the eyes of Conservatives, but some of the damage stuck to Butler as well. Butler later wrote in The Art of Memory that "every word" of Macleod's Spectator article "[wa]s true". Butler was able to speak fluent French to French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville to the latter's surprise. Butler's only major foreign trip was to Washington in late March 1964, where US President Lyndon Johnson complained about the sale of British-made buses to Castro-controlled Cuba, which was under a US trade embargo. Butler played only a small part in the 1964 general election campaign. He showed his lack of stomach for the fight by agreeing with the journalist George Gale of the Daily Express that the very close campaign "might yet slip away" in the "last few days". Randolph Churchill wrote that he had "uttered his own death-wish and death warrant". He would not have retained the Foreign Office if the Conservatives had won. The job had already been promised to Christopher Soames. Many, including Wilson, said that Butler would have won the 1964 general election if he had been Prime Minister. At the comparatively early age of 61, Butler left office with one of the longest records of ministerial experience for contemporary politicians. After the election, he lost the chairmanship of the Conservative Research Department, which he had headed for 20 years, and refused Home's offer of an earldom, a rank normally granted to former prime ministers at the time; Harold Macmillan, for example, refused a barony in 1964 but accepted an earldom in 1984). Later life Master of Trinity and memoirs 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, Wilson offered him the job of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (where Butler's great-uncle Henry Montagu Butler had previously been Master and 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