-hanger atmosphere and timing precisely so that he could purchase the Liberals without, in effect, consulting anyone else. The TUC, the Parliamentary Labour Party, the NEC (still less the constituency parties or other affiliated bodies) were thus allowed to play no part in the bargaining process. Jim, while publicly proclaiming his conviction that Labour would win an election, was privately informing anyone who would listen that an April poll would mean a certain Margaret Thatcher landslide – so would they please give him a mandate to strike any bargain he could? Thus the cabinet, too, had no real say in the matter, other than registering approval or disapproval: they were handed the Lib-Lab pact exactly like the Budget. Here was a historical decision which, if it means anything at all, will change the whole character of the Labour Party. But so far as the party was concerned, its constitution and established procedures might never have existed. The bargain was entirely a Tammany Jim operation.
Gruesome coupling
Even so, he would not have been able to carry it through without Michael Foot’s enthusiastic and active cooperation. Foot has found a huge taste for power, or at any rate the apparatus of power, in the last three years, and he was ready to pledge his final tranche of socialist reputation to help Jim to stay in No 10. It is a staggering example of the way in which power corrupts to reflect that, only a year ago, Foot opposed Callaghan as party leader on precisely the grounds that he was a natural conservative who might do a deal at the party’s expense. But last week Foot was at Callaghan’s side at every stage of the conspiracy: fixing the Left, tying up the dirty, ragged ends of the package, and then as fugleman, drum-beater and chorus-master of Jim’s “triumph”. At present, Tammany Jim is receiving the full benefit of Foot’s inexhaustible capacity for hero-worship. Foot, like Madame de Chevreuse, “loves with an ever-lasting love, but it is always changing its object”. Once it was Lord Beaverbrook. Then it was Nye Bevan. More recently it has been Mrs Gandhi; but since she disappeared through the trapdoor, there is no one else but Jim. So the former Robespierre from Ebbw Vale has been quite content – positively delighted in fact – to play an ebullient JH Thomas to Jim’s Ramsay Mac.
As a matter of fact, this last comparison is grossly unfair to MacDonald. In 1931 he may have been deluded and foolish, but historians now exculpate him from the taint of treachery or dissembling. He knew he was sacrificing his reputation with the Left: that was why he warned younger men, like Herbert Morrison, not to follow him. He left the party; he did not drag it in his wake. And there were no secret deals, no flavour of Tammany Hall. We shall probably never get an objective version of Jim’s talks with the Liberals, let alone be able to savour the atmosphere of nudges, winks and innuendoes (it is impossible to imagine Jim conducting business in any other way). But it was evidently a meeting not so much of minds (still less of spirit) as of bodies urgently needing to satisfy that most elementary of politician’s appetites – retaining the seat. In short, a marriage of convenience, erected on a basis of gross materialism, with none of the parties giving the slightest consideration to the national interest, political beliefs or public opinion. A “gruesome coupling” as Hamlet put it:
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty stye!
Such acts breed their own maggots; misunderstandings, half-truths and even downright lies are inevitable. A man who goes to bed with a prostitute agrees, and pays, the price beforehand; but this copulative occasion is replete with blank cheques which may bounce, and promissory notes no one intends to honour. “We have not abandoned socialism,” said Michael Foot afterwards. “Socialism is the one thing this country is not now going to get” was David Steel’s version of the contract. I note that my new Labour Party membership card still trumpets the desire to secure for the workers “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. Would it not now be more honest to add “subject to the veto of the Liberal Party”; or, better still, drop it altogether?
Jim’s victims
For of course the victim in this unholy matrimony is the rejected Left, the homely girl from next door, not considered grand enough for Jim and his pals, now they are at ease in a world where brandy costs £100 a bottle and the chauffeurs are kept waiting till dawn. The Left has been capturing the constituency parties, but it has no dowry in actual votes, and its MPs are much too timid to carry their convictions into the lobbies. So it is at the mercy of the leadership; no marriage lines needed. Some 70 or more Tribuneite MPs have always been flatly refused the right to special consultations now freely, even eagerly, granted to a mere 13 Liberals. Even Mr James Molyneaux is graciously closeted with Tammany Jim. When did Mr Mikardo enjoy such privileges? Watching TV on the night Jim bought the Liberals, I felt compassion for the burly figure of poor Eric Heffer, shaking his great dazed head, like a baited and bewildered bull which had just been deprived of its cojones. And indeed all that now remains for the parliamentary Left is to provide lobby-meat.
It may, however, be a different matter with the union bosses. Most of them have no seats or jobs to lose; they hold them for life, thank you very much Jim! The Liberals are now jubilant that there will be no more government policies and legislation at the command of the TUC – that, they say, is the whole point of the deal. Do the union bosses know this? They kept very quiet during the period of frenzied negotiations. Jack Jones, a noisy bow-wow who rarely fails to give tongue during the night, was deafeningly silent; not even little Clive Jenkins let out a whimper. Of course the union barons are slow to react to new situations. But there is now the sound of heavy thinking going on in Congress House; the old ironmongery is at work. And the unions have custody of the only bit of policy the government is still free to enact: Wage Restraint Phase Three. Unlike the parliamentary Left, they have got a dowry, albeit a shopsoiled one; and it is a dowry without which the government has no future.
But it probably has no future anyway. Tammany Jim’s deal with the Liberals brought a brief respite, “sweet not lasting, the perfume and suppliance of a moment” – though some would detect a more cloacal odour. Both parties are fully prepared to renounce the deal the moment they judge it opportune. That, however, will not restore matters; neither will be virgo intacta again. The Liberals, it seems to me, have made the bigger concession in this respect, for their ability to conjure up general election votes was always based on a sort of confidence trick. Whatever they may say, and however completely they dissolve the alliance, it will be a long time before they can convince the voters that they still enjoy the purity of independence. Jim has a way of leaving heavy thumb-prints on any possession he handles. He is not the sort of man you would buy a second-hand Liberal Party from.
Buying time
As for the Government, all the deal did was to save it from a public hanging. Like Dr Faustus, it has now surrendered the party’s soul; it will discover that “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike”. And was the time worth buying? The Government has no policy other than survival, like Balfour in 1905. Both the IMF and the TUC have a veto on any of its initiatives. Now these two are joined by a third body: the Liberal Party. This weird trio, plus the Labour Party itself, constitute the most incongruous quartet in British political history. It is hard to see it agreeing on anything. We thus have a formula for total stagnation and immobility. Of course there is the oil; but why should anyone think that the electorate, when the time comes, will judge the present Government less likely to waste it than the Tories? Indeed the government’s new allies have already promised to give virtually all the oil to Scotland! My view is that the longer the Government prolongs its existence the more catastrophic will be its eventual defeat. This in itself may not matter much – the Labour Party is dead anyway – but what does matter is the further erosion of public confidence in the good faith and integrity of our professional politicians, and the intrinsic honesty of our system. There were times, last week, when the activities of Tammany Jim and his Liberal friends reminded me vividly of the last days of the Fourth Republic, with French politicos wheeling and dealing right up to the very last minute when the roof came crashing down and buried them all.
[See also: Labour is losing Wales]
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This article appears in the 12 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What He Can’t Say