Portraits and Miniatures (3 page)

The important practical outcome, however, was that Butler got his Education Act, which was so well prepared that it lasted with credit for nearly half a century, was sufficient of a personal achievement for it rightly and unusually to be commonly referred to by his name, and that Churchill subsequently continued, half reluctantly, to give him great opportunities. This was so when he allowed him to reform Conservative Party policy after 1945 (which resulted in Butler and Lord Woolton, who was similarly engaged in reforming the Conservative Party machine, becoming mortal enemies), and it was still more strikingly so when he gave him the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in 1951. Churchill did not then say ‘I want you to be Chancellor.' Instead he showed him a list with his name against the office, and when Rab expressed pleased surprise said, ‘Anthony and I think it had better be you.' And then, lest there should be any gilt still clinging to
the gingerbread, he gave him about the lowest rank in the Cabinet (number five below two peers and the Foreign and Home Secretaries) that it has recently been possible to allot to a Chancellor, more seriously tried to give him an overlord in the shape of the portentous Sir John Anderson, and in fact gave him an ‘underlord' in the shape of Sir Arthur Salter whom he described as ‘the best economist since Jesus Christ', but who happily from Rab's point of view proved totally ineffective as a minister.

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.

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.

When Bevan died in the summer of 1960, aged only sixty-two and after six months of cruel illness, he had already become something of a national hero. Conservatives who throughout his active career had portrayed him as a symbol of destructive evil, a compounded mixture of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill at the height of their powers, members of the Labour right who had spent most of the previous decade in implacable battle with him, and even his own old allies and friends who had been dismayed and affronted by his 1957 endorsement of the British H-bomb, were united in their affection and respect.

This final wave of feeling has had the paradoxical affect of leaving an opaque film over his memory. Neither Ernest Bevin nor Stafford Cripps who had died a decade before him, the latter at almost exactly the same age, was mourned as Bevan was, but both have left a more sharply defined imprint upon the recollection of the informed public, Bevin for brutal but constructive working-class statesmanship, Cripps for an ascetic, almost Robespierrian moral authority.

Yet much more than either is Bevan enshrined in the small pantheon of Labour heroes. Although the Labour Party has been less ruthless in disposing of its failing leaders than has the Conservative Party, it has also been more reluctant to award them posthumous honours. From Disraeli to Mrs Thatcher there is a clutch of former Conservatives whose names, appropriately dropped, should evince a cheer. Before a general Labour audience it would now be wise only to try Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevan in this context. And of these only Attlee was leader and Prime Minister. Of the other three Labour Prime Ministers, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the last might do the best, but even his ripple of applause might be embarrassingly faint.

Bevan, however, is a safe name to play with. ‘As Nye said'
is the Labour equivalent of Mrs Thatcher's over-familiar references to the ‘Winston' she did not know and whose consensual style, in both his governments, she did not understand. But Bevan's posthumous clouds of glory have by no means swirled exclusively around the Labour Party. His cross-party reputation at the end of his life and in subsequent years was as high as it had at one time been abysmal. Both Churchill's ‘squalid nuisance' of the war years and the Minister of Health who in 1948 had rather overdone his sanitary responsibility in referring to the Tories as ‘lower than vermin' were forgotten. For a short time he was presented as almost all things to all men. He became at once the patriot who rose above petty politics and the keeper of the Labour Party's socialist conscience; the expression both of the provinces' revolt against London and of the welcoming tolerance of the metropolis, which made him as much at home in the Café Royal and the Savoy Grill as in the Tredegar Workmen's Institute (latterly perhaps more so); and the symbol of the generosity as well as the conflict of British politics. Such generalized reverence is a helpful qualification for national sainthood. But it inevitably leaves a certain fuzziness of impression.