John Smith (Labour Party leader) offer of the office of Solicitor General for Scotland, not wishing his political career to become sidelined as a law officer. In October, he was made an Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Energy. In December 1975, he was made a Minister of State. Smith supported James Callaghan in the Labour Party leadership election after Wilson resigned in April 1976. When Callaghan became Prime Minister, Smith became a Minister of State at the Privy Council Office, serving with Labour's Deputy leader, Michael Foot, the Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons. In this position,
John Smith (Labour Party leader) John Smith House in his memory. Tony Blair, Smith's successor as Leader of the Labour Party, was initially quite popular and an effective campaigner who capitalised on public mistrust of the Conservative Party to win a landslide victory at the 1997 general election. Smith's biographer, Mark Stuart, claimed that Smith could have won Labour a victory on a scale similar to that achieved by Blair because of the combination of the Black Wednesday debacle and internal Conservative Party divisions over Europe since 1992. Stuart argues that the lack of a "Blair effect" would have meant that the Conservative Party would