THE SPECTATOR REVIEWABOOKS

Raymond Carr on guerrillas in power Reviews by Simon Raven, John Biffen, John Casey and Auberon Waugh

Harold Wilson on Lord Butler

During the Spanish Civil War, the News Chronicle of December 8, 1938, Rab Butler tells us in his memoirs* . . . was good enough to say I had excelled myself during the previous afternoon in the capacity of Stonewaller, "while the Prime Minister sat silent ". I am portrayed as having gone through the long hour of questions, through three phases: first, determination combined with an air of injured innocence; second, friendliness with an implied appeal for mercy by the bowlers: third, righteous indignation. My most telling remark was thought to be, "A certain incident has taken place and a certain answer was returned ". All this sounds more light-hearted in retrospect than it felt amid the passions of the time.

Throughout his book Rab shows that he still enjoys a joke against himself as much as he did in the House of Commons — we all remember the uninhibited, unsimulated chuckles of laughter when any of his opponents made an effective crack about him or his colleagues. But this quotation from page 74 of The Art of the Possible is just a little too characteristic of the book as a whole : he has a tendency to under-write the great occasions. Worse, Rab repeatedly fails to answer the bigger questions in the reader's mind : why was he so often in the position — as in the instance he quotes from the Spanish Civil War — of defending policies which were so basically indefensible; did he question them even in his own mind; did he ever seek to change them?

This is a disappointing book for one main reason. Though it is entertainingly written, with all the deft touches his contemporaries so enjoyed in Parliament, it fails to measure up to its subject—one of the outstanding public men and Parliamentary characters of our age.. In giving the impression that things just happened to him, he is far too prone to understate how much events — and still more what his more flamboyant leader Harold Macmillan would refer to at. "tides of history" — owe to his contribution, to his persuasion and to his hard work. His personality and his achievements will inevitably go inadequately recorded if this book is the last word on Rab.

There is perhaps one exception to this. In one of the later chapters, he warms to the task of describing the reforms for which he was responsible in the working and policies of his party after 1945, a contribution as historically significant as Peel's revolution in the Tamworth Manifesto, if, sadly for the country — ant! his party — it has not survived for so long.

This book is disappointing, too, in failing to deal adequately and frankly with the two great turning-points of his political life — Suez and the selection of a successor to Anthony Eden, and the leadership crisis of October 1963.

There are hints of a partial dissociation in his mind from the lunacy of Suez, but no explanation why, feeling as he undoubtedly did, he did not press the issue to the limit. True, one could hardly have seen Rab banging the table, but he would have had powerful support. It was Kingsley Martin who explained the choice of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in terms of a reaction from a painful and sour hangover. After the inexplicable orgy of Suez, the Conservative party turned to a boon companion who bore more responsibility than any other for both the binge and the hangover, and rejected the man who had gone along with the company and tasted nothing stronger than tomato juice.

There were many, particularly among the younger members, among the forward-looking generation — of whom a great number owed their election and their personal adoption of the Conservative philosophy to Rab — who were looking to him for a lead he did not give. Perhaps he foresaw that the crisis would have effects going far beyond the immediate invasion and would ultimately engulf the leadership, for which he was one of only two possible contenders — there was no credible third man. Did he fear it would count against him? Did he feel that the party should be given its head, or fear that the old taunt of Municheer would be hurled against him? If so, he gained little from it; on his own analysis he must have realized that the men of Suez, those who drew a totally false analogy between Nasser and Hitler, the timeservers, and the Whips, were those who stood to gain—and their guilt was total.

It is extraordinary, recalling how the House was misled, and even deceived, about the true facts — and conscious, as Rab must be, how much damaging evidence has been published since — that he is as silent on these questions as Harold Macmillan himself in his latest volume. Inconceivable as it is that Rab was in the inner circle who knew of all the manoeuvres and collusion, it is surprising that the word Villacoublay ' is absent from his index, as indeed, it was from that of Harold Macmillan's account. Rab would have done better — fifteen years after, and half-way to the operation of the thirty-year rule — to have made clear where he stood, and to have given his reaction to the disclosures which have become part of the literature of Suez.

Equally disappointing is his account of the second major crisis in his public career, the 1963 leadership struggle. It is certainly readable, and his account of what went on in those smoke-filled Blackpool rooms, and a,bove all in those last hours when the decision was slipping away from him, adds a little to our knowledge of those great events. But only a little. Where Randolph Churchill in a few weeks recorded so much — almost all of it unchallenged — Rab in as many years has added so little. Except for one thing : the strange light he sheds on the mercurial Quintin Hogg. Not only the strange circumstances of the renunciation of his peerage, against Rab!s advice, but his outburst over the telephone on the Thursday, October 17 —" This simply won't do" — his 'characteristic fury' the following, crucial morning, only to be followed by his acquiescence in Sir Alec's appointment later in the day.

This was undoubtedly the most traumatic period in Rab's public life.

It was unfortunte for him that Harold Macmillan, while too ill to continue in Downing Street, yet felt well enough to play a decisive role in the choice of his successor, having already told the sixtyone-year-old Rab, then two years younger than Macmillan had been on succeeding to the Premiership, that on age grounds he was better fitted to be kingmaker than king. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Harold Macmillan's views on Rab's succession were not dissimilar from those of Clem Attlee on Herbert Morrison. But Clem was not in the habit of leaving his fingerprints around.

Despite this, Rab fails in his book to provide any of the answers to the questions everyone was asking. Even more disappointing, he does not even mention the questions.

Could Rab, by refusing to serve under Sir Alec Douglas-Home, have prevented Harold Macmillan's nominee from taking over? For in these days it is a rare event if, when the monarch sends for a potential Prime Minister, the response is not a kissing of hands but an undertaking to inquire whether a Government could be formed : the question remained open. Rab's account gives the impression of a limited but dutiable resentment. He clearly shared the doubts which so many of his senior colleagues felt. Even more he resented the manner in which the choice had been made. He was unsure about the number of backbenchers who would not bear him. Clearly there was a number who had it , in for him, yet he could not know how many — it would be interesting to know their quality and reasons — and he seemed too ready to regard them as adequate in numbers to block his appointment. But he lifts the veil sufficiently to indicate that he had reason to feel that the soundings taken had been prejudiced by the manner in which at least some of the Whips had put the question. Under direction? And, if so, whose? He gives no answer, while sug gesting that the attitude of the Whips' Office was decisive.

The best comment on the whole operation, which Rab perhaps would, with greater frankness, endorse, was that expressed at the time by the then Conservative commentator, William ReesMogg, in the Sunday Times : that the Conservatives had ceased to be gentlemen while not yet becoming democrats.

This raises another question which must be asked. Had Humphry Berkeley succeeded not in 1965 but in 1963 in persuading the Conservative parliamentary party to accept an elective system on a change in the leadership, what would the results have been? Since we do not know the real strength of those who would not have Rab at any price, it is impossible to estimate what the outcome would have been. At least it is arguable that an indecisive result on the first ballot would have put Rab in a position to exercise a decisive influence on the choice of any alternative. Nor is it possible to estimate, if Rab had been elected, how the knife-edge election of 1964 would have gone. It might have been a Conservative majority which was called upon to face the implication of an £800 million payments deficit with a majority of less than half a dozen.

Another unanswered question, and Rab was undoubtedly right not to raise this, was what might have happened had Labour won by a larger majority so that the 1964 Parliament would have begun with every prospect of a full term. At least one detached observer, who by definition could not be described as a Senior or any other rank of Conservative, felt at the time that the Conservatives would have been wise to choose Rab as an interim leader, to guide his party in a 1945-type reappraisal after thirteen years of office, and to retain his post long enough for the young lions to fight it out among themselves and enable the clear successor to emerge. But Rab's name had been blackened by the unscrupulous exploitation by the Tories of some unguarded comments to a Daily Express journalist — now gone to higher things — on a train. In the event, Rab's acceptance of Downing Street's offer of the nomination to Trinity closed this option for the Conservatives.

1956 and 1963, then, are disappointing chapters in this book. But though the work as a whole fails to live up to the stature and mystery that was Rab, it is still an entrancing account of a long fieriod of history. Telling us so little of the Rab of the crises, it tells us a great deal of the essential Rab of the first twenty-five years of his Parliamentary life. We learn more than we could ever have known of the influence on him of his early years in India, and of his intellectual inheritance. We knew — but are now able to confirm from his own words — what his domestic life gave to him. We learn what Saffron Walden and the wider Essex community meant to him — as much, even, as Stockton meant to Harold Macmillan.

The present political generation, and the historian, learn more than most of us realize about all that went into the fights over the Government of India Bill, and, surprising from the point of view of later comment, about the Olympian stature his colleagues accorded to Stanley Baldwin, and the evidence of the sureness of his touch — the victory of his Fabian strategy, until the challenge of the dictators and Baldwin's inadequate response, produced a new assessment. ticularly in the negotiations on denominational schools — even more when one reads how the 1944 Act was pushed through in the face of a clear and explicit veto from Winston Churchill at the height of his wartime power.

His response to this veto was the one clear evidence in his public life that he had the steel to decide that an issue on which he was utterly determined was not to be limited by conventional notions of the 'art of the possible'.

For those are the words he has chosen to cover the whole of his massive contribution to his country's history. That they represent his definition of politics is proved again and again in these pages. It may be that this was because his early ministerial life was at a junior level in an age when compromise on big issues of principle, and international principle at that, dominated the stage. He might have been more fortunate if his first ministerial appointment, like that of Harold Macmillan, had been in May 1940, and not in 1932, or if his role at the time of Munich had been only that of an umbrella-carrying PPS not a Minister of the Crown.

When the great divide came in 1956, and again in 1963, he appeared committed by over-long experience, and 'perhaps by a sense of party loyalty which proved singularly ill-rewarded, to interpreting the art of the possible in excessively limited terms. Too often he set his sights too low. Too frequently he failed to ask what the possible might be, given determination to enlarge its horizons and to inspire others, as he was capable of doing, with what those horizons might mean.

Public life in Rab's generation has shown, as in all other ages, that while political parameters can never extend beyond what is possible, the greatest achievements have been recorded in the days when there were those who decided that sometimes it is necessary to set one's sights on the impossible. It may not always be achieved, certainly most times it will fail of achievement, but most of our history has been made by those who tried.