BOOKS
Not Ajax but Ulysses
J. Enoch Powell RAB: THE LIFE OF R. A. BUTLER by Anthony Howard Mollie and I have been talking', remarked the Master of Trinity to my wife, sitting beside him in hall, 'and we've come to the conclusion that Harold Macmillan is not really a very nice person'. It was classic Rab, one of those remarks which left the hearer uncertain if he was being made fun of or whether after all a self-critical charac- ter was applying irony like a salve to its perception of its own shortcomings. With Rab one never knew. Here was a man of deep and large intelligence, not endowed with a sense of humour that went beyond mild whimsy. Could he really be so inno- cent and uncalculating? Could his ambi- guities really be unintentional? Or were we being half invited to laugh the whole thing Off as a huge joke? That ultimate enigma escapes inviolate from the grasp of even an exceptionally able and well-drawn biography. We shall not easily come to know more about Rab Butler than can be learnt from Anthony Howard's calculated study; but what we, who lived close to Rab, already knew we appreciate the better for reading Howard. Everything reasonably necessary to a judg- ment, on this side of the last trump, will be found there, thanks to an adroit use of archives to test and supplement records already in print. Perhaps after all it is best to content ourselves with the visible cause and character traits which produced the Rab story. They are plain enough, and amply documented here. Rab was a congenital Tory. His instincts were for organic change and compromise, for a willingness to recognise the fated constituents of human nature and historical situations and to work along the grain. Rab was not an Ajax who went about courting the lightning in order to defy it. He was a Ulysses, who wanted to achieve the prac- ticable with all the skills and cunning of a conscientious artist. It is facile to remark, as we of the war generation sometimes did, that he would have been different and, in our view, more successful if he had ever worn uniform and borne arms. He never did; but that was not the man.
Office and affluence came his way, and they became him. The Courtauld money, the safe seat, the early initiation into government office — in retrospect they seem more like his natural attributes than mere acquisitions. True it is that he fitted Office and filled it: office was the central source of fulfilment and motivation in his life. He sat in the House of Commons for 36 years, and he was only off the front bench for the first three of those. The most characteristic phase in the whole biography was after Macmillan in 1957 snatched the
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premiership to which Rah had seemed destined. Rab then proceeded nevertheless almost literally to run the government machine over which his successful rival presided; and no one who ever served with or under him at that time failed to marvel at the huge competence and capability with which he devoured gargantuan meals of administrative and political decision- taking. Rab without office would have been like a mariner starving to death on a desert island.
Rab therefore needed to pay whatever was the price at which his essential pabu- lum would be procured, and that price is in politics a price which the proud and sensi- tive sometimes find impossible to pay. Yet he could easily have been mistaken for a proud and sensitive man. The truth, I think, is that he was a private and a withdrawn man, with considerable de- pendency, which such characters often have, upon general approval and support from outside. To need to be liked and admired is not incompatible with the qual- ities of firmness, determination and pertin- acity which Rab demonstrated over and over again, when president of the board of education or later when Home Secretary.
Rab's was not a distinguished academic mind, despite the fellowship he acquired at Pembroke College, Cambridge; but his powers of perception and analysis were uncommonly acute, and since their promptings were not distorted or diverted by strong prejudices or passions, they gave him a commanding overview in politics of what he was to choose for the title of his autobiographical essay, 'The Art of the Possible'. An important and explicatory component of his political life was the long tally of years he spent in charge of policy- making bodies, in particular the Conserva- tive Research Department, and as Chair- man of the Conservative Party. He was a politician's politician, with a flair for politi- cal management.
Then one comes to the crux — the three occasions, in 1953, in 1957 and in 1963 when vulgar perception poses the question why he failed to capture the supreme prize, as it is accounted, of political life, to come back with 'the Cup'. Certain it is that a different character — and there was a different character around at the. time would have played a different game, with whatever result; but I wonder, and all the more after re-living Rab's life in Anthony Howard's book, if we were not mistaken, we who dashed ourselves to pieces on the rocks to make him Prime Minister, in what we judged to be success in his terms. In Lady Macbeth's analysis it might have been 'what thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily'; but certainly not `wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win'.
This is where the tradition, inherited and inculcated, of the public servant falls into place in Rab's portrait. It is extraordinary with what precision Rab's role in the succession crisis of 1963 had been played before, even down to details, not once but several times. It had been played already in 1957, when, returning home after accept- ing office under Macmillan, Rab declared to the press: 'If my services are of value, they will be at the Prime Minister's dispos- al. There is a big difference between public life and private life. In public life one has to do one's duty. I would certainly not desert the ship at a time like this.' It had been played already when Rab, newly Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1952, suffered the crucial key of a free exchange rate to be wrenched from his hands. (`It is difficult to establish', writes Howard, 'just how mortified Rab was by this failure.') It had been played already in 1955, when following Eden's accession Rab clung to the Treasury but was refused in Cabinet the opportunity to introduce the early autumn Budget that could have averted the humiliation of the 'pots and pans' and his relegation to leadership of the House.
`I could not get my way and, no doubt, should have resigned', he wrote shortly afterwards. There spoke, for a moment, the politician rather than the public ser- vant; for the essence of the public servant is precisely not to resign but to take whatever post aboard 'the ship' the work- ings of the system may throw up. 'In the event', the biographer continues, 'Rat) (perhaps characteristically) resolved to soldier on.' It might serve as an epig- rammatic summary of the whole story. Rab soldiered on like the immensely able public servant that he was, until, in quite the correct manner, the demission came at 63 — slightly late for a civil servant but early for a politician — with a knighthood (the top knighthood), a peerage and the mast- ership of a college (the top college).
So we are wrong to 'stand there gazing up' after the lost leader. And yet, and yet; though politics is about government and place, politics is also about persuasion and articulation. I had not heard until I read it in Howard that 'one of Rab's favourite sayings even in old age was: "I may never have known much about ferrets and flower-arranging, but one thing I did know was how to govern the people of this country." ' It is not a bad curtain line, nor a false one, if it had not been eclipsed by the characteristically impenetrable Rabb- ism: 'I think I could have made quite a tolerable leader for the Conservatives'.
Yes, no doubt, if it had fallen out that way; but to have made it so, Britain would have had to have been a different Britain from that which we look back upon; and different also from that to which we now look forward.
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