This is taken from The Guardian:

Gareth Butler
Former editor of Radio 4's The World This Weekend and doyen of BBC political coverage
by Jon Sopel
Tuesday March 4 2008

Gareth Butler, who has died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 42, was one of the cleverest, most knowledgeable and likeable people in broadcasting. As one would expect from someone who had taken over editing the series British Political Facts from his father, the psephologist David Butler, he held in his head facts and figures, policy details and statistical quirks that never ceased to amaze. Who needed Google when Gareth was in the office?

He was a natural to steer BBC Radio 4's election night coverage, taking charge of editing the general election programme of 2005, countless local council elections, European polls and US election nights. His last job at the BBC was as deputy editor of The Politics Show, which he had joined at its birth in 2003. The final programme he edited was from the World Economic Forum in Davos at the end of January, where we had gone to interview the prime minister.

But Gareth had decided that after 20 years with the BBC, it was time to move on. As we sat at dinner in the Swiss Alps, he talked excitedly about the future - first there were the plans he was making with his wife Jess, whom he had married last May; there would be a cricket tour to the West Indies with the BBC Radio News cricket team that he ran. Then he would consider the career options: would it be with a public affairs company, a thinktank, a pollster? It sounded as though the options were abundant and the headhunters were circling.

We also learned how Gareth would pass car journeys with the two children from his first marriage, Joel, 13, and Sacha, 11. They would give him a year, any year from the middle ages onwards, and he would provide a fascinating or obscure fact about it. Needless to say, once we discovered this, the rest of the dinner was spent trying to catch him out. We failed miserably.

Born and brought up in Oxford, after the Dragon school and then Abingdon school, Gareth won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1986 with a first in history. Academia would have been a natural choice - his father being a fellow of Nuffield College, his mother Marilyn a former rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and one of the country's foremost literary critics. But like his two brothers, he chose journalism. After brief stints as a House of Commons researcher with the former Labour chancellor, Denis Healey, and Labour frontbencher Tom Clarke, Gareth joined the BBC in 1987, at central talks and features in the current affairs department of Bush House. After that, he went on to special current affairs at Radio 4 to work on the programmes Law in Action and Stop Press. Inevitably, Gareth's acute political antennae led him to the World at One and The World This Weekend.

He became editor of The World This Weekend in 1995. This was the start of what became a major problem: how to manage the competing demands of having a job which required one to work at the weekend, with an Arsenal season ticket in your pocket. The ingenious solution was a very peculiar rota pattern at The World This Weekend - with a big gap in the middle of Saturday afternoon.

In 1997, Gareth went on to work for the then head of BBC News, and now chief executive of the Royal Opera House, Tony Hall. This was a job that required rather different skills. Here you needed the highly attuned antennae of the mandarin, dealing with complaints from the public, navigating a path through the often complex internal politics of the BBC and having the intellectual rigour to think through delicate editorial judgments on which, as an organisation, the BBC is rightly judged. Gareth upheld all that was good about the corporation's public service values.

But it was his ability to understand and communicate nuance that lent itself so well to covering politics, and why politics was always going to be the perfect job in journalism for him. He finally arrived in October 1999 at Millbank, the BBC's studios at Westminster, as an assistant editor of live programmes, producing programmes like Dispatch Box and, most recently, The Politics Show.

Gareth was not a showy person but was starting to move into the limelight himself. His first article since leaving the BBC is published in the current issue of the magazine Progress.

He is survived by Jess, Joel, Sacha, his parents and two brothers.

· Gareth Edgeworth Butler, broadcaster, born May 3 1965; died February 29 2008

This is taken from The Independent:

Gareth Butler: Politics producer at the BBC
Thursday, 6 March 2008

Gareth Butler was a notable producer of political programmes at the BBC, where he brought to his work an encyclopaedic knowledge of parliament and government and avoided, thanks to the gift of gentle understatement, any of the grandstanding or pomposity to which others with the same strengths might have succumbed. His death at the age of 42 leaves his friends and colleagues mourning a talent that enlivened and enhanced their own work.
His last job, as deputy editor of The Politics Show on BBC 1, allowed him to roam the territory he loved. The contours of politics always interested him as much as the frenetic activity on the mountain tops. He understood that interviews with leading figures were never the whole story, and that a clearly painted background was needed if they were to make sense. As a producer, he made that talent tell from the start. He had the kind of editorial brain that viewers and listeners deserve.
He began at the Corporation in two famous nurseries, which produced many powerful editorial figures and classy programmes. From current affairs in the World Service at Bush House he moved in the late 1980s to Anne Sloman's special current affairs department in Radio 4, working on programmes like Law in Action, Stop Press and The Week in Westminster. There, he learned the trade, and it was a natural graduation when he found himself moving along the corridor in Broadcasting House to The World at One and the hurly-burly of daily news.
Those of us who worked with Butler as a young producer in those days remember a calm understanding that was often a contrast to the panic that fast-moving programmes create in their wake. He would always find time to keep an eye on the cricket score (a test match run-chase would excite him almost as much as a juicy by-election), but never missed the point of a story. His journalistic scepticism came naturally, but it was laced with good nature and warmth. By 1995 he had become editor of The World This Weekend on Radio 4 – still an hour-long programme in those days – and was recognised as a valuable talent.
That was why Tony Hall, then head of BBC News, took him on as an assistant to do the kind of job that journalists often dread (or belittle), dealing with complaints, public speeches, strategies for programmes dealing with the shark-ridden waters of politics and those who are looking for blood. He survived the experience and emerged to make programmes once again. In particular he got, as well as television responsibilities at Westminster, a job that he considered a dream, editing the Radio 4 election-night programmes.
These are special events for all involved, wonderfully unscripted, always with the whiff of surprise, full of guts and life. Butler produced them all for Radio 4 in the new century – two general elections, an American presidential election, local and European elections – and loved their spirit and edgy drama. There is nothing quite like these nights. He understood how to sift the trivial from the important and how to spot a rogue poll, or a glib analysis, at a hundred paces. The most extraordinary facts would always be at his fingertips. For a presenter, his memory was a godsend, and his statistical skill and confidence a relief.
These abilities were hardly surprising. Before he joined the BBC, while working as a researcher at the House of Commons, he became joint editor of the 1986 edition of British Political Facts – that glorious compendium of 20th-century parliamentary and government statistics and lore – in the happy company of his beloved father David, doyen of British psephology, at Nuffield College, Oxford, who had published the first edition of the book in 1963. They produced three editions together, and the next would have been Gareth's alone.
He was educated in Oxford and at Abingdon, and then at Cambridge where he took a first in History at Gonville and Caius College. His family was notably close. With his two brothers, his father and his mother – the literary scholar and former Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, Marilyn Butler – he shared a natural enthusiasm for politics and public affairs that he would never think of questioning. Like the importance of cricket – he organised a BBC News team – or Arsenal, it was a simple fact, as obvious and incontrovertible as how many seats the Liberals won in 1906 or how many by-elections there were in Harold Wilson's first term of office.
Within the past few months Gareth Butler had decided to leave the BBC after 20 years, in search of a new challenge. At the time of his death he was excited about opportunities that might continue to stretch his talents and feed his hunger for politics.
His private life had taken a happy turn last summer with his second marriage, to Jess, and he enjoyed a close relationship with two children, Joel and Sacha, from his first. When news of his collapse and death began to circulate among his BBC colleagues there was a sense of disbelief, and then a terrible sadness that he and his family would be denied a new chapter in a life that had already produced so much.
James Naughtie
Gareth Butler, television and radio producer and writer: born Oxford 3 May 1965; married Lucy Anderson (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 2007), 2007 Jessica Asato; died London 29 February 2008.