Political career of Rab Butler: 1929–1941 Political career of Rab Butler: 1929–1941 Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, (9 December 1902 – 8 March 1982), generally known as R. A. Butler and familiarly known from his initials as Rab, was a prominent British Conservative politician. Butler was elected to Parliament for Saffron Walden in Essex at the 1929 General Election, and soon became a parliamentary assistant to Samuel Hoare, the leading Conservative politician associated with Indian policy. Butler attended the Second Round Table Conference and early in 1932 he visited India on Lord Lothian's Franchise Committee, which recommended an increase in the Indian franchise.
Rab Butler new Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in the House of Lords, Butler was the main Foreign Office spokesman in the House of Commons. In internal foreign office discussions after the Anschluss of Austria, Butler counselled against a British guarantee to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia, and approved of the Cabinet decision (22 March) not to give one (he later omitted these facts from his memoirs). Butler spent most of the Sudeten Crisis at a meeting in Geneva about reform of the Covenant of the League of Nations. He strongly approved of Chamberlain’s trip to Berchtesgaden (16 September), even if it