Butler attributed his defeat to Macmillan's "ambience" and "connections". He said "savage" things to Derek Marks of the "Daily Express", who protected Butler's reputation by not printing them and, years later, told Alistair Horne, Macmillan's biographer, that he "could not understand" why he had been passed over after "picking up the pieces" after Suez. Nigel Nicolson, who had conceded that "in the circumstances", Macmillan was the right choice, wrote of the "melancholy that right had not triumphed" with which Butler proposed Macmillan as leader at the party meeting on 22 January.