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.