Rab Butler - Butler and Macmillan

Butler and Macmillan

In January 1957, Eden resigned as Prime Minister. At the time the Conservative Party had no formal mechanism for determining a new leader, so The Queen had the ultimate choice as to who should succeed Eden as Prime Minister. The Queen took advice from senior Ministers, as well as Churchill (who backed Macmillan), Edward Heath (who as Chief Whip was aware of backbench opinion) and from Lord Salisbury, who interviewed the Cabinet one by one and with his famous speech impediment asked each one whether he was for "Wab or Hawold" (it is thought that only between one and three were for "Wab"). The advice was overwhelmingly to appoint Macmillan as Prime Minister instead of Butler. The media were taken by surprise by this choice, but Butler himself later confessed in his memoirs that while there was a sizeable anti-Butler faction on the backbenches, there was no such anti-Macmillan faction.

Macmillan sought to placate Butler by appointing him to a senior position, albeit as Home Secretary rather than Foreign Secretary, the job he wanted. In his memoirs, Macmillan claimed that Butler "chose" the Home Office, an assertion of which Butler drily observed in his own memoirs that Macmillan's memory "played him false". Butler held the Home Office for five years, in which he once more demonstrated his radical reforming credentials through a number of pieces of legislation, but his liberal views on hanging and flogging did little to endear him to rank-and-file Conservative members. Butler also held various additional posts on different occasions throughout this period, including Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, and Conservative Party Chairman, the latter job prompting a newspaper analogy with Nikita Khrushchev's rise to power through control of the Soviet Communist Party.