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 the comparatively early age of 62, Butler left office with one of the longest records of ministerial experience amongst contemporary politicians. After the election, he lost the chairmanship of the Conservative Research Department, which he had headed for twenty years, and refused an earldom. Butler remained on the Conservative front bench into the next year. Harold Wilson felt that the Conservatives had made Butler a scapegoat after the "“Daily Express”" incident during the election, and offered him the job of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where his great uncle Henry Montagu Butler had previously been Master, on 23 December 1964.