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 on 23 December 1964 he offered him the job of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (where his great-uncle Henry Montagu Butler had previously been Master, and where the incumbent Lord Adrian was due to retire on 30 June 1965). Butler did not accept until the middle of January, and took office at the start of the new academic year on 7 October 1965. On 19 February 1965 he was created a life peer as Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, "of Halstead in the County of Essex"; because of his appointment as master he sat as a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords. Between the 1964 election and his retirement from the House of Commons he had been Father of the House.