Jim Callaghan

Jim Callaghan turned up to speak at a students' union debate many years ago but left during the middle to attend his constituency meeting. When he came back he was ticked off by a prominent member of the students' union for being so mannerless.
I didn't think it was such a rude thing for him to do since surely his constituency was a bit more important than us.
But later I formed a different picture of the man. I think he could be rude, a bit of a bully, one who'd ride roughshod over people....
I joined the local labour party when Callaghan was our MP; the only reason was that I felt he could do with some middle-of-the-road support since there was a cabal of members of the constituency who were out to remove him, very left-wing guys who'd get up to speak and would not sit down for Castro-like periods of time.
I felt I was there to do him a good turn.
A lot of good I did him. I found he had plenty of support and didn't need me.
But I stayed a member for a year or so until something happened that made me change my mind about the man.
By this time he was PM and one of his first jobs was to assign a person to be Ambassador to the USA. He chose his son-in-law, Peter Jay.
I was disgusted. I turned up at the regular weekly meeting and, in "any other business", I said what I thought about the appointment and I would like to convey the message of what I thought to the immenent constituency meeting the following Friday.
A sort of shivering silence descended on the meeting. Then the chairman said that it was not possible to take the message to that meeting which Callaghan would be attending because it had been brought up in "any other business".
Whether that was a valid, constitutional reason I didn't (and don't) know; the fact was they were not going to do it and jumped at the excuse they made.
The fact was, I could see by the looks of dread on their faces, they were dead scared of telling him what I had said. He'd have wiped the floor with them.
I was never told about further meetings and never attended again.