Rab Butler was too indecisive (and badly dressed) to be Prime Minister

‘The best prime minister we never had’ is not an epithet exclusive to Rab Butler. Widely applied to the late Denis Healey, it was also said of Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod and Roy Jenkins. (More recent candidates would include Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke.) All had arguably greater intellects than the prime ministers they ended up serving, all enjoyed significant popularity in the country and all were committed to the centre-ground of British politics. Yet while ‘The best PM we’ve never had’ is a club rather than a solitary designation, Rab Butler is pre-eminent among its members. The holder of all three great offices of state — a record shared with only Sir John Simon and James Callaghan — the architect of postwar Conservative policy, a deputy prime minister and first secretary of state, there were no fewer than three occasions on which he might have become prime minister, on two of which he was expected to.