Suiting Up for 10 Downing Street

Employment Secretary Michael Foot is usually seen in public wearing the kind of clothes that produce sighs of despair along Savile Row. Last week, however, he had taken to wearing jackets and trousers that actually matched. Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, who is normally neat but not resplendent, took his front-bench seat in the House of Commons in an impeccable double-breasted suit and rich gray silk tie suitable for an audience with the Queen. There was good reason for the sartorial preening: after the second ballot of Labor Party members was counted, Callaghan and Foot were the remaining contenders in the race for the party leadership--and with it, the move to 10 Downing Street as resigned Prime Minister Harold Wilson's successor.

The winner was to have been decided by a third ballot scheduled for Monday this week. "Big Jim" Callaghan was the odds-on choice to take it; he won 141 votes on the second ballot, to Foot's 133. Thereafter, the two vied for the 38 votes that went to Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, who as low man in that vote automatically dropped out of the race; most of his backers were expected to side with Callaghan, who needs at most 17 additional votes to win.

The surprise in the leadership fight has been not the strength of Callaghan but the drawing power of Party Left-Winger Michael Foot, who led the first ballot with 90 votes, to 84 for the Foreign Secretary. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, a favorite of Labor intellectuals, polled only a disappointing 56 votes on that ballot. Along with two other contenders--Energy Secretary Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a leftist, and middle-roading Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland--Jenkins dropped out.

Strict Limits. A passionate socialist, Foot won backing not just from the party's left wing, but even from some center-right M.P.s who admire his integrity. It was Foot and his friend Jack Jones, powerful boss of the Transport and General Workers' Union, who last summer persuaded the unions to accept strict limits on wage increases as a necessary means of fighting Britain's inflation rate, which was then running at 26%.

In the final balloting, though, that valuable service to Labor's cause may not have been enough. A notoriously unorthodox administrator, Foot has been a Cabinet minister only since 1974 and has never held any of the top portfolios normally considered essential background for No. 10. Beyond that, Foot was thought to be especially vulnerable in a general election campaign against Tory Leader Margaret Thatcher. In one Sunday Times poll, only 7% of the Labor voters named Foot as their first choice to be Prime Minister; 33% found him "not acceptable." Callaghan, on the other hand, was the first choice of 48%.

Callaghan appealed to many Laborites as a pragmatic politician with a shrewd, intuitive sense of what the average voter wants. Some Labor M.P.s were bothered by the fact that, like Wilson, he seems impossible to pin down ideologically. Christopher Mayhew, a former Labor M.P. who entered Parliament with Callaghan in 1945, recalled that the new M.P. was even then a leader, hustling about to corral his fellow freshmen for a meeting. "But on the great issues of the day," recalls Mayhew, "there was no indication of where he stood."

As Prime Minister, Callaghan would certainly have to tackle some great issues--notably Britain's pressing economic problems. As a member of two Wilson Cabinets, he committed himself to the cutback in government spending outlined in Denis Healey's White Paper (TIME, March 1). Michael Foot's strong showing has aroused leftist hopes for greater leverage, but actually Callaghan could use Foot's enhanced position to keep the left in line. If the deputy leader of the party, Edward Short, obliges, Foot could well inherit that title --thus giving Callaghan broad party backing for anti-inflationary policies. The blurring of right-left distinctions in the party might also give Callaghan the opportunity to break from Harold Wilson's practice of apportioning Cabinet portfolios among the party's factions. He could then concentrate on appointing younger men of talent who will be needed in the party's leadership.

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