Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week the former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim exposed in the 1980s as having worked with the Nazis.

Plus we've got the inventor of the first home pregnancy testing kit, also around the world

non-stop in just 20 days with only the power of heated air.

We got right into the core of the jet stream.

We were doing 160, 170 miles an hour.

I mean in a balloon. And for these stressful times, we've got the man who pioneered

mindfulness 40 years ago.

Pretty much everybody can feel their body, but nobody's ever been taught that that's mindfulness

mindfulness of the body that's coming up later in the podcast but we begin this

week with something which may sound familiar a British Prime Minister hanging on to power by the

fingertips, a British government in chaos, and a desperate struggle within Parliament to

try to get MPs to back the leadership. There's even an Irish angle, But this is not from the last few months of the Brexit crisis.

No, this takes us back 40 years to March 1979. Simon Watts has been listening through the BBC

Archives to hear the personal stories

of those who were there for the collapse of the Callahan government.

Mr Speaker, sir, I beg to move that this House has no confidence in her majesty's government.

It's March 28th 1979, one of the most dramatic nights in British parliamentary history.

Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the Conservative opposition,

is attempting to unseat the Labour Prime Minister James Callahan, and the result is on a knife edge.

Our purpose as a government and as a party is to present a bold socialist challenge to all these problems as we face these tasks and I ask for the

confidence of the horse and of the country so that we can continue with our work.

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