Richard Austen Butler

Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, KG, CH, PC, DL (9 December, 1902 – 8 March, 1982), who invariably signed his name R. A. Butler and was familiarly known as Rab, was a British Conservative politician.

Butler was one of the few British politicians to have served in the three posts of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, but never achieved — and was twice passed over for — the premiership.

Early life

Butler was born in Attock Serai, in India into a family of Cambridge dons and Indian Governors; as a child his right arm was injured in a riding accident, leaving his hand never again fully functional. His limp handshake and inevitable lack of military experience (and stooping donnish manner at a time when many politicians were former officers) were political handicaps in later life. He was educated at Marlborough College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society in the summer term of his third year; in March 1924, as a newly-elected President, he entertained the Opposition Leader Stanley Baldwin at a debate. While at Cambridge he read French (in which he obtained a First), German and, in his fourth year, History and International Relations, in which he obtained one of the highest Firsts in the University. He specialised in the study of Sir Robert Peel, a man whose actions had split the Conservative Party and who may have greatly influenced Butler's later political trajectory. Butler also took part in the ESU USA Tour, the debating tour of the United States run by the English-Speaking Union.

After a brief period as a Cambridge don, teaching nineteenth century French history, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden in the 1929 general election. Butler held this seat until his retirement in 1965.

In Parliament

Butler held a series of junior Ministerial posts throughout the 1930s, often enacting controversial policy decisions. After a brief period as Parliamentary Private Secretary (ie. personal assistant) to the India Secretary Samuel Hoare, he was given his first ministerial job as Under-Secretary of State for India (1932-37) at the time the Indian Home Rule Act was being debated in Parliament amidst massive opposition, led by Winston Churchill, from rank-and-file Conservative supporters. In 1937-8 he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour.

Subsequently he was (appointed 1938) Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Neville Chamberlain's government. Butler's close association to the government's policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany may have been instrumental in limiting his political career. Butler himself would later claim that appeasement had been aimed at buying time for Britain to rearm, and that he had little input into the direction of foreign policy and that true power was held by Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, with the Prime Minister speaking in the House of Commons for the major aspects of government foreign policy instead of Butler, who was the sole Foreign Office minister in the Commons (an arrangement devised to respond to criticism of appointing a peer as Foreign Secretary rather than a reflection on Butler).

David Lloyd George intended a compliment when describing Butler as "playing the part of the imperturbable dunce who says nothing with an air of conviction."

1944 Education Act

In the summer of 1941, Butler received his first Cabinet-level post when he was appointed President of the Board of Education by Winston Churchill. The position was widely seen as a backwater in wartime, with Butler having been promoted to it to remove him from the more sensitive Foreign Office. Despite this he proved to be one of the most radical reforming ministers on the home front, shaking up the education system in the Education Act 1944, which is often known as the Butler Education Act. At the end of the war Butler briefly served as Minister of Labour for two months in the "Caretaker" administration of Winston Churchill.

Resistance plans

Butler had been designated to be one of the regional representatives of King George VI as part of the secret plan of resistance had Britain been occupied by the Nazi forces. Little even today is known about this proposed plan. The 201, 202 and 203 Battalions of the British Home Guard would have been the foundation of this British resistance.

Post-War

After the Conservatives lost their majority in the 1945 general election, Butler emerged as one of the most prominent figures during the rebuilding of the party. He served a record term as Chairman of the Conservative Research Department from 1945 to 1964. When the Conservative party returned to power in 1951 he was appointed to the senior post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Butler followed to a large extent the economic policies of his Labour predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell, pursuing a mixed economy and Keynesian economics as part of the post-war political consensus. The Economist commented on these similarities by referring to a hybrid Chancellor, "Mr Butskell", from which the term Butskellism derives.

Butler planned to move to system of free-floating the pound ("Operation ROBOT"), but this was scuppered by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in a rare intervention of his in domestic politics.^{[citation needed]}

In 1953 Butler acted as head of the Government when Winston Churchill suffered a stroke whilst his successor Anthony Eden was undergoing an operation overseas. Many have speculated that Butler could have become Prime Minister had he persuaded Churchill to retire at this point, but Butler lacked the ruthlessness that would have been necessary to accomplish this, and may have been concerned about opposition to a "Man of Munich" becoming Prime Minister. Churchill slowly recovered and retired in 1955, handing power to Eden with no controversy.

Butler's career did not prosper under Eden, about whom a number of Butler's sardonic witticisms surfaced. He described Eden as "half mad Baronet, half beautiful woman" and once agreed with a journalist that Eden was "the best Prime Minister we have". His penultimate budget slashed taxation immediately before the 1955 general election but soon afterwards it became apparent that the economy was 'overheating' (i.e. inflation and the balance of payments deficit were rising sharply) and his final budget undid several of the tax cuts, leading to charges of electoral opportunism. In December 1955 Butler was moved to the post of Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons. Although Butler continued to act as a deputy for Eden on a number of occasions, he was not officially recognised as such and his successor as Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, was assured by Eden that Butler was not senior to him.^{[citation needed]}

Despite this Butler chaired the Cabinet in Eden's absence. However Butler's stock stumbled during the Suez Crisis, particularly during Eden's absence in Jamaica, during which time Butler was seen to give weak leadership.^{[citation needed]}

Butler and Macmillan

In January 1957 Eden resigned and did not give advice to Queen Elizabeth II as to who should succeed him. The Queen took advice from senior Ministers, as well as Churchill (who backed Macmillan), Edward Heath (who as Chief Whip was aware of backbench opinion) and from Lord Salisbury, who interviewed the Cabinet one by one and with his famous speech impediment asked each one whether he was for "Wab or Hawold" (it is thought that only between one and three were for "Wab"). The advice was overwhelmingly to appoint Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister instead of Butler. The media were taken by surprise by this choice, but although we shall never know what the result would have been had there been a formal election, it is hard to make much of a case that Butler was unfairly treated on this occasion. Butler himself later confessed in his memoirs that while there was a sizeable anti-Butler faction on the backbenches, there was no such anti-Macmillan faction.

Macmillan sought to placate Butler by appointing him to a senior position, albeit as Home Secretary rather than Foreign Secretary, the job he wanted. In his memoirs Macmillan claimed that Butler "chose" the Home Office, an assertion of which Butler drily observed in his own memoirs that Macmillan's memory "played him false". Butler held the Home Office for five years, in which he once more demonstrated his radical reforming credentials through a number of pieces of legislation, although his liberal views on hanging and flogging did little to endear him to rank-and-file Conservative members. Butler also held various additional posts on different occasions throughout this period, including Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal and Conservative Party Chairman, the latter job prompting a newspaper analogy with Khrushchev's rise to power through control of the Soviet Communist Party. He was an increasingly successful public speaker. At one dinner party in June 1957, he began a speech with the words: "An after-dinner speech should be like a lady's dress - long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.".

The succession to Macmillan

In the "Night of the Long Knives" reshuffle in 1962 Butler at last received the formal titles of Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State; however Macmillan used the occasion to promote younger men such as Maudling (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Edward Heath (in charge of the EEC entry negotiations) from amongst whom he hoped to groom his successor. The following year, Macmillan was taken ill on the eve of the Conservative Party Conference and resigned as Prime Minister, asking the party bigwigs to "take soundings" of Cabinet Ministers and MPs to select a consensus candidate as the leader through the "customary processes". In the confusion of the next few days Butler found himself sidelined after delivering a poor Conference speech. Lord Hailsham was rejected after using the Conference to campaign openly for the job in a manner considered vulgar at the time. Support gathered around the outside candidate Lord Home. Much ink has been spilled on how badly the consultation process was rigged, but in the end Macmillan recommended Home for the premiership.

Many were outraged over the way that Butler had been passed over yet again; Hailsham and Maudling were dissatisfied by the choice but agreed to serve under Home; Enoch Powell and Iain Macleod (who later claimed in print that the leadership had been stitched up by a "Magic Circle" of old Etonians) both refused to serve under Home and sought to persuade Butler to do the same, in the belief that this would make a Home premiership impossible and result in Butler taking office. However Butler refused to refuse, even claiming in a letter to "The Times" that to have done so might have led to a Labour government, a suggestion later dismissed as absurd by Harold Wilson. Some have attributed his actions to his university study of Peel and its lesson of it never being correct to split your party. Enoch Powell, a former brigadier, observed that they had given Butler a loaded revolver which he had refused to use on the grounds that it might make a noise, a metaphor which speaks volumes about how Butler's lack of military experience affected his colleagues' image of him.

It is worth observing that despite Butler's immense ability and experience he was not an overwhelming choice as leader. In leadership elections a generation later, it is often the case that the initial frontrunner (eg. David Davis in 2005), or the "obvious" and publicly popular candidate (eg. Michael Heseltine in 1990, or Kenneth Clarke in 1997 and 2001) often loses at the final hurdle to a "second-best" candidate who enjoys a wider consensus of support in his own party. But there is no doubt that the episode was a public relations disaster for the Conservatives, who had to elect their next leader (Edward Heath in 1965) by a transparent ballot of MPs.

Home appointed Butler as Foreign Secretary and it was in this post he served until his party narrowly lost office at the 1964 general election. Many believed that the Conservatives would have won under his leadership, but during the election campaign he had shown his lack of stomach for the fight by remarking to a journalist that the campaign was "slipping away".

Retirement from politics

At the comparatively young age of 62 Butler left office for the last time with one of the longest records of ministerial experience amongst contemporary politicians. Butler remained on the Conservative front bench for the next year, when he was appointed Master of Trinity College Cambridge. The same year he was awarded a life peerage as Baron Butler of Saffron Walden. He would then sit as a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords. He had declined offers of an hereditary earldom, both by Alec Douglas-Home in his resignation honours list and by Harold Wilson.

At the time of his retirement from Parliament he was the longest continuously serving member of the Commons and Father of the House. As Master of Trinity, Butler was publicly promoted as a mentor and counsellor to Charles, Prince of Wales when he was enrolled in university; a humorous cartoon of the time showed Butler telling the Prince that he was to study a specially made-up History course "in which I become Prime Minister". Butler also actively served as the first Chancellor of the University of Essex from 1966 until his death in 1982 at Great Yeldham, Essex.

Butler's son Adam served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 to 1987.

In Fiction

In the alternate reality depicted in John Wyndham's story Random Quest, where the Second World War did not happen, Rab Butler is the Prime Minister of Britain (the story was written in 1954, when his becoming PM was a serious possibility).

References

• Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler - British Politics & Policy 1933-1940, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p.403, ISBN 0-521-20582-4
• F. S. Pepper (ed.), Handbook of 20th Century Quotations, Sphere Study Aids, 1984, p.105, ISBN 0-7221-6770-9
• The Master of Trinity at Trinity College, Cambridge
• Saffron Walden Conservatives

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