East Hendred
December 1992
R. A. Butler
Although Miles away from being ‘a great man’ in the sense epitomized by the inner certainties of a General de Gaulle, Rab Butler was in many ways the most intriguing British political personality of those born since 1900. This stems from his ambiguity of character, from the paradoxes of his career and style, and from the fact that he was a richly comic figure, around whom anecdotes and aphorisms clustered, who was also capable of being extremely and intentionally funny himself.
He was most famous for not becoming Prime Minister. There have been other renowned ‘near-misses’ - Austen Chamberlain, George Nathaniel Curzon, even Hugh Gaitskell - but no one quite rivalled Rab in making a métier out of being pipped at the post. He is also credited (semi-apocryphally) with sustaining Anthony Eden, one of the seven heads of government under whom he served, with an unforgettable declaration of support: ‘He is the best Prime Minister we have.’ This phrase, which rang around the political world, neatly illustrated nearly all the attributes possessed by Butler and previously described. But it missed out one, which was his gift for quiet constructive statesmanship. By his Education Act of 1944, at once boldly conceived and skilfully engineered, his deft tenure of the Exchequer in the early 1950s, and his frequent provision of the administrative cement which held disintegrating governments together, he showed himself a great public servant, with, for most of his career, some streaks of vision as well.
Amongst his paradoxes were his devotion to public life without the steel of ultimate ambition; his assuming the mantle of a deep-rooted Essex man, while representing in Conservative politics the antithesis of the values which have now come to be associated with that maligned county; and of becoming in some ways a grander grandee than Macmillan, because a less self-conscious one, without having a drop of non-bourgeois blood in his veins.
As a very young man Butler had been for a year a teaching fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but from his resignation there following his marriage into Courtauld wealth in 1926 until his forty-year-later somewhat weary return to Cambridge, this time to the splendour of the Master’s Lodge at Trinity, his attention never flickered away from the bright light of politics, and above all from the politics of office. He was in the House of Commons for thirty-six years and for no less than twenty-six of them in a government of one sort or another. He was the quintessential front bench insider politician. He once (in 1949) said to me with typically feline indiscretion: ‘The trouble with Anthony [Eden] is that he has no intellectual interests.’ Rab liked some non-political moorings such as his presidency of the Royal Society of Literature or the possession of his father-in-law’s fine collection of French Impressionist paintings, but it never seriously occurred to him to make a life away from politics or even away from office. His career went through a lot of fluctuations, and he suffered many indignities at the hands of both Eden and Macmillan. But he never responded to them by deciding he had had enough, or even with the serious threat of resignation. It was always better to be in than out.
His marriage gave him not only his wealth but his Essex roots. Samuel Courtauld settled £5000 a year tax free upon him, which was a very considerable income in 1926. He also subsequently gave him Stanstead Hall, a substantial north Essex country mansion, into which he moved in 1934. On top of this he left him Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, which Butler eventually sold to the royal family as a residence for Princess Anne, as well as a life interest in the pictures, with the residue of his fortune going to Sydney Butler, Rab’s first wife until her death in 1954 and Courtauld’s only child. The nomination to the Saffron Walden Conservative candidature, which Rab secured at the age of twenty-four and which gave him a secure constituency for four decades, although its safeness never prevented him cultivating it with skill and assiduity, also came through the Courtauld connection. And when he married again in 1959, as the result of a fine middle-aged romance about which his widow has written with a moving vividness, it was to another Courtauld, this time by marriage, who lived in another, although smaller, Essex country house in which he eventually finished his days.
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.