Word: callaghan
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...Minister of Britain by the monarch and asked to form a government. The monarch, of course, was Queen Elizabeth II. The Prime Minister was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 53, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands, who last week led her Conservative Party to a decisive victory over James Callaghan's Labor Party. The Tories won a solid majority of 43 seats in the 635-member House of Commons,* and Thatcher thereby became not only the first woman to head a British government but the first to lead a major Western nation...
Even before the vote tally established that the Conservatives had an absolute majority of 318 seats, outgoing Prime Minister Callaghan drove to Buckingham Palace last Friday to hand in his resignation to the Queen. Minutes after he left the palace precincts, Thatcher was on her way to "kiss hands" and receive the royal commission to form a government. Denis Thatcher accompanied his wife to the palace; like Prime Ministers' spouses before him, he remained downstairs to chat with the Queen's aides...
...Labor Party headquarters a few blocks away, "Sunny Jim" Callaghan, 67, spoke of his defeat with the same reserve and gentle dignity that marked his campaign. He publicly congratulated his successor as Prime Minister. "It is a great office," he said, "a wonderful privilege, and for a woman to occupy that office is, I think, a tremendous moment in the country's history. Therefore, everybody must on behalf of all our people wish her well and wish her success...
...Callaghan, who easily recaptured his home constituency in Wales, now becomes leader of the opposition. He will be less tormented by the Labor Party's left wing, many of whose zealous members went down to defeat in marginal districts. So did the most able woman in his Cabinet, former Education Secretary Shirley Williams, 48. Another loser, predictably, was onetime Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, 50, who soon faces trial on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder a man who claimed to be his lover. A Tory easily bested eight other candidates to take Thorpe's North Devon seat...
Throughout the four-week campaign, which was brought about when Callaghan's government narrowly lost a vote of confidence in March, both major parties emphasized that Britain faced a clear choice. Callaghan offered a continuation of the moderate social democratic policies that have dominated British political and economic life since the end of World War II. Thatcher presented a clear break with the socialist past, advocating a return to the market economy and a retrenching of Britain's welfare state. As some commentators saw it, Labor, in a reversal of traditional roles, had become the party of established orthodoxy, while...