Rab Butler - Member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

In his autobiography "The Art of the Possible", Butler attributes his political gifts to his grandmother Mary Kendall of Pelyn, Lostwithiel, Cornwall. He wrote a lengthy paragraph on the Kendall family who for many generations past had been active in the politics of Cornwall and England. It has been remarked of this family, that they have perhaps sent more members to the British Senate than any other in the United Kingdom.

Butler held a series of junior Ministerial posts throughout the 1930s, often enacting controversial policy decisions. After a brief period as Parliamentary Private Secretary (i.e. personal assistant) to the India Secretary Samuel Hoare, he was given his first ministerial job as Under-Secretary of State for India (1932–37) at the time the Indian Home Rule Act was being debated in Parliament amidst massive opposition, led by Winston Churchill, from rank-and-file Conservative supporters. In 1937-8 he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour.

Subsequently he was (appointed 1938) Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Neville Chamberlain's government. Butler's close association to the government's policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany may have been instrumental in limiting his political career. Butler himself would later claim that appeasement had been aimed at buying time for Britain to rearm and that he had little input into the direction of foreign policy and that power was really held by Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, with the Prime Minister speaking in the House of Commons for the major aspects of government foreign policy instead of Butler, who was the sole Foreign Office minister in the Commons (an arrangement devised to respond to criticism of appointing a peer as Foreign Secretary rather than a reflection on Butler).

Butler disliked Churchill. After Churchill had made a confident war speech on 12 November 1939, Butler told Jock Colville that he "thought it beyond words vulgar". Colville recorded in his diary on 10 May 1940, when Churchill was replacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister:

Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed. He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the 'pass has been sold' by Mr. C., Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.

David Lloyd George intended a compliment when describing Butler as "playing the part of the imperturbable dunce who says nothing with an air of conviction".