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When the Tories lost to Labor in 1945, Rab was picked to mold a forward-looking philosophy for the demoralized Conservatives. From the Tory research office, which consisted of two chairs and a desk when he took over, came a flow of pamphlets that reasserted the importance of the individual in a "property-owning democracy" and redefined Conservatism as a "policy of humanity and common sense." Almost as important to the party's future as his New Conservatism were "Rab's Boys," the bright young back-room protégés whom Butler enlisted to help formulate policy. Among them: Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, House Leader and Party Co-Chairman Iain Macleod, Lord Privy Seal Ted Heath. According to a House of Commons quip, "Rab gave Macmillan his brains."
Butler was an outstanding Chancellor of the Exchequer for four years after the Tories' return to power in 1951. His less able successor was Macmillan, and the two top Tories have coolly coexisted in the years since. During an economic crisis in which he successfully resisted Cabinet pressure to curtail the government's newfangled social services, Rab said pointedly: "We have lived too long on old port and overripe pheasant." On another occasion, he gave John F. Kennedy a cue by exhorting the voters "not just to think you are going to get something out of government; think what you can do for your country." As an imaginative Home Secretary from 1957 to 1962, Rab trimmed "the Victorian whiskers" from the betting and licensing laws and was praised as warmly by Socialists as by his fellow
Tories for his cell-to-ceiling program of reform for Britain's Dickensian prison system. Since 1962, when he was named First Secretary of State, Butler has supervised a variety of thankless tasks, notably mapping independence for the three states of the Central African Federation. He is outspokenly pro-American and, with Foreign Secretary Lord Home, has probably been the staunchest Cabinet advocate of British membership in President Kennedy's "mixed manned" multilateral force.
Butler was born in India, where his father was Governor of the Central Provinces before returning home to become master of Cambridge's Pembroke College. Rab went to Marlborough, was a brilliant undergraduate at Cambridge, and headed the university debating society. After one debate, in which Butler voted against a motion argued by Stanley Baldwin, he was warned by the visiting Prime Minister that "intellectualism is a sin and could lead a young man to a fate worse than death." Notwithstanding Baldwin, Rab became a Cambridge don. He deserted the common room for Commons after marrying Sydney Courtauld, a textile heiress, whose long illness and death in 1954 visibly sapped his political energies.