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.