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Cotton traders grumbled about having to scramble for their bales instead of waiting for their share of the government's block purchase; some housewives disliked having to shop around for their preferences instead of docilely taking what was doled out to them; manufacturers had to turn to and develop new designs for a newly competitive market; farmers took to mumbling about the dangers of abandoning the government market and its fixed price. Says Butler: "Freedom is a clean wind but a chilly one when you are not used to it." Freedom had made Britain great. Only freedom. Butler argued, could make it great once more.
Within two years, Butler had results to show. Today Britain is flourishing. Production is at its highest level ever. Employment is at record levels. Prices have risen slowly, but wages have pretty well kept pace. Even the Laborite Daily Mirror concedes that Butler is an "outstanding success . . . the man who sets the Socialist opposition brooding." Attlee himself has declared that Butler is the only Tory who knows where he is going.
Rising Man. Rab Butler knows where he is going because he laid down the road. It is a new road for Toryism, and Butler is a new kind of Tory. He belongs neither to the aristocracy of Churchill and Eden nor the business world of Lord Woolton and Neville Chamberlain, but to a long line of scholars and civil servants. His new Toryism accepts the welfare state and its social services with enthusiasm-but with an insistence that people be treated as individuals. It maintains a man's right to be secure collectively, but insists on his right to advance individually. It has divorced itself from reaction, just as it has dismissed the Colonel Blimp notion that the Empire could live in a closed world of its own. Says Butler: "The school of thought I represent accepts the social changes of our times."
To reach his present status of influence, Rab Butler has had the advantage of superior intelligence, foresight, and an inherited sense of service. He has few close friends in the House of Commons, or the Cabinet. "Once you break the ice with Rab, you find the ice water underneath," cracked one M.P. His self-confidence almost touches arrogance. "I'm supposed to know all the answers and I usually do," he once told a press conference. But he is widely respected, his intimate friends find him charming and witty, and his intellectual authority as the party's guiding brain is unchallenged. He has another important asset, which often seems to go with forethought: luck. Said one observer: "Butler gives the impression that the stars are on his side."