Word: rab
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...Douglas-Home's shrewdest appointments, to the crucial job of party chairman, was Labor Minister John Hare, 52, a hardworking, true-blue Tory. As for Sir Alec's defeated rival for the prime ministership, Rab Butler, he had always wanted to be Foreign Secretary (Harold Macmillan denied him the job), and Rab made his debut last week at a Western European Union conference at The Hague with complete professional aplomb...
When Churchill became Prime Minister, he could not forgive Butler for having defended Chamberlain's actions, but he recognized Rab's talents and in 1941 offered him a choice between the important Ministry of Information and the backwater Board of Education. Remote as it was from the war effort, Butler plumped for education, knowing that it would be one of the key areas of postwar social reform. When he thanked Churchill for the job, legend has it that the Prime Minister retorted: "I meant it as an in sult." Nonetheless, the highly acclaimed Butler Act in 1944 became...
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...
...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...
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...