RICHARD AUSTEN BUTLER, a parliamentary pundit once observed, "always looks as if he will be the next Prime Minister—until it seems the throne may actually be vacant." Butler has been deputy to all three postwar Tory Prime Ministers—Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan —and after the 1956 Suez debacle had every expectation of succeeding Eden at 10 Downing Street. When the party picked Macmillan instead, "Rab" Butler, though bitterly humiliated, said bravely: "Well, it is something to have been almost Prime Minister."
Whether or not he actually wins the throne this time, Britain's cool, complex Deputy Prime Minister is in charge of the government for the time being, and by any measure he has had far the widest and longest administrative training for the top job. He is hard to fault for past mistakes, since he had no responsibility for Suez and hardly any for the Common Market failure, not to mention the Keeler scandal. Moreover, Rab is renowned for his patience. "He seems," says one commentator, "to act in decades and think in centuries."
A Member of Parliament for 34 of his 60 years, Butler is a dedicated organization man who nonetheless takes irreverent delight in the impish indiscretion and bland ambivalence. When Eden's ditherings with economic and colonial problems stirred angry criticism in 1956, it was Butler who declared slyly: "He is the best Prime Minister we have." He once said that Britain's sacrosanct civil service is "a bit like a Rolls-Royce—you know it's the best machine in the world, but you're not quite sure what to do with it." His sallies have earned him a slightly uneasy reputation as a gifted intellectual in a party that looks askance at "brilliant" men. Nor have many older Tories—including Harold Macmillan—ever forgotten that, as a junior minister in Neville Chamberlain's government, Butler was a loyal and eloquent champion of Munich.
When Churchill became Prime Minister, he could not forgive Butler for having defended Chamberlain's actions, but he recognized Rab's talents and in 1941 offered him a choice between the important Ministry of Information and the backwater Board of Education. Remote as it was from the war effort, Butler plumped for education, knowing that it would be one of the key areas of postwar social reform. When he thanked Churchill for the job, legend has it that the Prime Minister retorted: "I meant it as an in sult." Nonetheless, the highly acclaimed Butler Act in 1944 became the master plan for Britain's present-day educational system, and its author joined the Cabinet as the nation's first Minister of Education.