BOOKS
What Mollie saw in Butler
Alastair Forbes
AUGUST AND RAB by Mollie Butler Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.95 by Mollie Butler Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.95 It is one of the much debated mysteries of British politics', has written that gang- ling old giant and longtime jet-setting Gstaad regular, Professor Ken (short for Kennedy-struck it used unkindly to be jeered in Cambridge, Mass) Galbraith, `why Rab Butler never became Prime Minister, for he was in competition with markedly less able men.' Those four last words being apt for comment by another and much more athletic Gstaad habitué, Harold Macmillan's chosen biographer, the brilliant historian Alistair Horne, whose magnum opus is likely to be the Xmas present most in demand by serious folk a year from now. It might at first sight seem odd that any citizen of the United States, where the office of Chief Executive has so often turned out to have been held by one of the least able men in the Union, should see any 'mystery' in the fact that Butler was twice, in 1957 and in 1963, pipped at the post for the British Pre- miership. Nevertheless, all History proper being made up of numberless anecdotal atoms, it is clearly a puzzle deserving of regular re-examination. There are indeed many welcome and illuminating hindsights in this charming and warm-hearted little book, more than two thirds of which are devoted to Rab, by his definitely on-the- far-out-side-of-idolatry adoring widow, who can justifiably claim to have received from him and given in return 22 years of happiness so unclouded as to be rare in the annals of conjugal felicity.
Mollie Montgomerie was born in 1907 of good sound Lowland stock but had be- come, before she was 12, an Essex girl for life. At one of the no less than six Trinity May Week Balls she attended at Cam- bridge, she met a young Essex neighbour, the rather rich and very handsome future Arctic explorer August Courtauld, and after a two-year engagement married him in 1932. After an apparently largely camel- borne honeymoon in the Sudan and several years sailing from a Solent-side farm, she settled down with him in a large Georgian house, Spencers, handy for his yachting from Essex and Suffolk estuaries. While Courtauld was to have a brave and busy war in MTBs, her own had to be mostly given over to motherhood, a vocation she carried on well beyond VE-Day. She was quite a well-heeled Mrs Miniver: 'when milk was rationed . . . I decided to invest in 2 Jersey cows': and whole Stiltons sweated away in the cellar air-raid shelter against rainier or hungrier days. But soon the marriage was to encounter a worse .1. enemy than the Third Reich when multiple sclerosis put a time bomb on a short fuse into August Courtauld's increasingly con- fused head and destroyed utterly his perso- nality before finishing off this body. At about the same time, his father's heiress- cousin Sydney Courtauld, Rab's first wife and the mother of his children, was fighting a losing battle against the vilely painful cancer that had attacked her always I thought rather stern countenance (`Don't make Rab laugh like that, he'll be sick,' I remember her admonishing me). Sydney surprisingly had expressed her certainty that, freed in due course of their Courtauld spouses, Rab and Mollie would marry. And so, in 1959, it came to pass. Nearly three years before, Mollie had been as disappointed as Rab himself by the `I think you'll find it excludes acts of God.' answers Bobbety Salisbury had obtained in Downing Street to his question 'Hawold or Wab?' and in his masterly memoirs, as stylish as Eden's and Macmillan's were stodgy, had quoted the kindly and sym- pathetic words welcomingly addressed to him at the time by Clarissa Eden, who has since however informed me that they were totally insincere and dictated under duress by her Macmillan-hating husband. A pity.
`I hear Rab is going to marry a little woman from the provinces,' had ex- claimed, we are told, one foiled London hostess and Rab, who was always at home in French literature despite an atrocious accent that had once upset a French lady he had taken out on to the balcony of Byron's former Geneva home, the Villa Diodati, CI started a verse of Lamartine's "Le Lac" but when I looked round the balcon was bare') for a while delightedly nicknamed her Emma Bovary. Mollie who, in William Rees-Mogg's own near- Rabism, 'strengthened Rab's complexity with her simplicity' nevertheless preferred Proust to Flaubert and artlessly, as in everything she writes, telling of a soirée she had organised, confesses that she `decided to go as a combination of Madame Verdurin and myself. She does sometimes sound just like that, as when relating how she played panderess to the then undergraduate Prince of Wales by giving him as a dinner neighbour the Chilean Ambassador's nice daughter Lucia, 'since I thought Prince Charles would like her. Indeed he did, and their subsequent friendship was a happy exam- ple of someone on whom he could safely cut his teeth, if I may put it thus.'
Mollie knew little or nothing of politics save what Rab taught her as he went along in complete mastery of his then three concurrent jobs, Home Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Chairman of the Tory Party. Though he must have expounded with pride the creation of his great Education Act of 1944, he may have skipped recounting the views he had ex- pressed about Chamberlain's reluctant concession of the Premiership to Churchill as Hitler's armies marched West. 'The good clean tradition [sic!] of English poli- tics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history . . . a half-breed American'. It was to another half-breed American — though one without Red- Indian blood, Harold Macmillan — that Mollie vowed she would never willingly speak again after her discovery that, as Lain Macleod well put it in the Spectator, he `was at all times, from the first day of his Premiership to the last, determined that Butler, although incomparably the best qualified of the contenders, should not succeed him.' Although Macmillan had, during his gratuitous mismanagement of the Profumo and other matters muttered hints of giving up, these were probably not genuine. Certainly if he had had as much knowledge as any first year medical stu- dent or even any attentive reader of the press he would hardly have run at the surgeon's first cut at his prostate. After all, on polling day in 1970 he was confidently predicting to Lord Salisbury and myself over the luncheon table not only Ted Heath's defeat that evening but his own rapid return to the Tory leadership by universal demand! He had first tried to block Butler with Quintin Hogg, who had begun to no avail an ugly rush of peerage disclaimers. Then he successfully gerry- mandered Home into his shoes, thanks only to Butler's maddening but characteris- tic refusal to refuse to serve under that honourable but not too cerebral Scot. Lady Butler reveals that even the latter's first cousin, Tony Lambton, had telephoned 'to protest at anyone other than Rab becom- ing Prime Minister'.
The author's first feeling was that her husband 'was putting loyalty to his party above loyalty to his country' and she was far from alone in her reaction. Later she came to 'think that for him the two were synonymous'. That was probably true and is an indictment surely sufficient to rob this lovable and much-loved man of the status of 'distinguished statesman' as well as `uniquely great human being' his widow so touchingly gives him. That he had qualities utterly lacking in either Eden or Macmil- lan, and unusual in politicians generally, is certain, notably, as she writes tonte and nobility'. I can confirm that it was, as she recalls, 'consistently amusing to be with him'. He liked jokes (certainly believing as I do myself in Chamfort's view that there could be no day so wasted as one without laughter) and his own were excellent. Sometimes they were evidently too ellipti- cally Johnsonian for Mollie to spot them as in, to the press, 'I could not do what Mrs Thatcher does, the impressive thing is that she does it at all.' A lot of his notorious indiscretions were simply gaffes raisonnees, as when he informed me, at the Tory Conference just before Suez, that 'the P,M seems a bit calmer, though for several weeks he ought to have been in a strait- jacket'. Nevertheless, Mollie Butler is quite wrong in thinking that, for anyone but her, he 'had that overworked word "charisma" '. It is precisely what he never could acquire. Accident of birth had given him a face like a humanoid potato. A later childhood accident had left him with a floppy right arm and hand that made him unable to give a proper handshake. While his doting Mollie 'had never heard a man with such a beautiful speaking voice', another admirer, the late William Clark, described it as 'a curious, rather high- pitched monotone as if he were hypnotised'.
One of Harold Wilson's few redeeming good deeds was to make Rab a memorably beloved Master of Trinity and his last Cambridge years are very agreebly sketch- ed in. So are the treasured Hebridean holidays they shared with their numerous children and grandchildren. Friendships, not least with Harry 'The Monk' Williams, that Betjemanish priest who thinks that a rich man can always get to heaven through the eye of a nervous breakdown or a Jungian analysis, also gets a mention (one friend, the late Tory bigwig Philip Swinton, has just made a surprise appearance in Joe Orton's scabrous diaries). As usual, alas, one has to lament carelessness of proof- reading and editing. That most literate of baronets, Sir John Verney, is thanked for correcting 'faults of taste or grammar' but why did he allow his author to lapse for a long paragaph into that most unfashion- able of tenses, the historic present, on the sudden appearance of the novelist Leslie Hartley and his gondolier, I wonder? The late Prince Alphy Clary and his late wife Princess Lidi are oddly described as 'exces- sively good company' as well as 'living in total penury'! (My italics.) Neither state- ment is or ever was remotely true; see the Prince's admirable book A European Past enthusiastically reviewed in these pages by me on its appearance some years ago. As for poor dear Princess Marina, Mollie Butler manages to get both her and her Rolls-Royce altogether wrong. And the vessel in which the Butlers' proud Russian hosts took them skimming over the Gulf of Finland was a hydrofoil and not a hover- craft. Sorry to sound like Anthony Powell.
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