Portraits and Miniatures Read Free Page A

It may none the less have cast its shadow on to future relations.
    It was, however, successful at commending Butler to the headmaster and the other beaks. In September 1931 on the formation of the National Government he became parliamentary private secretary to Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for India, and then, a year later and still under thirty, he was promoted to be parliamentary under-secretary and a full member of the Government. It was a considerable opportunity because it meant that for the next three years he was concerned with the preparation for and the steering through the House of Commons of the Government of India Act, which within the Conservative Party providedthe central battlefront of politics throughout the period. Butler profited from Hoare’s patronage and served him well. But he accumulated no affection for him, wrote many years later of his lack of humanity as a departmental chief, and treated his 1935 downfall as Foreign Secretary, first at the Quai d’Orsay in the wily hands of Pierre Laval and then on the ice in Switzerland, with the deadpan dismissiveness that became one of the characteristics of Rab’s style.
    While Butler was serving the unloved Hoare he clashed directly with the unreconstructed Churchill, who until 1935 devoted more effort to frustrating the India Bill than to denouncing the dictators. Not only did Rab have to refute a whole series of Churchill-inspired amendments, he also found himself trying to organize against Churchill’s position in the press and in the constituency parties. He then compounded his sin by progressing via an uneasy nine months at the Ministry of Labour to becoming parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office in February 1938, and as such the principal Commons spokesman for appeasement during the last eighteen months of the peace. When Eden and Cranborne (later Salisbury) resigned, Halifax became Foreign Secretary and Butler moved into Cranborne’s junior job. But it was more important and more exposed than is that job now. First, he was the sole Foreign Office junior minister, as against today’s five. Second, he had the Commons to himself, subject to a great deal of Chamberlain supervision. He had the advantages and disadvantages of becoming almost the Prime Minister’s parliamentary adjutant, with one foot in the Foreign Office and the other across the road in 10 Downing Street.
    In all these circumstances he built up remarkably little resentment in Churchill. His subsequent relations with him were obviously (in retrospect although by no means necessarily in advance) to turn out to be much more important than with Baldwin, for whom his affection was real and personal, or with Chamberlain whom he served so faithfully in the appeasement years, and to whom, in the company of Alec Home, Chips Channon and Jock Colville (whose presence as the future chronicler of the life of St Winston renders the occasion almost respectable), he drank atoast,
on May 10th
1940, as ‘the King [already just] over the water’. Churchill, who was by no means always magnanimous even in victory and very rarely so in defeat, had paid Rab a high tribute for his parliamentary skill at the end of the India Bill struggles in 1935, and had markedly failed to extend this to Hoare. And in 1940 he first kept him in the new coalition government with the elliptical tribute that he ‘could go on with [his] delicate manner of answering parliamentary questions without giving anything away’, and then refrained from sacking him when, at the time of the fall of France, Butler engaged in a highly indiscreet ‘peace feeler’ conversation with the head of the Swedish Legation in London.
    This latter restraint may have been because no one knew better than Churchill, following the two days of War Cabinet discussion on 27 and 28 May 1940, that the under-secretary’s desire for a negotiated peace was exceeded by that of his ministerial chief,