THREE TIMES ALMOST PRIME MINISTER

RICHARD AUSTEN BUTLER, a parliamentary pundit once observed, "always looks as if he will be the next Prime Minister--until it seems the throne may actually be vacant." Butler has been deputy to all three postwar Tory Prime Ministers--Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan --and after the 1956 Suez debacle had every expectation of succeeding Eden at 10 Downing Street. When the party picked Macmillan instead, "Rab" Butler, though bitterly humiliated, said bravely: "Well, it is something to have been almost Prime Minister."

Whether or not he actually wins the throne this time, Britain's cool, complex Deputy Prime Minister is in charge of the government for the time being, and by any measure he has had far the widest and longest administrative training for the top job. He is hard to fault for past mistakes, since he had no responsibility for Suez and hardly any for the Common Market failure, not to mention the Keeler scandal. Moreover, Rab is renowned for his patience. "He seems," says one commentator, "to act in decades and think in centuries."

A Member of Parliament for 34 of his 60 years, Butler is a dedicated organization man who nonetheless takes irreverent delight in the impish indiscretion and bland ambivalence. When Eden's ditherings with economic and colonial problems stirred angry criticism in 1956, it was Butler who declared slyly: "He is the best Prime Minister we have." He once said that Britain's sacrosanct civil service is "a bit like a Rolls-Royce--you know it's the best machine in the world, but you're not quite sure what to do with it." His sallies have earned him a slightly uneasy reputation as a gifted intellectual in a party that looks askance at "brilliant" men. Nor have many older Tories--including Harold Macmillan--ever forgotten that, as a junior minister in Neville Chamberlain's government, Butler was a loyal and eloquent champion of Munich.

When Churchill became Prime Minister, he could not forgive Butler for having defended Chamberlain's actions, but he recognized Rab's talents and in 1941 offered him a choice between the important Ministry of Information and the backwater Board of Education. Remote as it was from the war effort, Butler plumped for education, knowing that it would be one of the key areas of postwar social reform. When he thanked Churchill for the job, legend has it that the Prime Minister retorted: "I meant it as an in sult." Nonetheless, the highly acclaimed Butler Act in 1944 became the master plan for Britain's present-day educational system, and its author joined the Cabinet as the nation's first Minister of Education.

When the Tories lost to Labor in 1945, Rab was picked to mold a forward-looking philosophy for the demoralized Conservatives. From the Tory research office, which consisted of two chairs and a desk when he took over, came a flow of pamphlets that reasserted the importance of the individual in a "property-owning democracy" and redefined Conservatism as a "policy of humanity and common sense." Almost as important to the party's future as his New Conservatism were "Rab's Boys," the bright young back-room proteges whom Butler enlisted to help formulate policy. Among them: Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, House Leader and Party Co-Chairman Iain Macleod, Lord Privy Seal Ted Heath. According to a House of Commons quip, "Rab gave Macmillan his brains."

Butler was an outstanding Chancellor of the Exchequer for four years after the Tories' return to power in 1951. His less able successor was Macmillan, and the two top Tories have coolly coexisted in the years since. During an economic crisis in which he successfully resisted Cabinet pressure to curtail the government's newfangled social services, Rab said pointedly: "We have lived too long on old port and overripe pheasant." On another occasion, he gave John F. Kennedy a cue by exhorting the voters "not just to think you are going to get something out of government; think what you can do for your country." As an imaginative Home Secretary from 1957 to 1962, Rab trimmed "the Victorian whiskers" from the betting and licensing laws and was praised as warmly by Socialists as by his fellow

Tories for his cell-to-ceiling program of reform for Britain's Dickensian prison system. Since 1962, when he was named First Secretary of State, Butler has supervised a variety of thankless tasks, notably mapping independence for the three states of the Central African Federation. He is outspokenly pro-American and, with Foreign Secretary Lord Home, has probably been the staunchest Cabinet advocate of British membership in President Kennedy's "mixed manned" multilateral force.

Butler was born in India, where his father was Governor of the Central Provinces before returning home to become master of Cambridge's Pembroke College. Rab went to Marlborough, was a brilliant undergraduate at Cambridge, and headed the university debating society. After one debate, in which Butler voted against a motion argued by Stanley Baldwin, he was warned by the visiting Prime Minister that "intellectualism is a sin and could lead a young man to a fate worse than death." Notwithstanding Baldwin, Rab became a Cambridge don. He deserted the common room for Commons after marrying Sydney Courtauld, a textile heiress, whose long illness and death in 1954 visibly sapped his political energies.

Since his 1959 remarriage to Mollie Courtauld, widow of his first wife's cousin, Rab has bounced back with all his old vitality. A warmhearted man beneath a glacial public visage, he worships the ten Butler and Courtauld grandchildren, who call him "Grandrab." From his first marriage he also inherited a priceless collection of French canvases (Renoir, Cezanne, Manet), and he is rated one of the better do-it-yourself parliamentary painters since Churchill. He may never become Prime Minister, though he insists, "I never use the word 'never.' " If he does get the job, he would be the first to pronounce himself "the best Prime Minister we have."

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