Portraits and Miniatures (2 page)

With Stanstead Hall, a substantial Westminster house in Smith Square and plenty of money to keep up both of them he lived in pre-war days on a scale that was lavish without being flamboyant. In 1935 he achieved the accolade of being host at Stanstead to a great Conservative fête with all the Essex MPs except for Churchill on the platform and Stanley Baldwin as the principal speaker and his guest for the weekend. Butler's cup was made more overflowing by the fact that Baldwin, whom he insisted to the end of his life was the one of his seven Prime Ministers to whom he felt closest, assured him at the railway station on departure that his squirearchal way of life would underpin his political balance and future.

Rab's later grandeur, however, came to be based much more on his idiosyncratic indifference to appearance or discretion than to the affluence of his way of life. Mollie Butler (his second wife) described him as having an inherent distinction of appearance because he was
tiré à quatre épingles.
About the inherent distinction I agree, while regarding the use of that French phrase, which I think can best be translated as ‘in band box condition', as clear evidence of the blindness of love. Rab could look a notable, even a superior figure with his cheeks half-shaven and with dandruff spilling on the shoulders of a shabby suit, but what he certainly could not do, for at least the last twenty years of his life, was win a competition for glossiness. He looked more like the Lord Derby of the 1870s, whom Sir Charles Dilke at first mistook for a tramp when he unexpectedly met him in a Surrey country lane, than like, shall we say, Lord (Cecil) Parkinson.

I find more convincing shafts of illumination in two anecdotes about Rab's year as Foreign Secretary, the last act of his twenty-six-year tour of half the departments of Whitehall. Sir Nicholas Henderson, his principal private secretary for this final phase, noticed on a foreign tour that Rab was wearing his none-too-spotless dinner-jacket trousers at breakfast, although with an ordinary coat above them. He hesitantly drew attention to this
possible absent-mindedness but was assured by the Secretary of State that it was intentional and due to the downy wisdom he had acquired over many years. ‘I generally find it a wise precaution,' he said. ‘You never know abroad how much time you have to spare before dinner.'

The second relates to an attempt by Lyndon Johnson half to bully and half to pour obloquy on Rab's head. The British Government were irritating Washington by permitting the sale of Leyland buses to Cuba. Butler, paying a pre-arranged White House visit, was harangued by Johnson, who thought he could strengthen his point by pulling out a wad of dollar bills, fingering them derisively as though he might be about to toss them at Rab, and suggesting needlingly that if Britain was too hard up to behave as a proper member of the Western Alliance she should none the less cancel the contract and send the bill for compensation to LBJ's Texas estate office. The culprit was intended to slink out in shame, with head bowed and his tail between his legs. No doubt Rab did leave with his head bowed, for that was its habitual posture. But so far from ingesting shame he regaled many a dinner party for months to come with accounts of the President's extraordinary mixture of menace, vulgarity and naïveté, chortling and gurgling with pleasure as he further embellished each attempt to make him feel humiliated.

Yet in this cultural clash, while Butler represented the forces of urbane civilized superiority and Johnson the raw brashness of the insecure
arriviste,
it was also the case that Rab was the natural servant of the state and LBJ the natural ruler. The Texan who clawed his way into the US Senate and then to the vice-presidency which became the presidency would never have let power slip three times through his hands in the way that Rab did.

Butler's provenance was half academic and half Indian public service. His father was in India for thirty-seven years, ending as Governor of the Central Provinces, before coming back first as Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Man and then as Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. But his great-uncle, Henry Montagu Butler, had been a dominating headmaster of Harrow and then Master of Trinity (in both of which institutions he ironically
succeeded in flattening the intellectual enthusiasm of Rab's hero Stanley Baldwin) from 1859 to 1918. Rab's mother was a Miss Smith of Edinburgh, whose father had been editor of the Calcutta
Statesman
and one of whose brothers was Principal of Aberdeen University as well as a Moderator of the Church of Scotland, while another had been private secretary to the Viceroy. There was a hint of eighteenth-century Cornish parliamentary gentry in his father's family, but the aristocratic influence was minimal, although the top of the upper-middle-class status was assured and constant. Rab's father and three of his brothers became knights, although only the least academically regarded one made any money. Wealth was indeed a somewhat alien concept, and Sir Montagu Butler was distinctly shocked by the amount of money that Sam Courtauld settled on Rab. Although this separated him from the lifestyle of his parents and other forebears, making him at once broad-acred and more metropolitan, as well as less at home in the comfortable villas of the Cambridge academic clans, he remained a dutiful and affectionate son. I would guess he remained closer to similar parents than Maynard Keynes had done twenty years earlier.

As a young Member of Parliament Butler pursued a course of great party rectitude. Almost his first action to attract any public notice was a May 1930 anti-Harold Macmillan letter to
The Times,
of which he was the author, but for which he organized three other MP signatories as well as himself. Oswald Mosley had just resigned from the Labour Government and issued a manifesto of economic and constitutional innovation against the hidebound complacency which seemed to be the approach of both the main parties to unemployment and other evils. It was the beginning of the road that was to lead Mosley to the British Union of Fascists, but this was at first by no means the obvious direction, and many respectable people, from Harold Nicolson to Aneurin Bevan, were attracted by his ideas. So was Macmillan, who had written to
The Times
supporting Mosley's call for a change in the rules of politics. ‘… if these [existing] rules are to be permanently enforced, perhaps a good many of us will feel it is hardly worth bothering to play at all', Macmillan rather rashly
wrote. The Butler-drafted reply was intended both as a put-down and as a warning off the grass, and from the point of view of party orthodoxy was neatly done: ‘When a player starts complaining “that it is hardly worth bothering to play” the game at all it is usually the player, and not the game, who is at fault. It is then usually advisable for the player to seek a new field for his recreation and a pastime more suited to his talents.' Macmillan stood rebuked by the prefects, who no doubt hoped the headmaster would be pleased, for lack of proper school spirit.

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.