Butler’s friend and biographer, the journalist Michael Crick, paid tribute to him as the “father of pseudoscience” – a word Butler promoted early in his career to describe “the new study of electoral science based on the Greek word psephos for pebble. The ancient Greeks voted in the elections”. “For decades Butler was the leading falsifier in Britain and around the world,” Crick said. Butler himself once described the term as an “awful, stupid, academic joke” that “hangs like an albatross around my neck”. Born on 17 October 1924, Butler studied philosophy, politics and economics at New College, Oxford. His studies were interrupted when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant to serve in World War II. As an undergraduate, Butler adapted a forgotten Edwardian equation, the “cube rule,” for his work on elections. He found that he was able to calculate the total number of seats he won from the percentage of votes polled. It enabled him to predict the seats likely to be won by the two major parties based on opinion polls. “For the 1950 election, aged just 25, he was the in-house pundit on the BBC’s first televised election results programme, a position he held until the 1979 election,” Crick said. Butler was known for developing the concept of swing – the percentage shift of votes from one party to another between elections. In 1955, he presented the Swingometer on the BBC’s Nightly Show. It was given a more prominent place in the BBC’s 1959 election broadcast and has become a staple of election coverage around the world. In his biography of the Sultan of Swing, Michael Crick writes that Butler “did not confine himself to an audience of academic colleagues … but was determined to make elections intelligible to a mass audience”. Tributes were paid by those who followed in his footsteps. Robert Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester, called Butler “a giant of political research”. Anthony Wells, head of European policy and social research at YouGov UK, said that talking to David Butler was like “a mathematician sitting down and talking to Archimedes or a physicist meeting Newton”. The BBC’s Nick Robinson described Butler as “the big daddy of all the election watchers, analysts, academics and pundits”. Butler’s innovations were recognized early when, aged 25, as a researcher at Nuffield College, Oxford, he was asked to contribute to the BBC’s first televised election results programme. While working there, he was invited to the home of Winston Churchill, then leader of the opposition, who had read an article Butler had written in the Economist and wanted to ask the young academic about his chances of returning to Downing Street. “They ate dinner together and were alone most of the evening. They also listened to the radio election broadcast that night … and Butler was asked his verdict,” Crick writes in the biography. Churchill would lose the election. Speaking to the BBC in 2017, Butler said he was glad not to be writing about that year’s general election which would have seen Theresa May’s Conservatives lose their majority as support for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor grew, defying early polls. However, he opened a Twitter account to share his thoughts on that year’s election. “It’s great to rediscover that one is never too old to learn,” he wrote of his appearance on social media. As the dust settled on the 2017 vote, Butler tweeted: “Learning to tweet at 92 was fun. But my thoughts must now be confined to elections, so I sign off… until next year?’
