by Roy Jenkins
This was odd, for Butler had incomparably less of ‘school spirit’ about him than did Macmillan. He was too irreverent for that. He was no good at games (although quite a good shot) because of an arm permanently damaged in a childhood Indian riding accident, and he did not much like Marlborough, where he was sent after failing to get an Eton scholarship. He was born two years too late for the World War I army. He showed no particular affection for either of the two middle-grade Cambridge colleges (Pembroke and Corpus) of which he was a member, and although he warmed much more to Trinity in later life this was on the basis of a worldly old Master enjoying a success in a new field rather than of an enthusiastic college loyalist.
Macmillan, on the other hand, was full of schwärmerei for the institutions with which he was associated. He loved Summer Fields, Eton, Balliol and the Grenadier Guards. So this early Butler-Macmillan dispute was fought with each occupying paradoxical terrain. It may none the less have cast its shadow on to future relations.
It was, however, successful at commending Butler to the headmaster and the other beaks. In September 1931 on the formation of the National Government he became parliamentary private secretary to Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for India, and then, a year later and still under thirty, he was promoted to be parliamentary under-secretary and a full member of the Government. It was a considerable opportunity because it meant that for the next three years he was concerned with the preparation for and the steering through the House of Commons of the Government of India Act, which within the Conservative Party provided the central battlefront of politics throughout the period. Butler profited from Hoare’s patronage and served him well. But he accumulated no affection for him, wrote many years later of his lack of humanity as a departmental chief, and treated his 1935 downfall as Foreign Secretary, first at the Quai d’Orsay in the wily hands of Pierre Laval and then on the ice in Switzerland, with the deadpan dismissiveness that became one of the characteristics of Rab’s style.
While Butler was serving the unloved Hoare he clashed directly with the unreconstructed Churchill, who until 1935 devoted more effort to frustrating the India Bill than to denouncing the dictators. Not only did Rab have to refute a whole series of Churchill-inspired amendments, he also found himself trying to organize against Churchill’s position in the press and in the constituency parties. He then compounded his sin by progressing via an uneasy nine months at the Ministry of Labour to becoming parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office in February 1938, and as such the principal Commons spokesman for appeasement during the last eighteen months of the peace. When Eden and Cranborne (later Salisbury) resigned, Halifax became Foreign Secretary and Butler moved into Cranborne’s junior job. But it was more important and more exposed than is that job now. First, he was the sole Foreign Office junior minister, as against today’s five. Second, he had the Commons to himself, subject to a great deal of Chamberlain supervision. He had the advantages and disadvantages of becoming almost the Prime Minister’s parliamentary adjutant, with one foot in the Foreign Office and the other across the road in 10 Downing Street.
In all these circumstances he built up remarkably little resentment in Churchill. His subsequent relations with him were obviously (in retrospect although by no means necessarily in advance) to turn out to be much more important than with Baldwin, for whom his affection was real and personal, or with Chamberlain whom he served so faithfully in the appeasement years, and to whom, in the company of Alec Home, Chips Channon and Jock Colville (whose presence as the future chronicler of the life of St Winston renders the occasion almost respectable), he drank a toast, on May 10th 1940, as ‘the King [already just] over the water’. Churchill, who was by no means always magnanimous even in victory and very rarely so in defeat, had paid Rab a high tribute for his parliamentary skill at the end of the India Bill struggles in 1935, and had markedly failed to extend this to Hoare. And in 1940 he first kept him in the new coalition government with the elliptical tribute that he ‘could go on with [his] delicate manner of answering parliamentary questions without giving anything away’, and then refrained from sacking him when, at the time of the fall of France, Butler engaged in a highly indiscreet ‘peace feeler’ conversation with the head of the Swedish Legation in London.
This latter restraint may have been because no one knew better than Churchill, following the two days of War Cabinet discussion on 27 and 28 May 1940, that the under-secretary’s desire for a negotiated peace was exceeded by that of his ministerial chief, and that to have got rid of Butler while leaving Halifax immune would have been a classic example of shooting the monkey rather than the organ grinder. But it probably owed at least as much to a somewhat mocking affection Churchill was developing for Rab. In The Art of the Possible Butler gives a memorable description of being bidden to ‘dine and sleep’ at Chequers in March 1943. At mid-morning the next day he was summoned to the bedroom where Churchill lay smoking a cigar and stroking a black cat, although working hard at the same time. Rab was asked to assent to the proposition that the cat did more for the war effort than did he (then Minister of Education), for it provided Churchill with a hot-water bottle and saved fuel and power. Rab delicately declined to agree but said that it was a very beautiful cat, which seemed to please Churchill.
There may have been more symbolism in the occasion than Rab realized. I think Churchill felt towards him rather as he did towards the cat. He was aware that Butler regarded him with detachment, but found Rab useful, up to a point elegant, capable both of being stroked and pushed off the bed when he was fed up with him, and in a sense easy because he was so utterly unlike himself. He appointed Butler President of the Board of Education (as it was then called) because he thought he deserved promotion (he had been a parliamentary under-secretary for nine years), wanted him out of the Foreign Office, and believed he would keep quiet a sector of the home front that bored Churchill. The last thing the Prime Minister wanted was a major and controversial measure of educational reform.
Rab’s tactical skill was to see that he could make such a measure major only if he could also negotiate it out of controversy. To his ultimately successful progress to this end there were considerable setbacks. One was when the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster wrote to The Time a letter which combined (a by no means impossible feat) a highly conservative approach with a skilful appeal to Labour sympathy. Churchill is alleged to have cut it out and sent it to Rab with the scribbled message: ‘There you are, fixed, old cock.’ The tone, bantering, friendly, half dismissive but without total assurance that the aim would be achieved, almost perfectly captured Churchill’s attitude to Butler. Its authenticity is, however, in doubt for there was no record of it except in Rab’s memory, and no one was more addicted than Rab to making up stories at least superficially hostile to himself, in which the punchline owed more to verisimilitude than to fact.
The important practical outcome, however, was that Butler got his Education Act, which was so well prepared that it lasted with credit for nearly half a century, was sufficient of a personal achievement for it rightly and unusually to be commonly referred to by his name, and that Churchill subsequently continued, half reluctantly, to give him great opportunities. This was so when he allowed him to reform Conservative Party policy after 1945 (which resulted in Butler and Lord Woolton, who was similarly engaged in reforming the Conservative Party machine, becoming mortal enemies), and it was still more strikingly so when he gave him the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in 1951. Churchill did not then say ‘I want you to be Chancellor.’ Instead he showed him a list with his name against the office, and when Rab expressed pleased surprise said, ‘Anthony and I think it had better be you.’ And then, lest there should be any gilt still clinging to the gingerbread, he gave him about the lowest rank in the Cabinet (number five below two peers and the Foreign and Home Secretaries) that it has recently been possible to allot to a Chancellor, more seriously tried to give him an overlord in the shape of the portentous Sir John Anderson, and in
fact gave him an ‘underlord’ in the shape of Sir Arthur Salter whom he described as ‘the best economist since Jesus Christ’, but who happily from Rab’s point of view proved totally ineffective as a minister.
None of this, however, could detract from the central reality that Churchill gave Rab the unmatched opportunity of the Treasury at a time of superficial difficulty but of great underlying potential, and that Rab at the age of forty-eight had the verve and the dexterity fully to seize it. The result was his golden period from 1952 to 1954 and the consequence that when, in the summer of 1953, there occurred the greatest vacuum ever known at the top of a British government he was at the plenitude of his powers. In June of that year, when Eden, the heir apparent, was in a New England clinic and incapacitated for six months, and Churchill, the seventy-eight-year-old Prime Minister, had a major stroke, Butler ran the government for three months, including presiding over sixteen successive Cabinet meetings. He was irreplaceable. Even Macmillan, not then a serious rival but soon to be one, retired to hospital for most of July. Although it was gently exercised, Rab’s power was temporarily immense. He had no rival, and the swirl of opinion in his favour was considerable.
This was the moment when, more even than in 1957 when he was passed over for Macmillan or in 1963 when he accepted the same fate at the hands of the much less formidable Alec Home, had he possessed the steely will for power of a Lloyd George or a Mrs Thatcher, he would have insisted that he could no longer accept the responsibility of running the government without the perquisites of being Prime Minister. He would have met with resistance, both from those who hoped, against what at first seemed to be overwhelming odds, for a Churchill recovery and from those who wanted to keep the succession open for Eden. Salisbury and Woolton, a formidable alliance of Church and trade, would have been dedicated opponents. There was indeed some hatching of a constitutionally improper plot to make Salisbury an interim Prime Minister until Eden returned to his inheritance like Richard Cœur de Lion back from the Crusades.
None the less, had he had ruthlessness in him, Butler could have blown the charade away, for he had one deadly weapon. He merely had to refuse to be a party to the deceit of the British public involved in pretending that Churchill was much less ill than he was. Butler had two emperors without any clothes between him and the premiership: one in his pyjamas at Chartwell and the other in a surgical shift in Boston. He merely had to point out how relatively naked they each were for the position of both of them to become untenable. From a mixture of decency and weakness I doubt if he was within miles of doing so. But once he had omitted to do so he had become an intendant and not an animator. After 1953, the events of 1957 and 1963 were in the stars, particularly as Rab was never again as buoyant or powerful as he had been at the middle point of his Chancellorship.
In December 1954 his first wife died, having been fluctuatingly ill for more than a year. In 1955 he besmirched his brilliant Treasury record by introducing an electioneering budget in the spring (although there is no evidence that it was either necessary or effective from this point of view) and then retracting it in the autumn. The Eden Government, so disastrous for its chief, was also uncomfortable for Rab. But he and the Prime Minister did not even have the solace of being linked together like brothers. On the contrary, Eden took advantage of Rab’s weakness after his humiliating autumn budget of 1955 to ease him out of the Treasury (in favour of Macmillan) without giving him the Foreign Office, where he wanted a junior and compliant incumbent in the shape of Selwyn Lloyd. Rab accepted the non-job of Leader of the House of Commons and, even more surprisingly, a compensating invitation to spend Christmas at Chequers. That feast having passed without recorded horrors, he retaliated with ‘the best Prime Minister we have’ in January and with a classic ‘anxious to wound but afraid to strike’ performance throughout the summer and autumn of the Suez imbroglio.
In fact Rab’s Suez ambiguity did more harm to himself than to Eden (who needed no assistance in self-destruction at that stage), and even an affectionate admirer like myself cannot excuse his complete failure to stand up to Eden in his crucial one-to-one interview with him on 18 October, accompanied by his constant mutterings of semi-detachment. Butler’s sins in that ghastly three months when every leading member of the British Government covered himself with discredit were less than those of Macmillan whose militancy (and misjudgement of Eisenhower) on the eve of the battle was only matched by his determination to run away as soon as the bombardment (of sterling) began. Yet Macmillan kept a constituency, whereas Butler, despite the competence, even the brilliance, of his clearing up of the mess once defeat was obvious and Eden had retired hurt to the West Indies, alienated almost everybody. The meeting of the 1922 Committee on 22 November at which he and Macmillan jointly appeared had about it an almost allegorical quality that should be enshrined in a tapestry or painting in the room in which the meeting took place. Butler gave a pedestrian account of the hard work he had done in retreat from Eden’s rashness. Macmillan, who was only there because Butler unwisely thought that maybe he should be accompanied, gave one of the great virtuoso performances of his life. Every stop was pulled out. The retreat was still the reality, but it was conducted under a thunderous barrage of patriotic braggadocio.
When Eden resigned seven weeks later Butler was still the favourite in the predictions of the press. But in the Cabinet, where the effective decision was made, and with Churchill, who was called in for consultation by the monarch, Macmillan was given the edge. Butler’s support was varyingly estimated at between one and three of his Cabinet colleagues as against the circa fifteen who plumped for Macmillan. Whether he would have done better amongst the junior ministers and Tory backbenchers is uncertain. In any event they were not asked, and Rab began six and a quarter years of being Macmillan’s factotum, a major-domo, even a chamberlain, rather than a butler, although eponymy made it inevitable that he was often cartooned as precisely that. He had an independent fame in the country and commanded considerable reserves of faintly amused affection. He never attempted to modify his style to suit Macmillan’s, or to echo his words, or to pretend to a warmth towards him that he did not feel. Butler was none the less Macmillan’s deputy, depended upon to ‘run the government’ (his old Martha-like skill) during Macmillan’s fairly long and frequent absences abroad.
Despite this dependence, Macmillan often treated Butler with a surprising lack of consideration. He refused to give him the Foreign Office at the beginning of the government, on the some-what specious ground that Selwyn Lloyd had to be kept there because a second head on a charger (the first being Eden’s) would be too much of a repudiation of Suez. So Rab had to make do with the Home Office, where, however, he became considerably and constructively engrossed. To this was added the leadership of the House of Commons, in which post his capacity for elliptical and non-partisan ambiguity brought him great success, particularly with the Opposition. Two and a half years later, after the victorious election of 1959, Macmillan, rather like a cricket captain piling sweaters upon a patient umpire, added the chairman ship of the Conservative Party, which required too much enthusiasm and partisanship to be Rab’s natural habitat. Then, in the summer of 1960, when he moved Selwyn Lloyd to the Treasury, he again passed over Rab’s claims to the Foreign Office, preferring Alec Home despite his then being a peer, and making Rab the derisory counter-offer of succeeding Home as Commonwealth Secretary.
Even Rab could not accept that, and so he continued for another year with his three top-heavy home front jobs, until in the long recess of 1961 Macmillan simply stripped him of two of them in order to provide for Iain Macleod a route out of the Colonial Office where he was causing too much internal Conservative Party disruption. Then, after another six months, Macmillan persuaded Butler to accept responsibility for dismantling the ill-fated Central African Federation, while retaining the Home Office across an uncomfortable gulf of 4000 miles. Finally, as a result of the disastrous day of the long knives of 12 July 1962, Rab lost the Home Office
and was left for the last year of the Macmillan Government with a potentially poisoned chalice in Africa (out of which, however, he skilfully sucked most of the poison) and the meaningless title of First Secretary of State at home. It is difficult to contest Anthony Howard’s conclusion that by 1962 Butler had become for Macmillan ‘a trout that he could tickle and play with at will’.
In these circumstances Butler approached his third and last Prime Ministerial opportunity. He may have been a little réchauffé, but he was not old, only just over sixty, younger than Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan and Callaghan when they succeeded, and the same age, within a few months, as his vanquisher, Home. In some ways his position was stronger than in 1957, for in 1963 he had no Suez record of equivocation immediately behind him, he had much weaker opposition, and he had in the mean time acquired a splendid wife who had the buoyant determination which Rab himself lacked. ‘I vowed privately never to speak to Harold Macmillan again,’ she wrote simply and starkly after the 1963 débâcle. Moreover, she translated her private vow into public action. Débâcle it none the less was. I understand Rab’s position perfectly. He could have blocked Alec Home and become the only possible Prime Minister. He would have had to force himself in. He did not want to do so. He did not have a vast vanity that demanded he should be acclaimed with trumpets and fanfares. But he did want to be freely accepted. That he could not achieve, so he preferred the course of submission with many regretful backward looks and much need for reassurance that he had behaved well.
