The Prime Ministers We Never Had

Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn

Steve Richards

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781838952426
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838952433
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A deep dive into the "almosts" of British political history. What qualities separate a prime minister from those who nearly made it? Steve Richards dissects the careers of eleven influential figures, from Rab Butler to Jeremy Corbyn, who, despite their talent and ambition, never reached the highest office. This insightful analysis explores the complex interplay of leadership, circumstance, and historical forces that determine who succeeds and who falls short in the ruthless world of British politics. Perfect for readers of political history and biography, this compelling study offers a fresh perspective on British public life. Discover the untold stories behind the leaders we never had and gain a deeper understanding of the demands of leadership.

1

RAB BUTLER

Rab Butler is the original prime minister we never had. Butler is one of those rare former Cabinet ministers whose name and deeds are still often cited. When they are, an observation usually follows, along the lines of, ‘Ah yes, Rab Butler, the best prime minister we never had’. Indeed, the persistent claim forms the subtitle of a recent biography of Butler, although the author wisely adds a question mark.¹

The judicious question mark has its place not so much because of the adjective ‘best’. That is a subjective judgement. Rather, the justified doubt is over whether Butler was ever in a strong enough position to become prime minister, in spite of his remarkable career. On so many levels Butler was supremely well qualified. No one else in this book can compete with him in terms of experience and range. He held multiple roles for decades: a reforming minister, a modernizing party chairman and a stand-in prime minister. Butler had a high profile on the political stage from the 1930s until the Conservatives were defeated in the 1964 election. In each post he had a profound impact. Butler was not a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politician. He was a change-maker.

There is a striking contrast between Butler’s ministerial career at points when he might have become prime minister and the careers of some of those who did climb to the very top. Tony Blair and David Cameron had no ministerial experience when they became prime ministers. Margaret Thatcher was only briefly Education Secretary. John Major had held two of the most senior jobs, Foreign Secretary and chancellor, but only fleetingly.

Compare those examples of limited or no ministerial experience with Butler’s mind-boggling range. As a junior minister in the early 1930s he played a significant role in implementing plans that helped India become autonomous from the British Empire, a highly charged mission that included the handling of opponents within the Conservative Party – not easy for a senior minister, let alone a junior one. During the war he was responsible for education, passing the Education Act of 1944, one of the few examples of legislation that was still cited for its significance half a century later.

After the Conservatives were slaughtered in the 1945 election, Butler was a reformer in opposition, seeking ways of synthesizing Tory values with the fresh challenges and assumptions of the postwar era, one in which Labour ruled with a big majority. Blending a party’s traditional values with changing orthodoxies is an art form. Although not exuberant as a public performer, Butler was an artist in terms of encouraging his largely reluctant party to move with the times. As a result, the Conservatives soon resumed their traditional role of winning elections.

When he was made chancellor in October 1951, Butler faced the demands of strengthening a fragile post-war economy. There were oscillations in terms of progress and his own popularity, as there are for all chancellors who serve for more than a moment or two. But on the whole, the economy was stronger by the end of his spell at the Treasury than at the beginning. Butler moved on to become an innovative Home Secretary under Harold Macmillan in the late 1950s, as well as performing several other tasks. He was briefly Foreign Secretary in the run-up to the 1964 election. He even stood in when the actual prime minister was ill, on two highly sensitive occasions.

Most Cabinet ministers do not last for very long. They soon find they are not up to the job, fall out with their leader, or get bored too easily. Some are moved from department to department without staying long enough to leave any significant mark. Butler’s political CV is daunting and this is only a brief introductory summary. He had more experience than several incoming modern prime ministers put together.

Here is a depressing lesson of leadership: for aspiring leaders, there is greater safety in having no past of significance than one of such depth that controversies and consequences are recalled when the crown moves into sight. Butler’s patient, practical reforming zeal propelled him to the top of his party, but it was also a significant obstacle in the way of him becoming prime minister.

The proposals to give greater self-government to India were complex and highly contentious. Winston Churchill was one of many Conservative MPs who looked on warily at what the youthful Rab Butler was doing – an intimidating prospect. Party members were equally concerned as Butler in his role as junior minister put the case for what became the Government of India Act in 1935.

Butler was a genuine modernizer, unlike many more recent figures in the Conservative Party who have claimed this vaguely defined epithet for themselves. In the case of India he faced one last defiant cry from old-fashioned imperialists and took them on politely. Butler had a good relationship with local party members in his Saffron Walden constituency, but even they felt compelled to ‘express great apprehension lest the granting of self-government to India… may be injurious to the British Empire’.² His first move as a minister was substantial but it alienated a significant section of his party. Genuine reformers are bound to antagonize those within their party who cling to the status quo.

In seeking change, Butler was not dogmatic. His determined pragmatism was on display from the beginning as he patiently sought ways of bringing doubters with him. He insisted regularly in the Commons that the proposals in relation to India were the product of compromise and determined expediency; they represented what Tony Blair would later call the ‘third way’. The British government retained a right to intervene if it judged governors in India were ruling irresponsibly. Self-government depended partly, and vaguely, on the consent of the Westminster government.

Inevitably, this third-way approach did not satisfy more ardent imperialists. Churchill and his supporters established the India Defence League, a pressure group committed to keeping India as part of the British Empire. In response, Butler was involved in setting up the Union of Britain and India, whose name articulated the ambiguity of the limited leap towards self-government. And so in his first ministerial role, Butler was at the heart of a divide within the Conservative Party, implementing seismic changes in a cautious manner. If there was a template for Butler’s career, this was it.

One of Butler’s great enduring strengths was fully formed from the beginning: his eagerness to work with non-Conservatives, including policy specialists and those from other political parties. He had consulted widely over self-government for India. In doing so he pushed at the boundaries of what a section of his party would accept, and yet he sought to manage internal dissent as subtly as possible, which was another of his talents. Churchill praised Butler even as he vilified more senior ministers, quite an achievement for the youthful politician. Butler had been careful to treat Churchill with solicitous respect in the Commons and in private meetings. He was alert to the political mood at any given time and knew Churchill was a potential leader. More immediately, Butler recognized that the great ego would erupt less ferociously if treated with charming deference.

There were other strengths. From the beginning of his career Butler was a doer who derived satisfaction from implementing policies as much as from the theatre of politics. Some colleagues thought him closer in certain respects to a civil servant, mastering detail and looking towards putting policies into effect. This was a misjudgement, mistaking his capacity for work and his self-effacement as the traits of a technocrat. Butler was ideologically rooted on the centre right, a politically deft one-nation Conservative capable of finding the means to bring about ends, forging new alliances and creating a consensus around thorny issues. He did not have the temperament of a civil servant. He was a constructive and creative Conservative politician.

When Butler was made president of the Board of Education in 1941 the same patterns recurred. There was already a broad but fragile political consensus about the need for sweeping changes to education provision. As is often the case with an apparent consensus, when specific measures were proposed there was little agreement within parties, let alone between them.

The need for reform of schools had been widely recognized since the end of the First World War. In 1918, still exerting a restless radical verve, Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George had passed an Act aimed at raising the school leaving age and giving more responsibility to local authorities to run schools in place of overstretched churches and other religious institutions. The changes were never implemented, largely due to resistance from parts of the Conservative Party. Butler’s triumph as Conservative Education Secretary was to realize the essence of Lloyd George’s vision.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Butler was getting used to making moves that challenged orthodoxies in his party. For some Conservatives, education was still seen as a religious responsibility even though their perception was at odds with reality. Churches did not have the resources or the inclination to meet the demand for school places. As with his plans for India, Butler had to deal with the wariness of Churchill, who was now a wartime prime minister rather than a formidable backbencher. Churchill wanted Butler to focus on schools delivering as best they could in wartime conditions. Butler insisted that the education system needed to adapt more fundamentally to modern conditions. He was much less demonstrative than Churchill but far more ambitious, at least in terms of domestic reform.

Again, Butler looked beyond the boundaries of the Conservative Party, calculating rightly that in the national wartime government he would have the support of Labour ministers – including the deputy prime minister and Labour leader, Clement Attlee. In making the case for more secular education and a school leaving age of fifteen, rising to sixteen, Butler cited the left-wing political philosopher R. H. Tawney as much as he did more conservative advocates of change.

As with his approach to India he was not recklessly inexpedient. He sought again a third way, although in doing so from the right Butler was more at ease with embracing some on the left than Blair tended to be when he navigated this deceptively tricky terrain as Labour prime minister. Blair was not known for citing Tawney very often, while Butler was freer to do so as he wooed Labour figures.

Butler was a navigator of what was possible, and more of an incrementalist than his internal opponents dared to realize or acknowledge. Following complex negotiations with religious leaders, a majority of the Anglican church schools were effectively absorbed into the state system. As part of the compromise, a third of them received higher state subsidies while retaining autonomy over admissions, curricula and teacher appointments. Churches had lost some of their grip but by no means all. Well into the twenty-first century, some church schools would still be targeted by middle-class parents who discovered an attachment to Christianity in order to secure a place for their children. Butler’s historic education policies had distinct limits and yet marked a radical break with the past.

The most enduring reform of the 1944 Act established secondary education at the age of eleven, while abolishing fees for state secondary schools. The Act also renamed the Board of Education as the Ministry of Education, giving it greater powers and a bigger budget. Subtly, the legislation was both a move towards greater centralization and an assertion of localism, with councils acquiring more responsibility for local schools. The Act hinted at a much bigger vision of how to manage a public service through robust central and local government. The hint was not followed through, however. Following decades of confused corporatism in the 1960s and 1970s, the UK government opted for weaker central government and moribund local government after 1979, a combination that led to a more atomized state. By then, Butler’s one-nation conservatism was out of fashion.

Even so, the 1944 Act became totemic. On its sixtieth anniversary, the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, noted in a lecture:

It is no wonder that the 1944 act is often referred to as the Butler act, as a measure of the respect for Rab Butler’s contribution to the development of state education. The fact that we continue to work towards his educational goals reflects the high quality of his forward thinking and the debt we owe him for stimulating and guiding great steps forward in educational provision in this country. It is time now for the generations who have benefited from Butler’s visionary thinking to repay that debt, and seek to improve further the life chances of the generations to come.³

Not many Cabinet ministers have their name associated with reforms that are the subject of a lecture decades later. Most are not associated with reforms while they are ministers. Yet Butler was a cautious visionary. His changes meant that, although pupils had at last the benefits of a later school leaving age, they faced the prospect of selection at eleven, an arbitrary age for a child’s long-term fate to be determined. Some church schools continued to flourish and became part of a new elite.

In spite of the reactionary strands of the legislation, the Act marked a big leap on both practical and ideological grounds, guaranteeing British children an education until they were at least fifteen. In some respects, Butler was framing arguments about a more benevolent state that came to underpin the 1945 Labour government. This does not mean Butler was by any means a figure of the left, but he was willing to contemplate a bigger role for government, not least in the context of the 1940s and the Second World War. He was ahead of his party on this – the only place for a genuinely reforming minister to be, but not one that necessarily endears a potential leader to local members. Butler was as personally ambitious as any of his Conservative Party contemporaries, but he was a tireless reformer who did not always calculate how this left him in terms of becoming leader.

After Labour’s victory in 1945, Butler became a thoughtful opponent. Quite a lot of the Conservative frontbench was surprised to be out of power after the war. Butler kept going, applying the same intelligent energy as he had done in government. Here too there are parallels with the approach of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the build-up to the 1997 election. They were obsessed with the question of why Labour kept losing elections, and they sought, with varying degrees of success, to synthesize the values of their party with the attitudes of the voters who’d abandoned them – or who’d never supported them to begin with. Both became prime minister. Butler performed at least as effective an act of synthesis for the Conservatives, but he did not become prime minister.

After Attlee’s victory in 1945, Churchill’s instinct was to attack Labour with a renewed ferocity without looking too closely at his own party. He was a restlessly impatient loser. Butler was less complacently bombastic, recognizing there was little to be gained from mounting an onslaught that by implication challenged the judgement of the voters. Attlee had won a landslide. Butler knew the Tory message had to be much more sophisticated than ‘the voters got it wrong’.

As head of the party’s research department, Butler published a series of charters that blended Tory support for enterprise and individualism with a recognition of government responsibilities and the importance of direct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Rab Butler
• 2. Roy Jenkins
• 3. Barbara Castle
• 4. Denis Healey
• 5. Neil Kinnock
• 6. Michael Heseltine
• 7. Michael Portillo
• 8. Ken Clarke
• 9. David and Ed Miliband
• 10. Jeremy Corbyn
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Picture credits
• Index
• Picture Sections