David Butler

David Butler, who died in 2022, was in many ways a remarkable man.  He was often on television, especially at times of elections, and was blessed with mathematical skills.  As a young boy he spent a lot of time looking at cricket scores and working out batting averages and relished the dates, events and results of cricket matches.  

He came from an intellectually bright family.  His cousin was the well known politician Rab Butler who held many government offices, his father was a Latin professor and his maternal grandfather was the historian, A.F. Pollard.  David did well at school and eventually got a university degree from New College, Oxford.  His time at university was interrupted by the war and he became a tank commander with the Staffordshire Yeomanry and was part of the allied forces that crossed the River Rhine.

He certainly lived an interesting life but is best known for inventing a new science known as psephology.  This derived from the Greek word for ‘pebble’ and came from the ancient practice of the Greeks where pebbles were used to cast their votes. His science was essentially to analyse voting trends and to predict election results. This he did initially on the very first televised election broadcast by the BBC and he did that sort of work until 1979.

In 1955 he introduced the swing-o-meter to the election coverage.  Essentially he saw shifts in the voting preferences in the early results and he used those figures to predict the outcome of elections supported by a mass of facts and figures which he had at his fingertips.  His aim was not to impress academics but to make elections understandable to the mass of ordinary people.

He developed what has become know as the Cube Rule which predicts on the basis of votes cast for the political parties the number of seats in Parliament each party will eventually end up with.  Churchill read one of his articles and was so impressed that he invited him to Chartwell for dinner.

This election activity was not his main work as he was an academic in Oxford University.  When the BBC replaced him in 1979 with Peter Snow he was disappointed but worked for ITV in 1997 and Sky in 2001 and even in 2017 he was involved, at the age of 92, by using Twitter!

He was obviously a master of numbers and could analyse in meaningful ways the trends in figures which others did not see.  He set the benchmark which others have followed.  We all live with a certain degree of mathematical necessity.  We all want to know what our bank accounts hold in terms of cash.  We want to know the level of income we derive each week, each month, each year.  We want to know the value of our pensions, savings, investments and interest.  Yet there is one statistic which affects us all without exception.  This applies to the rich and poor, the intelligent and uneducated, persons from every country and language group.  Without exception we all die.  We are all mortal which by definition means we do not live forever in our physical bodies.  We must face the grave or the furnace!   

God says that it is appointed unto each of us to die and after that the judgement.  We need to face that prospect with some deep thought and some real preparedness.  That is only possible if we give serious consideration to the Lord Jesus who came to earth to give us life in its fullness, which means life everlasting with its joy and glory.  The Bible shows us the way to eternal life and it is through faith in the One who died for our sins and rose again.  He conquered death and so can we if we know Him personally in our lives.

DAILY MESSAGES WITH MEANING (05/09/24)

Written by PAUL YOUNG

All photos courtesy of Unsplash