Portraits and Miniatures Read Online Free Page B
Author: Roy Jenkins
Rabâs claims to the Foreign Office, preferring Alec Home despite his then being a peer, and making Rab the derisory counter-offer of succeeding Home as Commonwealth Secretary.
Even Rab could not accept that, and so he continued for another year with his three top-heavy home front jobs, until in the long recess of 1961 Macmillan simply stripped him of two of them in order to provide for Iain Macleod a route out of the Colonial Office where he was causing too much internal Conservative Party disruption. Then, after another six months, Macmillan persuaded Butler to accept responsibility for dismantling the ill-fated Central African Federation, while retaining the Home Office across an uncomfortable gulf of 4000 miles. Finally, as a result of the disastrous day of the long knives of 12 July 1962, Rab lost the Home Office and was left for the last year of theMacmillan Government with a potentially poisoned chalice in Africa (out of which, however, he skilfully sucked most of the poison) and the meaningless title of First Secretary of State at home. It is difficult to contest Anthony Howardâs conclusion that by 1962 Butler had become for Macmillan âa trout that he could tickle and play with at willâ.
In these circumstances Butler approached his third and last Prime Ministerial opportunity. He may have been a little
réchauffé,
but he was not old, only just over sixty, younger than Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan and Callaghan when they succeeded, and the same age, within a few months, as his vanquisher, Home. In some ways his position was stronger than in 1957, for in 1963 he had no Suez record of equivocation immediately behind him, he had much weaker opposition, and he had in the mean time acquired a splendid wife who had the buoyant determination which Rab himself lacked. âI vowed privately never to speak to Harold Macmillan again,â she wrote simply and starkly after the 1963 débâcle. Moreover, she translated her private vow into public action. Débâcle it none the less was. I understand Rabâs position perfectly. He could have blocked Alec Home and become the only possible Prime Minister. He would have had to force himself in. He did not want to do so. He did not have a vast vanity that demanded he should be acclaimed with trumpets and fanfares. But he did want to be freely accepted. That he could not achieve, so he preferred the course of submission with many regretful backward looks and much need for reassurance that he had behaved well.
From there the road led on to the Foreign Office, which might have excited him in 1955 but which merely wearied him in 1963, to the refusal of an earldom from Home in October 1964 and the acceptance of a life barony from Wilson in January 1965 (a very Rab touch this, half disdainful throwaway and half unfortunate cock-up), thirteen years of hesitant spring and glorious autumn as Master of Trinity, followed by three and a half years of declining health, death on Budget day 1982, and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey with the Government reeling at the beginning of the Falklands crisis. Even at the end Rab could not be far fromthe epicentre of politics. Maybe he was the best Prime Minister we never had. Certainly he was the most ambivalently fascinating of the nearly men.
Aneurin Bevan
When Bevan died in the summer of 1960, aged only sixty-two and after six months of cruel illness, he had already become something of a national hero. Conservatives who throughout his active career had portrayed him as a symbol of destructive evil, a compounded mixture of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill at the height of their powers, members of the Labour right who had spent most of the previous decade in implacable battle with him, and even his own old allies and friends who had been dismayed and affronted by his 1957 endorsement of the British H-bomb, were united in their affection and respect.
This final wave of feeling has had the paradoxical affect of
Even Rab could not accept that, and so he continued for another year with his three top-heavy home front jobs, until in the long recess of 1961 Macmillan simply stripped him of two of them in order to provide for Iain Macleod a route out of the Colonial Office where he was causing too much internal Conservative Party disruption. Then, after another six months, Macmillan persuaded Butler to accept responsibility for dismantling the ill-fated Central African Federation, while retaining the Home Office across an uncomfortable gulf of 4000 miles. Finally, as a result of the disastrous day of the long knives of 12 July 1962, Rab lost the Home Office and was left for the last year of theMacmillan Government with a potentially poisoned chalice in Africa (out of which, however, he skilfully sucked most of the poison) and the meaningless title of First Secretary of State at home. It is difficult to contest Anthony Howardâs conclusion that by 1962 Butler had become for Macmillan âa trout that he could tickle and play with at willâ.
In these circumstances Butler approached his third and last Prime Ministerial opportunity. He may have been a little
réchauffé,
but he was not old, only just over sixty, younger than Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan and Callaghan when they succeeded, and the same age, within a few months, as his vanquisher, Home. In some ways his position was stronger than in 1957, for in 1963 he had no Suez record of equivocation immediately behind him, he had much weaker opposition, and he had in the mean time acquired a splendid wife who had the buoyant determination which Rab himself lacked. âI vowed privately never to speak to Harold Macmillan again,â she wrote simply and starkly after the 1963 débâcle. Moreover, she translated her private vow into public action. Débâcle it none the less was. I understand Rabâs position perfectly. He could have blocked Alec Home and become the only possible Prime Minister. He would have had to force himself in. He did not want to do so. He did not have a vast vanity that demanded he should be acclaimed with trumpets and fanfares. But he did want to be freely accepted. That he could not achieve, so he preferred the course of submission with many regretful backward looks and much need for reassurance that he had behaved well.
From there the road led on to the Foreign Office, which might have excited him in 1955 but which merely wearied him in 1963, to the refusal of an earldom from Home in October 1964 and the acceptance of a life barony from Wilson in January 1965 (a very Rab touch this, half disdainful throwaway and half unfortunate cock-up), thirteen years of hesitant spring and glorious autumn as Master of Trinity, followed by three and a half years of declining health, death on Budget day 1982, and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey with the Government reeling at the beginning of the Falklands crisis. Even at the end Rab could not be far fromthe epicentre of politics. Maybe he was the best Prime Minister we never had. Certainly he was the most ambivalently fascinating of the nearly men.
Aneurin Bevan
When Bevan died in the summer of 1960, aged only sixty-two and after six months of cruel illness, he had already become something of a national hero. Conservatives who throughout his active career had portrayed him as a symbol of destructive evil, a compounded mixture of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill at the height of their powers, members of the Labour right who had spent most of the previous decade in implacable battle with him, and even his own old allies and friends who had been dismayed and affronted by his 1957 endorsement of the British H-bomb, were united in their affection and respect.
This final wave of feeling has had the paradoxical affect of
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