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 buy time for Britain to rearm and to gain support in Britain and the Dominions, and also claiming that he had had little input into the direction of foreign policy. Paul Stafford writes that “The impression that "“The Art of the Possible”" creates, that Rab welcomed the drive away from appeasement after Prague and supported Halifax for leading it, is wholly false”. Butler’s own papers suggest that he had gone to “greater lengths to meet Hitler’s demands than any other figure in the British government” in 1939. His efforts to revoke the Polish guarantee in the summer of 1939 went