Portraits and Miniatures(6)

When Eden resigned seven weeks later Butler was still the favourite in the predictions of the press. But in the Cabinet, where the effective decision was made, and with Churchill, who was called in for consultation by the monarch, Macmillan was given the edge. Butler’s support was varyingly estimated at between one and three of his Cabinet colleagues as against the circa fifteen who plumped for Macmillan. Whether he would have done better amongst the junior ministers and Tory backbenchers is uncertain. In any event they were not asked, and Rab began six and a quarter years of being Macmillan’s factotum, a major-domo, even a chamberlain, rather than a butler, although eponymy made it inevitable that he was often cartooned as precisely that. He had an independent fame in the country and commanded considerable reserves of faintly amused affection. He never attempted to modify his style to suit Macmillan’s, or to echo his words, or to pretend to a warmth towards him that he did not feel. Butler was none the less Macmillan’s deputy, depended upon to ‘run the government’ (his old Martha-like skill) during Macmillan’s fairly long and frequent absences abroad.

Despite this dependence, Macmillan often treated Butler with a surprising lack of consideration. He refused to give him the Foreign Office at the beginning of the government, on the some-what specious ground that Selwyn Lloyd had to be kept there because a second head on a charger (the first being Eden’s) would be too much of a repudiation of Suez. So Rab had to make do with the Home Office, where, however, he became considerably and constructively engrossed. To this was added the leadership of the House of Commons, in which post his capacity for elliptical and non-partisan ambiguity brought him great success, particularly with the Opposition. Two and a half years later, after the victorious election of 1959, Macmillan, rather like a cricket captain piling sweaters upon a patient umpire, added the chairman ship of the Conservative Party, which required too much enthusiasm and partisanship to be Rab’s natural habitat. Then, in the summer of 1960, when he moved Selwyn Lloyd to the Treasury, he again passed over Rab’s claims to the Foreign Office, preferring Alec Home despite his then being a peer, and making Rab the derisory counter-offer of succeeding Home as Commonwealth Secretary.

Even Rab could not accept that, and so he continued for another year with his three top-heavy home front jobs, until in the long recess of 1961 Macmillan simply stripped him of two of them in order to provide for Iain Macleod a route out of the Colonial Office where he was causing too much internal Conservative Party disruption. Then, after another six months, Macmillan persuaded Butler to accept responsibility for dismantling the ill-fated Central African Federation, while retaining the Home Office across an uncomfortable gulf of 4000 miles. Finally, as a result of the disastrous day of the long knives of 12 July 1962, Rab lost the Home Office and was left for the last year of the Macmillan Government with a potentially poisoned chalice in Africa (out of which, however, he skilfully sucked most of the poison) and the meaningless title of First Secretary of State at home. It is difficult to contest Anthony Howard’s conclusion that by 1962 Butler had become for Macmillan ‘a trout that he could tickle and play with at will’.

In these circumstances Butler approached his third and last Prime Ministerial opportunity. He may have been a little réchauffé, but he was not old, only just over sixty, younger than Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan and Callaghan when they succeeded, and the same age, within a few months, as his vanquisher, Home. In some ways his position was stronger than in 1957, for in 1963 he had no Suez record of equivocation immediately behind him, he had much weaker opposition, and he had in the mean time acquired a splendid wife who had the buoyant determination which Rab himself lacked. ‘I vowed privately never to speak to Harold Macmillan again,’ she wrote simply and starkly after the 1963 débâcle. Moreover, she translated her private vow into public action. Débâcle it none the less was. I understand Rab’s position perfectly. He could have blocked Alec Home and become the only possible Prime Minister. He would have had to force himself in. He did not want to do so. He did not have a vast vanity that demanded he should be acclaimed with trumpets and fanfares. But he did want to be freely accepted. That he could not achieve, so he preferred the course of submission with many regretful backward looks and much need for reassurance that he had behaved well.

From there the road led on to the Foreign Office, which might have excited him in 1955 but which merely wearied him in 1963, to the refusal of an earldom from Home in October 1964 and the acceptance of a life barony from Wilson in January 1965 (a very Rab touch this, half disdainful throwaway and half unfortunate cock-up), thirteen years of hesitant spring and glorious autumn as Master of Trinity, followed by three and a half years of declining health, death on Budget day 1982, and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey with the Government reeling at the beginning of the Falklands crisis. Even at the end Rab could not be far from the epicentre of politics. Maybe he was the best Prime Minister we never had. Certainly he was the most ambivalently fascinating of the nearly men.