Paul J. Deveney, senior fellow and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a carefully crafted and thoroughly researched study of James Callaghan's rise to become British prime minister in 1976. In his introduction, the author explains that his aim is to demonstrate how Callaghan, humiliated when Britain was forced to devalue sterling under his watch as chancellor of the Exchequer in 1967, recovered over time to establish himself as Harold Wilson's natural successor in the role of leader of the Labour Party and was thereby ready to assume the reins of power when Wilson unexpectedly retired as prime minister in the spring of 1976. For Deveney, the story of Callaghan's impressive comeback “has been lost in the advent of New Labour” and the sense that Callaghan's premiership, which ended in ignominious defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, was “an unsuccessful chapter in Labour Party history” (3).

Some of the story, the author concedes, has been outlined before. In 1976 two British journalists, Peter Kellner and Christopher Hitchens, published their book, Callaghan: The Road to Number 10 (London), not long after the new incumbent moved into Downing Street. But, as Deveney notes, this contemporary treatment lacked the perspective available to later writers and was based on newspaper cuttings rather than the wealth of archival papers that gradually became accessible to researchers and underpin Callaghan's Journey (allied to an impressive range of interviews with key political figures and civil servants who observed events from close quarters in the 1970s). The key thread in his own account, the author argues, was Callaghan's supreme skill as a political tactician, using a series of issues to rebuild his credibility at the expense of other major rivals for the Labour leadership, of whom there were several at the end of the 1960s. While these issues are accorded due focus, Deveney's overarching concern is to illuminate the workings of the British political system via the strategies, thoughts, and actions of one leading figure; hence, his emphasis on “politics rather than policy” (4).

The bulk of the book consists of a series of chapters setting out how Callaghan rehabilitated himself after 1967, using his base first as home secretary and then, after a spell in opposition, as foreign secretary from 1974 to 1976. Deveney makes the case that Callaghan's reputation was cumulatively restored through his handling of a succession of crises: notably over Wilson's aborted plans for trade union reform, over the onset of “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and over Britain's attitude toward membership of the European Community, which was secured by Edward Heath's Conservative government in the early 1970s. On the latter, Callaghan skillfully marginalized his main rival for the leadership on the center right of the Labour Party, Roy Jenkins. Throughout the period, the author convincingly demonstrates, “Big Jim” was always conscious of the need to align himself with mainstream Labour sentiment, in parliament, among trade unionists, and away from Westminster among local activists, even at the expense of antagonizing Cabinet colleagues. This theme is further developed in arguably the most distinctive chapter in the book, setting out how Callaghan made personal and political capital out of his relationship with influential national newspapers, especially the left-leaning Guardian.

Aside from a curiously brief epilogue (less than half a page), the chief concern about Callaghan's Journey is that the territory it covers has been more extensively trodden before than the author acknowledges, particularly in Kenneth Morgan's 1997 biography Callaghan: A Life (Oxford). Although Deveney alludes to and credits this in his introduction, he does not indicate how far and in what ways his view of Callaghan's political revival after 1967 differs from that presented by Morgan. Although not brought out explicitly in the work under review, Deveney appears to place more emphasis on the European question as a crucial catalyst, making Callaghan the “only logical successor” (195) to Wilson. Morgan, by contrast, regards Northern Ireland, traditionally a barren hunting ground for British politicians, as the arena that did most to cement Callaghan's place as Labour's heir apparent.

With this exception, Deveney seems to share many of the judgments already established in Kenneth Morgan's biography. Callaghan's Journey, seen within this historiographical context, primarily adds color and depth to the orthodox picture of high politics in the Wilson-Callaghan era. Morgan made the point, for example, that rising to become prime minister was not achieved by being “universally amiable.” In a career of fluctuating fortunes, before and after the 1967–76 period as well as during it, a key feature of Callaghan's rise to the top as shown by Morgan was a willingness to trample over opponents in order to secure political advancement. Morgan's verdict—one that Deveney's valuable new study echoes and elaborates on—was that Callaghan was a “terrifyingly hard man,” whose dealings were frequently marked by an air of barely disguised menace: “One of the less appropriate sobriquets for this sometimes difficult and bad-tempered man was ‘Sunny Jim’” (751).