The New Tory

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Late at night in the House of Commons, when the freshness has gone from the air, and the lights shine dully on bald pates, weariness creeps into the usually keen blue eyes of the man sitting alone on the government front bench. His blue suit crumples. The thinning blond hair is no longer so carefully brushed across the balding scalp, and every now & then he coughs chestily. He fidgets. His left hand rubs slowly over his cheeks, reaches for a handkerchief to wipe his plumpish fate. Or his right forefinger goes round and upward to scratch the top of his head.

But Richard Austen Butler. Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, misses no point. If an opposition speaker misstates what he said, Rab is quickly on his feet to set the record straight in his clear, flat voice. If goaded, his reply is quick and effective. Hugh Gaitskell, Labor's lanky and self-confident economist and Butler's predecessor at the Treasury, pricks him with the barbed wish that some day he may hear a Butler speech which does not talk about "unity, stability, flexibility, and all the other 'itys.' " "Those are all nouns or virtues," Butler retorts, "to which the Right Honorable Gentleman and his friends attach little importance." And a rare smile lights Rab's wintry face, as chill and fleeting as breath seen on a cold morning. It is a maxim of Butler's--and he does nothing politically which is unstudied--that charity to the enemy is profitable in the long run.

This pale, chilly man is an odd fish in the Tory school--an intellectual in a party which prefers character to brains, a political philosopher in a party which habitually relies on dimly felt tradition, a remote ascetic in a party of sociable men. But Rab Butler, 51, is the Tory Party's brightest rising star. In his two years as Chancellor, he has done much to restore his country's pride and place. As party man, he has given his party new life, established himself as a coming Prime Minister.

How to Breathe. Both as Chancellor and Tory, Rab Butler was the prophet of a doctrine notably neglected in Socialist Britain: freedom is worth having, and no amount of security will buy it. Its price is hard work--by a nation, industry, or individual. For Socialist restrictions, he substituted incentive. For Socialist regulation, he staked his faith on the British character. For Socialist "fair shares," he proposed freedom to earn more. He abolished most government purchases of imports, scrapped the "utility" scheme which had kept many manufacturers confined to standardized models, struck off price controls, lifted rationing, turned builders loose to build small houses and factories.

Such policies were not always immediately popular. "Socialism had so battened down the hatches that the passengers had forgotten how to breathe." Butler said.

Cotton traders grumbled about having to scramble for their bales instead of waiting for their share of the government's block purchase; some housewives disliked having to shop around for their preferences instead of docilely taking what was doled out to them; manufacturers had to turn to and develop new designs for a newly competitive market; farmers took to mumbling about the dangers of abandoning the government market and its fixed price. Says Butler: "Freedom is a clean wind but a chilly one when you are not used to it." Freedom had made Britain great. Only freedom. Butler argued, could make it great once more.

Within two years, Butler had results to show. Today Britain is flourishing. Production is at its highest level ever. Employment is at record levels. Prices have risen slowly, but wages have pretty well kept pace. Even the Laborite Daily Mirror concedes that Butler is an "outstanding success . . . the man who sets the Socialist opposition brooding." Attlee himself has declared that Butler is the only Tory who knows where he is going.

Rising Man. Rab Butler knows where he is going because he laid down the road. It is a new road for Toryism, and Butler is a new kind of Tory. He belongs neither to the aristocracy of Churchill and Eden nor the business world of Lord Woolton and Neville Chamberlain, but to a long line of scholars and civil servants. His new Toryism accepts the welfare state and its social services with enthusiasm-but with an insistence that people be treated as individuals. It maintains a man's right to be secure collectively, but insists on his right to advance individually. It has divorced itself from reaction, just as it has dismissed the Colonel Blimp notion that the Empire could live in a closed world of its own. Says Butler: "The school of thought I represent accepts the social changes of our times."

To reach his present status of influence, Rab Butler has had the advantage of superior intelligence, foresight, and an inherited sense of service. He has few close friends in the House of Commons, or the Cabinet. "Once you break the ice with Rab, you find the ice water underneath," cracked one M.P. His self-confidence almost touches arrogance. "I'm supposed to know all the answers and I usually do," he once told a press conference. But he is widely respected, his intimate friends find him charming and witty, and his intellectual authority as the party's guiding brain is unchallenged. He has another important asset, which often seems to go with forethought: luck. Said one observer: "Butler gives the impression that the stars are on his side."

Politics & Mangel-Wurzels. Rab was born Dec. 9, 1902, in the mud-walled village of Attock Serai in northwest India (now Pakistan). The Butlers were a famous family in India. Rab's father, the late Sir Montagu S. D. Butler, became a governor of the Central Provinces, and was knighted for his services before going home to become a master of Cambridge's Pembroke College. His uncle, a close friend of Nehru's father, became governor of Burma. His Scottish mother was related to the great liberal economist Adam Smith. The eldest of four children, young Rab left Attock at the age of eight for boarding schools in England's west country. There, and later at Marlborough, one of the top public schools, Rab acquired,an early self-reliance, a retiring manner, and a reputation for scholarship. His athletic prowess was limited by a badly set wrist, broken in a fall from a pony. To amplify the family's modest resources, he spent summers picking mangel-wurzels at 8-c- an hour.

At Cambridge, where Butlers have held distinguished places as professors and masters and fellows since 1790, Rab quickly set about a political career. He plunged into the debates of the famed Cambridge Union, where a promising young man is duly noted by the powers in Whitehall and ticketed for future office. Nervous, witty and aloof, Rab debated energetically, was elected president at the age of 21. One summer he led a debating team to the U.S., bringing back a report that "we found the earnest, logical Yankees easy to flummox, except for the Vassar girls, who ran circles round us." Once Stanley Baldwin came to argue against the motion: "That this House has the highest regard for rhetoric." (He lost, with Rab casting the deciding vote against him.) Rab escorted Baldwin to the station next morning, where the old man bought him a thriller "and told me that intellectualism was a sin, and would lead a young man to a fate worse than death." To this day the effort of concealing the fact that he is brighter than most men he meets gives Rab a remote air.

Rab took a double first in modern languages and history, then was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi. A fellow student was Sydney Courtauld, only daughter of the late textile millionaire and art collector Samuel Courtauld. Dark, handsome, intensely -interested in politics, she was attracted by Rab's intelligence and drive. In 1926 they were married. His wife brought Rab wealth, entree into the famous Tory homes of Mayfair, and, eventually, a constituency--Saffron Walden in Essex County, where Courtauld had a country house in which the Butlers now live. From there, in 1929, Rab was elected to Parliament.

Boring & Sound. The pale young man with the donnish air was no overnight success. His speeches--meticulously prepared, subtly reasoned, peppered with quiet wit--bored the House. But the ability to bore is rather well regarded in the House of Commons as a sign of soundness. Rab turned from oratory to committee and administrative work to prove his soundness. He was cautious, he was courteous, he never spoke out of turn, he never spoke unless well prepared. His voice was as clear as his logic. "The bullyboys may make the headlines," said a colleague, "but it is to the young Rabs that Tory leaders look for their successors." In 1931, Sir Samuel Hoare, then Secretary of State for India, made Rab his parliamentary private secretary, sent him to India to discuss the bill which was to give India a federal constitution and eventual dominion status. Soon, with the sponsorship of Stanley Baldwin, Butler was promoted to Under Secretary. When Hoare fell ill during debate, Rab took his place at the dispatch box. He knew India, and he knew his bill. Attacked from the left for going too slowly, abused from the right by Winston Churchill and the diehard imperialists for going too far, Rab skillfully stood his ground, pushed the bill through. He was then 32.

In 1938 Eden resigned from the Foreign Office in protest against Neville Chamberlain's policies of appeasement, and was replaced by Lord Halifax. Chamberlain picked Butler as Under Secretary. With the Foreign Secretary in the House of Lords, if was often Butler's job to defend policy in the Commons. While Churchill cried havoc from the back benches, Butler loyally defended Munich and Mussolini's Italy in his maddeningly tranquil voice, became famed for his equivocal replies to awkward questions. The exasperated and jittery Commons nicknamed him "Stonewall Butler," and Lloyd George called him "the artful dodger."

Butler still squirms unhappily over this period. "There were weaknesses in those policies, but there are many things about those days which are still unknown to the public," he explains uncomfortably. ''Then, you know, an Under Secretary doesn't make policy." He also points out that after the fall of Chamberlain, both Churchill and Eden asked him to stay on at the Foreign Office. "So they couldn't have been too fed up with me."

Plow & Shafts. Rab survived, with a typical combination of foresight and luck. In 1941 Churchill offered him the choice of the Ministry of Information or the Board of Education, a wartime backwater. True to family tradition, Butler was deeply interested in education. But, though Hitler was then racing for Moscow, Butler also foresaw that the education job would give him a major hand in shaping Tory postwar policy. He chose education.

While the Nazis bombed London, Rab talked and planned for peace. Starting with a bill already in draft, he planned a postwar revolution in the educational system which would make primary and secondary education (up to the age of 15) free to all children. Said he: "I do not want our state educational system to become a racing stable, out only to produce overbred classic favorites. We want to produce our racers, but we also want to produce good healthy stock, frightened neither of the plow nor of the shafts."

Rab hammered the bill through with the slogan: "Education is the spearhead of social reform." Its passage in 1944 gave him senior status in the party, and Cabinet rank as the first Minister of Edu cation. But the "Butler Act" did more. In the public's view, Rab's name no longer stood for a man of Munich, but for a leader of social reform. When the time came, Butler was the logical choice as the spokesman for the new progressive Toryism.

The time to speak came soon. With peace, the bitter recollection of bread lines, hunger marches, closing shipyards and pits, employers who exploited unemployment to depress wages under prewar Tory governments flooded back into British memories. The Tories were unceremoniously bundled out of office. Butler himself survived by only 1,158 votes.

Many another Tory had long recognized the need for modernizing the Conservative Party (Beveridge's cradle-to-grave plan was instigated by Churchill's Tory-dominated wartime coalition government, and was endorsed by most Tories). Essentially, however, the modernization finally came not so much because the Tories sought it, as because they were forced to it. No sudden lightning flash of inspiration and generosity on the part of the Tories brought about the change; the electorate, by administering a resounding rebuke, made it imperative. But in the swirling waters of social change now loosed by the Socialists intent on nationalizing all major industry, sharing all wealth, leveling all distinctions, where was the Tory Party to take its stand and find its feet?

Rab Butler was picked to find the answer. He took over the two chairs and one desk which constituted the Tory research department, and set to work "to wrest the initiative in the realm of political ideas from the Left." His first step was something hitherto unknown in Tory circles--he called on party members for ideas. Said Rab: "When I first knew the Tory Party, policy was brought down from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone. The faithful who waited for the tablets were often blinded by the light they saw."

No Crooked Atoms. The result, contained in a series of brilliant pamphlets, was to make coherent policy out of the deep distrust which Tories felt for the new Socialism. Rab replanted the sturdy old roots of Toryism in modern soil. The guiding principles of his philosophy were 1) a belief in the divine origin of the human personality, and 2) a faith in Christian ethics. Rab denied the cynical Marxist view of British history as the selfish struggle of classes; he saw it as a long odyssey of the individual toward the fullest expression of himself, in which each tradition and each institution was cherished as a milestone on that odyssey. In the 19th century, Toryism stood sturdily against the laissez-faire doctrine of Liberalism with its conception of labor as a commodity. The great Tory reformer Disraeli, a biographer once wrote, "could not believe that men. men of flesh with mobile faces . . . were condemned to combine like so many crooked atoms to produce the cheapest possible calico in the richest possible world." In that day, said Rab, "Conservatism did not hesitate to invoke the collective power of society to redress the social wrongs caused by economic development. Now Socialism unduly exalts the state, and Conservatives must emphasize the importance of the individual."

The new 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."

To 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 to win a full vote of confidence from the country, the Tories had nonetheless won a rare opportunity to prove themselves.

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 --if a bomb exploded under his desk, he would press a button for his third secretary." Blood, toil, tears and sweat are not for him. Recently he advised a British audience to adopt his own credo: "Do not be elated, never be depressed." But Sir Winston has learned to admire Rab's solid virtues; when Butler presented his first budget, Churchill lumbered to his feet, flourishing a handful of papers to urge backbenchers to louder cheers, crying: ''This is Tory democracy!"

Butler's relationship with Anthony Eden is built upon mutual friendship and respect. Butler never takes a hand in a foreign-policy decision. He himself tells a wry story of walking in St. James's Park with Eden and wagering that they could not get through the park without somebody's recognizing the handsome Foreign Secretary (nobody ever recognizes Butler). Sure enough, a nursemaid spotted Eden. "And I left him there," says Butler, "telling the pretty nursemaid about the mysteries of unrequited exports."

Butler's rise has inevitably cast him. in the public eye, as a 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.

"Quality, Sir, Quality!" Butler has been a superb Chancellor of the Exchequer at a time when Britain needed one. Last 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.

At week's end, with his wife and ten-year-old daughter (the only one of four children still at home), he took his papers and thoughts down to the gracious 16th century country home in Essex. There, slipping into baggy slacks, he relaxed for an afternoon of pottering about the rose garden with his wife. Next day he read the lesson at the local Anglican church, where he is vicar's warden. In his constituency Rab is universally respected and frequently liked, by gentry and tradesmen alike. "They say he's a cold fish," snorted a retired admiral who often shoots with him. "That's nonsense. Of course, he does not wear his heart on his sleeve. But Rab stands for quality, sir, quality! And that's rare nowadays."

This weekend, at a church in nearby Littlebury, the vicar will pray: "Oh, God, who has taught us to pray concerning our daily bread, bless, we beseech Thee, Thy servant Richard Austen Butler in his gigantic task for our country this coming week." Two days later, to the traditional cries of "Yah, Yah, Yah!", Rab Butler will step to the clerks' table in the House of Commons, open the old red leather dispatch box once used by Gladstone and lay down the budget which will shape the British economy for the coming year.

No Seasickness. Within the cramping bounds of shortages, heavy taxation and debts, no modern British Chancellor, Tory or Laborite, has much room to maneuver. Many of the controls imposed by the Laborites were forced by shortages which would have driven Tories to the same restrictions; and many of Butler's concessions would have been made by a Socialist Chancellor as the shortages disappeared. But there is an important difference of spirit and aim.

As Budget Day approaches, British workers are demanding more wages--and in Britain's tight economy, higher wages mean an increase in export prices at a time when German and Japanese competition is rising. Exports to the vital U.S. market have already dropped as a result of the U.S. downturn. But Butler is cheerful; he likens the British reaction to an old lady on a cruise: "She locks herself up in the cabin and is a little seasick, more out of apprehension than because of rough seas. Then the steward knocks on the door and tells her: 'We are two days out, ma'am, and the weather is fine.' Now, like the old lady, we are walking the deck and feeling good."

Within his small maneuvering room, Butler faces opposition from the gunboat imperialists in his own ranks whose spokesman is Press Lord Beaverbrook; they are outraged by the recent pact with Japan, which allowed small quantities of Japanese textiles into Britain and lifted the ban on Japanese goods in the colonies. To those who cry that his policy is breaking up the Commonwealth, Rab retorts: "The Empire boys underestimate my intense belief in the Commonwealth. I believe it has resources which will make your eyes pop out. But this is 1954, not 1904. Australia, Canada, South Africa will not be denied association with the U.S. dollar, and on their own terms. We are dealing with a Commonwealth in modern dress." The aim, says Butler, "is to break outwards, to sell more, and thereby to import more--to enlarge the circle rather than contracting a vicious circle."

Hope & Challenge. Butler also faces--and he never forgets--a Labor Party which still commands the allegiance of half the British electorate. Many a voter is still to be convinced that Toryism has really changed. Many a Briton is more concerned to be secure in what he has than to produce (and risk) more. Many workers, asked to do in four days work that now takes them five, balk for fear they will be laid off on the fifth. Many manufacturers are content to produce for a known limited market rather than risk expansion. It is this attitude that Rab Butler has set him self to combat.

In a competitive world, Britain has to earn her way--if only to pay for her social services--and Rab Butler knows it. It cannot be done, he believes, by more security, more plans, more taking in of each other's washing. It can be done by more freedom and hard work. That is the challenge--and the hope--that Rab Butler and the new Toryism offer Britain.

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