Portraits and Miniatures(3)

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.