Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images From left: Bob McKenzie, Sue Lawley, Alastair Burnet and David Butler. The BBC’s team for the October 1974 general election. After completing his degree he went to Princeton University as a visiting fellow (1947-48), but apart from a spell as personal assistant to the British ambassador in Washington (1955-56) he remained firmly moored at Oxford thereafter. There he studied philosophy, politics and economics, with a break of two years for service as a lieutenant in the Staffordshire Yeomanry, crossing the Rhine as a tank commander. The addiction to fact, though, may have come more from his father, Harold Edgeworth Butler, a don at New College, Oxford, who kept two copies of the Dictionary of National Biography in the house, ready for use should some dispute emerge.įrom St Paul’s school, London, David followed his father to New College. His first – wholly unaware – taste of elections came while he was still in the womb, when his mother, Margaret (nee Pollard), canvassed for his grandfather, the London University historian AF (Albert) Pollard, standing as a Liberal for the Combined Universities seat (those other than Oxford, Cambridge or London). This allegiance to verifiable fact reflected his upbringing. The books were often criticised for failing to be more adventurous, but Butler wanted analysis firmly rooted in verifiable fact as much so as his other great project, British Political Facts, co-written first (1963) with Jennie Freeman, then (1980) with Anne Sloman, and finally, culminating in the end-of-century edition (2000) with his son Gareth. In tandem with successive co-authors, Richard Rose (1959), Anthony King (19), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (1970) and from 1974 until 2005, Dennis Kavanagh, Butler broadened the concept through interviews with the principal players in each election. Part of McCallum’s initial purpose, which then became Butler’s, was to purge the process of myth and wishful thinking. McCallum could not handle statistics, but Butler could, and he furnished the statistical appendix to the British General Election of 1950, by HG Nicholas. The first was produced after the 1945 election by RB McCallum and Alison Readman. The histories of successive elections that came out of Nuffield became an institution. Political Change in Britain (1969), with the US political scientist Donald Stokes, provided the most thorough analysis of its day of what drove people to vote as they did – alongside class, a strong impulse was people’s tendency to vote as their parents did. He published a vast array of books, not all about elections, producing standard texts on the consequences of hung parliaments and who would have to do what if an election failed to give any party a working majority.įailure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax (1996), written with Andrew Adonis and Tony Travers, detailed a stupendous governmental fiasco. Having done his research degree at Nuffield (1949-51) he continued as a research fellow, and then a fellow (1954-92). At his seminars at Nuffield College, Oxford, on and off the platform at conferences, over lunches and suppers, on buses ferrying political reporters from one press conference to the next, he gossiped, speculated and reminisced but always, he taught.
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