1955. Combined with Suez, these destroyed his chances of becoming Prime Minister even without Macmillan's opposition in 1963. He also suggests Butler's handling of the Central African Federation, despite his illness, suggests that he may have been "the best Foreign Secretary Britain never had", but these qualities were negated by his chronic indecisiveness, often about petty matters. Roy Jenkins, describing a stormy meeting that Butler had with Lyndon B. Johnson, pinpointed a tendency in Butler's character in that "while Butler represented the forces of urbane, civilised superiority and Johnson the raw brashness of the insecure arriviste, it was also the case that Butler was the natural servant of the state and LBJ the natural ruler". He noted that a similar dynamic was at work in Butler's relations with the equally domineering Winston Churchill. Edward Pearce wrote of his legislative record that "Rab's failure was more brilliant than most politicians' success". Iain Macleod said of him that "Rab loves being a politician among academics and an academic among politicians; that is why neither breed of man likes him all that much". Lobby correspondents (journalists who report on political affairs, including non-attributable information leaked to them) were advised never to believe anything that Butler told them but never to ignore anything he told them either. Ian Gilmour argues that Butler was always more popular in the country than in his own party and that he acquired an unjust reputation for deviousness, but was in fact less so than a number of his colleagues. The Guardian and the Daily Mirror praised him on his return to Cambridge in June 1965 but wrote that he had lacked the ruthless streak needed to get to the very top in politics. The Economist (27 June 1970) called him "the last real policy-making Chancellor". Personal life On 20 April 1926, Butler married Sydney Elizabeth Courtauld (1902–1954), the daughter of Samuel Courtauld and co-heiress to the Courtaulds textile fortune. They had four children: Sir Richard Clive Butler (1929–2012), President of the National Farmer's Union from 1979 to 1986; Sir Adam Cortauld Butler (1931–2008), also a politician, father of Brigadier Ed Butler (born 1960); Samuel James Butler (1936–2015), father of Fleur Butler (born 1967); and Sarah Teresa Butler (born 1944). Sydney died of cancer in 1954, and in 1959, Butler married again, this time to Mollie Courtauld (1908–2009), the widow of Augustine Courtauld. They purchased Spencers, the house in