When was rab butler chancellor

Richard Austen Butler came from a family of academics, including Cambridge dons, two headmasters of Harrow and one of Haileybury. He rejected Harrow, failed to get an Eton scholarship and ended up going to Marlborough. He then won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he secured firsts in Medieval and Modern Languages, and in History; he was both secretary and president of the union. He married into the Courtauld family, which gave him financial independence, and won the safe seat of Saffron Walden, in When Chamberlain became prime minister he went as a junior minister, first to the Ministry of Labour and then to the Foreign Office.

With Halifax in the Lords, it fell to Butler to defend appeasement in the Commons. He remained committed to appeasement and to Chamberlain: for the rest of his life he would defend appeasement as the only policy that had been viable in In fact, he remained committed to it even after Chamberlain had abandoned it in In , probably because Halifax remained, Churchill kept him on. He might well have lost his job when he carelessly intimated to a Swedish diplomat that Britain would be amenable to a negotiated peace.

It was not the last time careless talk did him some damage. Education was simultaneously a backwater and a dangerous one: Churchill wanted the issue left untouched.

Butler thought differently. He managed to win over Churchill, and his backbenchers, and with the help of his Labour junior, James Chuter Ede, assuaged the fears of the different churches to push through the Education Act.

The Butler Act was one of the most important reforms of the 20 th century, and a great political and legislative achievement. Having been minister of labour in the caretaker government, after the landslide, he led the reorientation of Conservative policy, being the guiding hand behind the Industrial Charter and leading the Conservative Research Department. He faced an immediate balance of payments crisis, as Gaitskell would have done. The idea was to abandon the system of near-fixed exchange rates agreed at Bretton Woods and float Sterling, which would have abandoned Bustkellism before it was born.

ROBOT was still-born. In his next budget, Butler raised interest rates and cut import quotas further: sterling recovered. Politically, he was central to the working of government: when Churchill had his stroke and Eden was ill, Butler was, in effect, stand-in prime minister, a job he did very well.

He was one of the minsters that, in , demanded that Churchill name the date of his retirement. It may have affected his judgement, or it simply have been that Butler was determined to help ensure a Conservative victory in , when Eden became PM and went to the country.

Eden, riding on the back of an economic boom and a political honeymoon, was always likely to win, but opinion polls had it pretty close. It was good, if cynical politics; it was irresponsible economics. By the end of , a balance of payments crisis forced him to deflate the economy and reverse almost all the tax cuts.

The political damage was immense, and with that lost credibility probably went any chance of the leadership after Suez see the article on Butler as home secretary, here. An ungrateful Eden demoted him to lord privy seal and leader of the House; his archrival Macmillan replaced him at the Treasury.

He would go on to the Home Office and Foreign Office, thus being one of three men in the 20 th century to hold all three of the great offices of state other than prime minister one, Sir John Simon, like Butler, never got the top job; the other, Jim Callaghan, did. Rab Butler was a proponent of the appeasement of Nazi Germany from to In , Rab Butler entered into cabinet serving as the Education minister from that period until , during which he oversaw the Education Act From to , Rab Butler served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and later in as Home Secretary from to After his political career, he was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in When he was six years, Rab Butler broke his right arm in a riding accident, which was further aggravated by burns of hot water, when attempts were made to straighten it.

This deformity stayed with him his entire life. Rab Butler started his early education attending several preparatory except Harrow, where most of his family were educated. Rab Butler continued his education at Marlborough College where he left in Rab Butler then left for France to spend five months with a Protestant pastor in Abbeville.

Rab Butler became interested in students politics, and that made him held several positions at Cambridge. In the summer of , Rab Butler suffered a nervous breakdown and with that, postponed his study of history to his fourth year. Rab Butler , however, took up courses in German and spent some time abroad learning German. Rab Butler was put in the care of a doctor by his college in November , and in December his uncle Cyril took him to a specialist in Bristol.

Rab Butler was able to recover from the breakdown after that intervention. Rab Butler graduated with a BA in Rab Butler was able to win the seat as the Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden in the general election. Rab Butler would hold that seat until his retirement in It was during a time that the India Committee, highly supported by Winston Churchill had been formed to prevent plans for greater Indian self-government after the Gandhi-Irvin Pact.

He returned to London on May 21, On September 29, , Rab Butler was appointed as Under-Secretary of State for India becoming the youngest member of the government at age