Word: rab
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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...
...Rab 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...
...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...
...being, and by any measure he has had far the widest and longest administrative training for the top job. He is hard to fault for past mistakes, since he had no responsibility for Suez and hardly any for the Common Market failure, not to mention the Keeler scandal. Moreover, Rab is renowned for his patience. "He seems," says one commentator, "to act in decades and think in centuries...
...Haughty Margot Asquith called it "squalid," Lloyd George's wife would not move in until adequate plumbing was installed. During the blitz, Churchill complained that it was "shaky." One ancient boiler heated both Nos. 10 and 11, residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, leading then-Chancellor Rab Butler to complain that when Churchill set the thermostat in the 70s or 80s, he, Butler, was being "fried alive...