Richard Austen Butler will always be remembered as the Conservative Party's 'uncrowned Prime Minister'. On the threshold of No. 10 three times in his career -- in 1953, when both Churchill and Eden were ill; in 1957, when he was almost universally expected to take over in the wake of Suez; and again in 1963, when an ailing Harold Macmillan ruthlessly blocked his succession -- his record of service in Government is still unmatched by any other twentieth-century politician except Churchill.

In this first biography of him to be written with access to his personal and political papers, Anthony Howard offers and unusually engaging portrait of one of the most fascinating characters in recent British public life. Independent, indiscreet and never anything but irreverent, Rab could not be accused of making Burke's mistake of 'giving up to Party what was meant for mankind'. Though he never seemed to enjoy the same popularity in his own Party that he commanded in the country at large, his achievements were remarkable. He was the architect of the one piece of modern legislation that is remembered by the name of its author, the Butler Education Act of 1944. More than any other individual, he re-created the Conservative Party after the Second World War, and came within an ace, during his period as Chancellor from 1951 to 1955, of performing an 'economic miracle'.

In telling the story of Rab's life, Anthony Howard also reveals a great deal about the post-war Conservative party, including the veto that its ' blue blood and thunder group' was consistently able to exercise on his prospects of succeeding to the Premiership. Throughout his life, Rab carried the stain of supporting the pre-war policy of appeasement, although others equally closely associated with it -- including Lord Home, who finally thwarted Rab's ambitions in 1963 -- were never required to pay the same price for having been 'Men of Munich'. Was that really Rab's offence? Or was it simply that he never was quite regarded as 'one of us'?

This is a personal as much as a political biography. Rab grew up as 'a child of the Empire', though an unusually academic one. The last of an exceptional family line of 'Firsts', reaching back to the Cambridge of the eighteenth century, Rab was regarded as an intellectual by politicians -- just as when he finally returned to Cambridge, as Master of Trinity in 1965, he tended to be seen primarily as a politician by dons.

Anthony Howard ends his acute and immensely readable book with Lord Butler's self-effacing remark, 'I think I could have made quite a tolerable leader for the Conservatives.' That he should never have been given the chance to prove it may well be a measure of just how far the self-effacing tradition of public service has been driven out of political life in Britain.