Callaghan's election defeat was down to the fact that he made the cardinal error of not calling the election before the winter, when most of us expected he would and should have. Instead, we had rubbish piling up and bodies unburied all in a freezing cold winter (struggled to get my first-born home from the maternity hospital on New Year's Eve through the snow and spent hours shovelling snow out of an old lady's unfelted loft the same evening). Then we had crisis, what crisis (yes, I know...) as he stepped off a plane. Then there were dodgy on-off dealings with the ever-murky, ever-Tory, ever-opportunistic, ever morally-expedient (as they still are). In the NUT we had spent years in the seventies fighting Labour education cuts, massive class sizes and compulsory transfers of teachers. Don't blame working people for losing elections, ever.