ABSTRACT
The period of a little more than a quarter of a century covered by the tenure of British Foreign Secretaries from Callaghan to Cook (1974-2001) is a sizeable slab of modern British history and of international developments. Moreover it is a period that contrasts quite sharply with the relative stability, both within the British political scene and internationally, of the previous quarter century or so (1945-74), which immediately followed the Second World War. During the first of those periods Labour and Conservative governments alternated but each invariably had an overall majority in the House of Commons, however small, and neither party underwent a major upheaval, with splits and prolonged internal strife. Between 1974 and 2001 there were periods when the ruling party did not have a majority and each major party in turn was riven by internal feuding in which external policy issues over Europe played a significant or, in the case of the Conservatives in the 1990s, a determinant role. Internationally the prolonged stasis of the Cold War and the steady post-war economic growth during the first period was succeeded in the second by a major international economic crisis following the quintupling of the oil price after the Yom Kippur War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa and many other international developments, which no foreign-policy guru, however perceptive, had forecast even a few years before they occurred.
