George Osborne would probably not appreciate being compared to RA Butler, but reviewing a new biography of ‘Rab’ in current circumstances makes it inevitable. Cynical, clever, elusive, perhaps more cutting and abrasive than he meant to be, from being seen as a rightwinger Butler modernised and repositioned his party in opposition, then took over as chancellor in a period of financial crisis – a crisis that he wilfully exaggerated in order to play partisan politics – and seemed to steer the economy into calmer waters with a combination of good judgement and even better luck. Butler had a court of admirers among young, clever and ambitious Tory members of parliament, but, unfortunately for him, he had sufficient enemies to ensure that he never became prime minister.
More immediately, Butler was the miracle-working chancellor who helped the Tories win the May 1955 election with budget giveaways on top of a reputation for sound management (more deserved in Butler’s case than Osborne’s), who came back once the election was won with a package of cuts and tax rises known as the ‘Pots and Pans Budget’ of October 1955 which was brutally demolished in parliament by Hugh Gaitskell. As he often did, Butler had stayed in an office of state or a political position just a bit too long, and the cynicism of the two budgets of 1955 tainted his reputation, even detracting from his earlier genuine achievements.
Michael Jago’s new biography of Butler starts out with a question. Was Butler ‘the best prime minister we never had?’ His answer is a definite ‘No’ – he argues that Butler lacked the political and personal qualities that the office demands. Aloof, civilised, flexible, reformist, elitist, Butler emerges not so much the best prime minister Britain never had, but perhaps a French prime minister manqué where his style would have fitted better and he could have played court philosopher to a more active, decisive president.
My history teacher always believed that the best thing in writing history essays is to ‘answer the question’. It is sound advice, and one cannot fault Jago for doing just that. This biography is solid but short on literary elegance and style; it could have done with a little more blue-pencilling to strip out the redundant adjectives, or at the very least to get rid of sentences like ‘As Mac delivered that tug on Rab’s gallows, he hoisted his opponent on his own petard.’ It could also have done with rather more by way of primary sources; Rab left an admirable set of papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Jago has obviously worked hard there and given them a thorough interrogation, but the depth of study of other papers and the National Archive holdings beyond the well-trodden cabinet papers is lacking. There are a couple of errors (Josiah Wedgwood would be turning in his grave to have been called a Tory) and loose threads, but by and large the book is well constructed.
There is a psychological puzzle to someone, like Butler or indeed my own biographical subject Reggie Maudling, who is ostensibly highly ambitious and intelligent but who every time the prize seems within reach somehow contrives to fumble the opportunity. There are some telling details in Jago’s account – the nervous breakdown at college, the fact that this apparently cool and cynical man had to be pursued by the lively, attractive, intelligent – and fantastically rich – Sydney Courtauld before he got the message – but it is not woven together into a three-dimensional portrait of the public and private facets of the man. Even among his discreet caste and generation, Butler was regarded as enigmatic, and he has managed to repel the efforts of another biographer to get under his skin.
Butler’s political achilles heel was his appalling timing; he had a habit of leaving sinking ships only on the very last lifeboat, or on occasion jumping on board a rickety tub that he had previously disdained (Suez springs to mind). It was possible in postwar Tory high politics to get away with having been a convinced appeaser; the two candidates that Macmillan preferred to Butler in 1963, Lord Hailsham and Alec Douglas-Home, had been outspokenly pro-Munich and pro-Chamberlain. Offences prior to May 1940 could be regarded as spent convictions, but Butler was unfashionably late when he had his notorious conversation with Swedish diplomat Björn Prytz about peace terms on 17 June 1940.
The most puzzling bit of Butler’s career is dealt with comparatively briefly. How did the elite-schooled, wealthy, supercilious and hyper-partisan Chamberlainite of 1940 turn into a very early apostle of consensus politics and postwar reconstruction at the education ministry by 1942? As Jago makes clear, Butler quickly built a strong relationship with his Labour education colleague James Chuter Ede, and then with the Labour frontbench, to overcome Churchill and Conservative resistance to the reform that became his Education Act in 1944. An intellectual politician to a fault, Butler presumably spent the dull year of penance doing the least important and glamorous Foreign Office work in 1940-41 (but still, what a year even to have done the drudge work there!) thinking his way into his new political perspective. But there is very little Jago ventures about this period.
Jago’s central contention is, surely, correct – that Butler would not have made a particularly good prime minister. His subtlety, aloofness from his colleagues and tendency to say things that were at the same time witty, accurate and ill-advised would have been bad enough, but Jago convincingly documents his procrastination and indecision. A Butler government formed in 1957 or 1963 would probably have been a more genteel version of Gordon Brown’s government – some good policy, even some ‘saving the world’ (Butler did a fine job of restoring Britain’s international standing immediately after Suez), but an overall impression of drift and division. Butler’s reputation stands high because he was never promoted quite as far as the Peter principle would suggest; he actually has the happier side of the equation implied by Tacitus on the Emperor Galba ‘omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset’ (everyone agreed that he would have made a good emperor if he had never been one).
There are a couple of points where Jago goes too far in arguing his case against Butler as a great lost prime minister – for instance, in underplaying the deviousness of the anti-Butler plotting in autumn 1963 to the point of appearing to take seriously Lord Dilhorne’s infamous survey of cabinet preferences. The case would have been more convincing, and more morally interesting, if he had argued that Butler would have been a sufficiently inferior prime minister to Douglas-Home that the ends justified the means, rather than trying to defend the indefensible.
Though not an unqualified Rabbite, I find myself springing to his defence a couple of times. His ability to retreat from a position made him an admirable Keynesian chancellor once he had settled in. He was good at making problems (like the misbegotten Central African Federation) disappear and, although conceding that he was a good reforming home secretary, Jago does not give Butler enough credit for the lasting cultural change at the Home Office. Nor was Butler complicit, at a decision-making level, in many big public policy blunders other than the admittedly gigantic one of Suez. He was also, for a man supposedly so cold, capable of inspiring devotion in the next generation of mercurial, reforming Tory intellects – Iain Macleod above all.
If there is a hero in Jago’s Butler book, it is the unlikely figure of Harold Macmillan. At times, the book reads as if it might have started out as a double biography of the two men – if this is the case, I for one regret that it did not end up that way, although this is ‘the best book we have’. As Jago demonstrates, the two careers are intertwined from Butler’s stinging putdown of Macmillan in 1930 as perhaps being unsuitable for the game of politics to the final demonstration of Macmillan’s superiority at the game in 1963 – and perhaps extending into the political afterlife and Mollie Butler’s fierce and mostly successful guardianship of her husband’s reputation. But perhaps it is a fitting irony that even in a book ostensibly about himself, Rab Butler is upstaged yet again by Harold Macmillan.
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Lewis Baston is a contributing editor to Progress, a senior research fellow at Democratic Audit and biographer of Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling. He tweets @LewisBaston
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Rab Butler: The Best Prime Minister We Never Had?
Michael Jago
BiteBack Publishing | 480pp | £25