Page "Barbara Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn" Paragraph 13

As Secretary of State for Employment, she was also appointed First Secretary of State by Wilson, bringing her firmly into the heart of government.

She was never far from controversy which reached a fever pitch when the trade unions rebelled against her proposals to reduce their powers in her 1969 white paper, ' In Place of Strife '.

This also involved a major cabinet split, with threatened resignations, hot tempers and her future nemesis James Callaghan breaking ranks to publicly try to undermine the bill.

The whole episode alienated her from many of her friends on the left, with the Tribune newspaper railing very hard against the bill, which they held to be attacking the workers without attacking the bosses.

The split is often said to be partly responsible for Labour's defeat at the 1970 general election.

The eventual deal with the unions dropped most of the contentious clauses, leaving not much to show.

Despite failing to be elected to the shadow cabinet, Castle remained as the Labour shadow spokesperson on Employment in the early days of the incoming Conservative government in 1970, which introduced many of her policy suggestions as part of their Industrial Relations Act.

When she was attacking the Conservative bill, the government simply pointed to her own white paper, leading to Wilson reshuffling her first to the health portfolio and then out of the shadow cabinet.