Word: rab
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...Toryism accepted the social services as giving individuals fuller expression, and even claimed credit for helping create them. But Rab also transformed the terms in which the Tories saw them selves. Instead of capitalists itching to grind the faces of the poor, he saw them as exponents of freedom resisting an autocratic state. He wanted, said Butler, "a creative society, not a series of state almshouses...
...many a Tory, this was revolutionary. Rab was accused of "me tooism," of "trying to amalgamate the Tory Party with the Y.M.C.A." Even Tories who had no quarrel with Rab's principles felt a distaste for putting Utopian plans on paper. But in local meetings and party conferences, the rank & file enthusiastically adopted Rab's policy papers. Tory Party membership nearly doubled in the space of a year. In 1951 the Tories came back to office. Their margin was narrow -in fact, Labor polled more votes while the Conservatives won a handful more seats. If they had failed...
Unflappable Man. In a time of financial crisis, Chancellor of the Exchequer was the most crucial job in the Cabinet. It fell to Rab Butler, and he promptly showed his independence by refusing to let Churchill put an "overlord" above him. The two men still have their differences. Rab's intellectuality grates on the old man, and Butler once confided to a friend: "I believe Winston still thinks of me as a bright young man just down from Cambridge." As opposed to Churchill's inspired high spirits, Butler is, in the words of a friend, "completely unflappable...
...sort of rival to Eden. Actually, the two some time ago struck a private gentlemen's agreement on Eden's right to be the next Prime Minister. Then, like so many Chancellors before him-Disraeli, Gladstone, Pitt the Younger. Winston Churchill, to name a few-Rab Butler will get his turn to be Prime Minister. Some have lingering doubts about Butler as P.M.; some feel he lacks some final quality of imaginative decision...
...week Butler entered into the "closed season"-the two-week period when the Chancellor traditionally is cut off from the outside world and is left to think, and to give final shape to his budget in deepest secrecy. Every day, like a queen ant fussed over by faithful workers, Rab was closeted in his Treasury office. Evenings he worked until past midnight in his study, hung with Impressionist paintings from his father-in-law's collection...