Pedantic historians insist that Jim Callaghan never actually used the words “Crisis? What crisis?” on return from the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe on 10th January 1979—as the rubbish piled high and the dead went unburied in the mounting wave of British strikes known as the “Winter of Discontent.”
What is not in dispute is that this famous Sun headline captured the view of the voters about him and his disintegrating government, which had gone awol as union militants took over the country. Within four months Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street, and she stayed there for 11 years.
A pollster friend points out that the eventual turning point in Thatcher’s fortunes came when a poll showed a majority of people had come to believe the Winter of Discontent took place under a Tory government rather than a Labour one! That happened a few months before her own fall in 1990, when she was besieged by the poll tax riots which, like the strikes that brought down Callaghan, were seen by the public as the prime minister’s own responsibility.
Despite the pedantry over the exact words, the Sun—and the media generally—were correct in their basic view that there was much to blame Callaghan for during the Winter of Discontent. Far from dealing with it, he went off to sun himself—no pun intended—at an international summit with the equally hapless US president Jimmy Carter, complete with beach huts among the palm trees, then showed himself to be in denial on his return.
Callaghan’s policy chief, Bernard Donoughue, gives a graphic account in his diary of his boss’s determination to live up to his reputation as “Sunny Jim,” deliberately seeking to claim that the domestic crisis was over-egged when briefing journalists on the plane back from Guadeloupe. His actual words were these: “I promise if you look at it from the outside, I don’t think other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.” However, the rest of the world shared precisely that view, and the Sun gave a fair paraphrase.
Anyway, the rest of the world didn’t vote in the 1979 election. It was the first election I can remember clearly, as a 16-year-old, and I can report that we were mostly angry and appalled at Labour’s failure to govern the country properly. Middle England—including virtually all the teachers and sixth formers at my school—was determined to put a real government in place. Enter the Iron Lady.
So how similar is today’s situation?
The Winter of Discontent bit looks eerily familiar. By January 1979, the Callaghan minority government’s ill-fated pay control policy, and an incapacity either to get on with the union bosses who were supposed to be its fraternal partners, or to discipline the militants who were undermining those leaders with unofficial strikes and picket-line intimidation, had turned him into a political waxwork. Donoughue’s diary paints a picture of a prime minister who suffered a virtual breakdown, became fatalistic and inert, and who basically wanted to be shot of the whole thing.
Boris Johnson, another breezy optimist with little to be optimistic about, is equally to blame for the paralysis facing the country today. The reason why the rest of the world is only suffering supply-chain pressures while we have a full-blown crisis, with closed petrol stations and empty supermarket shelves, is because of Brexit and its decimation of the HGV driver industry within the UK. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland is descending into a deeper crisis of Brexit’s making—let’s hope and pray we don’t go anywhere near other parallels with the 1970s there—and wider economic dislocation is clearly and systematically related to Brexit.
Boris, meanwhile, is in sunny Spain on a beach holiday, and he returns on a plane in a few days’ time to face the cameras.
However, there the parallels end. For a start, there isn’t an imminent election. By 1979, Callaghan was in the fifth year of the parliament elected in October 1974. He foolishly passed by the opportunity to call an election in 1978, when he might possibly have won. Pre-Covid and pre-Brexit, 2019 already seems like a different age from today, but Boris is still only in the second year of this parliament—he can afford to play it long.
There are two other huge differences. Boris hasn’t given up, like Callaghan, and Keir Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher.
Boris’s political agility never ceases to amaze. A Tory leader who can make a party conference speech claiming a big new NHS tax as Thatcherite, as he did last week, and attack business for paying its blue-collar workers too little as part of the reason for the HGV driver shortage, isn’t short of political initiative. Unlike Callaghan, Johnson isn’t surrendering without a struggle, and though his Brexitism is a fundamental problem for him, and may ultimately be his undoing, I suspect he will ultimately do whatever it takes—short of actually re-entering the European Union—to try and make it work. It wouldn’t surprise me if, before long, David Frost is replaced by a more emollient interlocutor with “our European friends and partners.”
At the moment, then, the political answer to Boris is... Boris. Starmer languishes, partly because the Labour leader himself looks ineffectual and far less dynamic to the public than Boris (let alone Thatcher), but more fundamentally because he clearly isn’t the answer to a Brexit policy that he appears substantively to support. He voted for the present unworkable EU trade and co-operation treaty last December when it was before parliament, and hasn’t shown any agility in adjusting his position since then. Imagine Thatcher voting for the closed shop and Michael Foot’s union laws, which would have given free rein to picket-line thuggery in the mid-1970s—and still claiming to have been right to do so in 1979!
Whatever else they thought of her, the British public had no doubt that Thatcher possessed the resolve to sort out the union problem. They worried indeed that she might sort it out too robustly, and provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the unions. This is partly why her poll ratings weren’t so strong in 1978, although being the first woman to lead a major western political party also had a lot to do with that. Misogyny was overtaken by the sheer ineptitude and incapacity of Callaghan by 1979.
So we are in a winter of discontent, but a change of leader and government is not imminent. And I doubt it will seem so until there is both an election in the offing and a potential prime minister who is clearly the answer to the fundamental Brexit crisis of Boris’s own making.
