Word: butler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tears welled in the eyes of Maurice Macmillan, 42, the Prime Minister's son. Acting Prime Minister Butler stared emotionlessly across the auditorium. House Leader and Party Co-Chairman Iain Macleod slumped in his chair until his chin rested on his chest. Minister for Science Lord Hailsham was poker-faced. But Macmillan's announcement stripped away all pretense of a gentlemanly team decision to name his successor...
There was even a Home boom, though the patrician Foreign Secretary is as retiring as Hailsham is assertive, and is relatively little known to the public. The most logical candidate, on ability and experience, was the man who would fill Macmillan's shoes mean while: Rab Butler...
...Butler was favored by 40% of Tory voters questioned in a Daily Mail snap poll-second-running Hailsham got 35%-and bookies' odds were 6 to 4 that he would get the job. As Acting Prime Minister, Butler won from grudging colleagues and rivals the initial advantage of giving the windup speech in Macmillan's place. But on the whole, it was a strangely lackluster performance. Capitalizing on the test ban treaty, the one clear triumph for the government in a year of frustration, Butler pledged that Britain would press its allies to "keep up the momentum...
...treaty was not achieved by agitators sitting down in the public highway, but by statesmen sitting around the conference table." And he offered some invigorating invective against the "immature nonsense of socialism," which is trying to turn Great Britain into Little England. In a fourth Conservative election victory, said Butler, his party "must reject and repudiate these absurd aberrations of the left-wing mind...
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...