by A. N. Wilson
The sad fact was that Illingworth, Muggeridge and Graham Sutherland had all seen what was abundantly obvious to his close colleagues. Harry Crookshank, Leader of the House, found him ‘terribly drooling…fast losing his grip’.12 Far from being the prophet who looked forward to the actual future–a multi-racial Britain which was part of the European Union, he had turned into a drooling old reactionary, always half tight, incapable of holding back the future he deplored.
If the aged figurehead was barely capable of fulfilling his symbolic duties, the new young Head of State was also to find herself the target of some hitherto unprecedented criticism.
The decline in deference is one of the most striking features of our times. Deference was always tinged with irony in Britain, as anyone can deduce from reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott or Dickens, where impertinent servants are often quicker-witted than their masters, and where haughtiness or arrogance in superiors is regularly lampooned. The class system existed, and until the 1950s it remained very largely unaltered, partly because of the irony which in some senses redeemed it.
There was one aspect of it all, however, which was largely untinged by irony, and that was the attitude of the public towards the monarchy. The Coronation on Tuesday 2 June 1953 had held the nation in thrall, filling television viewers with the sense that Britain in all its pride and greatness could be reborn. It was a triumphalist, but also a poignant ceremony, bringing memories of the late King, a dignified, dutiful figure whom almost everyone respected for his courage in reviving the monarchy after the Abdication crisis of 1936, and his leadership during the Second World War.
His daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was enchantingly beautiful, and although in her public appearances she appeared to be shy and stilted, the public invested her with all their hopes for a better future. Her youth, her piety, her winning smile, her bright eyes, her young children, all excited a reverence which approached idolatry.
It was sometimes difficult to remember this in the later years of her reign, when even conservative newspapers were open in their scorn for her children, when her husband’s tactless jokes or outbursts of bad temper became commonplace causes of embarrassment, and when the Queen herself could be lampooned as an ugly puppet on the television satirical show Spitting Image. By the time this show was shocking and amusing the nation, republicanism was spoken of as an alternative form of government, and chatted about on the BBC as a plausible alternative–though it never seemed to have appealed to more than about 20 percent of the adult electorate.
The Queen had to learn, after the advent of ‘satire’ in the 1960s, that the age of deference was dead. But in the 1950s she was considered to be beyond criticism. This was demonstrated when a small-circulation journal, National and English Review, edited by a Conservative peer called Lord Altrincham, devoted its issue of August 1957 to an analysis of the institution of monarchy. Of the various articles, the one which attracted most attention was penned by Lord Altrincham himself, later, when he had renounced his peerage in order to stand unsuccessfully for Parliament, known as the writer John Grigg.
His article contrasted George V, whom he saw as an ideal constitutional monarch, and the shaper of the modern constitution, with the granddaughter, Elizabeth II. He considered it a great mistake that the Court was composed of tweedy, aristocratic types, rather than representing the racial and social range, not merely of Great Britain but of the Commonwealth of which she was the head. ‘Crawfie, Sir Henry Marten, the London season, the race-course, the grouse-moor, canasta, and the occasional royal tour–all this would not have been good enough for Queen Elizabeth I!’13
What people found truly shocking in Altrincham’s article was not so much his attack on the ‘upper class twits’ of the Court, as his personal description of Elizabeth II herself: ‘She will not…achieve good results with her present style of speaking, which is frankly “a pain in the neck”. Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text… But even if the Queen feels compelled to read all her speeches, great and small, she must at least improve her method of reading them. With practice, even a prepared speech can be given an air of spontaneity.
‘The subject-matter must also be endowed with a more authentic quality. George V, for instance, did not write his own speeches, yet they were always in character; they seemed to be a natural emanation from and expression of the man. Not so the present Queen’s. The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation. It is not thus that she will be enabled to come into her own as an independent and distinctive character.’14
A torrent of denunciation descended upon Altrincham. ‘What a cowardly bully you are,’ one woman wrote to him. As he was emerging from Television House with Ludovic Kennedy on 6 August, Altrincham met with Mr B. K. Burbridge, who stepped forward from the crowd and smacked him hard in the face, shouting, ‘Take that from the League of Empire Loyalists’ (i.e. Mosleyites). In fining Mr Burbridge 20s. for his assault, the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate expressed sympathy for his motives: ‘Ninety-five percent of the population of this country were disgusted and offended by what was written,’ he remarked, truthfully.
The Queen was unable to change her very distinctive character, though she was to conduct her duties as Head of State conscientiously and seriously for over half a century after Lord Altrincham’s article first appeared. As far as the composition of her Court was concerned, she did not heed his advice. At the end of the reign, it was still composed of aristocrats and canasta players, with no admixture from the Commonwealth, and no members of the middle or lower classes. The Queen remained doggedly, and to many people shockingly, badly educated. She displayed no knowledge of literature–old or new–no interest in serious music or the arts, no cleverness in an academic or ostentatious sense, though as time went on it would seem that she possessed mysterious reserves of common sense. As time wore on, it would seem as if her notion of parenthood was remote, and cold, and her eldest son publicly criticised her for this–though the rather brisker Princess Anne would leap to the mother’s defence. Her decision to send her sons to Gordonstoun was unredeemed folly. Stories regularly circulated of the Queen being, like many Englishwomen, more able to emote with animals than with members of her own species, and it would be fallacious to suggest that she ever excited warm affection from her people.
But there was something there. What it was would be extremely hard to define. Constitutional historians such as Lord Altrincham could, if they surveyed the whole of the Queen’s reign, compare her unfavourably with George V. She was known to be agitated by the state of the Established Church–in this she was not alone as the years wore on, and it moved through a series of self-imposed crises. But she was generally considered powerless to intervene. Why? Was she not the Supreme Governor of the Church? She was deemed to be worried about the danger to the Union posed by Scottish nationalism, but once again she seemed to do nothing about it. She allowed some rum coves, and some actual criminals, to become peers of her realm–how closely did she question the Prime Ministers responsible for the elevation of these rogues? Would not George V have refused to allow the mangling of the House of Lords perpetrated by Tony Blair? Would that redoubtable monarch not have insisted upon a plausible alternative system being in place before the Second Chamber was deprived of its hereditary element, and the red leather seats were filled with Blair’s placemen and placewomen, some of whom had overtly bought their places?
All these things were the direct responsibility not of her advisers, not of anyone but the Head of State herself, and they are more serious criticisms than that her voice was a pain in the neck.
But she was one of those very mysterious people in history whose virtues consisted in what she was, not in what she did, and which easily overcame her drawbacks. One of these virtues was longevity. In a rapidly changing Britain, she remained the one fixed poin
t, the one element of public life which did not change. Secondly, as was made clear on the rare occasions when she was known to broadcast her own words, rather than speeches written for her, she was a person of directness, simplicity, unfashionable Christian piety. Thirdly, she was a genuinely humble person. But these are lists of adjectives and qualities and they fail to convey what it is, about her and the institution they represent, that filled so many of her subjects with a feeling they nursed for no other public figure. At the time of her Golden Jubilee, after a disastrous period for the Royal Family, it was widely expected that the occasion would be a flop. Over a million people thronged the streets of London to see her on the balcony of Buckingham Palace–the largest crowd that had assembled since the victory celebrations at the end of the war. She was–a word once applied by her daughter-in-law to her butler–a rock.
Churchill’s death in 1965 produced a great upswell of patriotic sentiment, personal admiration and nostalgia. Churchill in his last days as Prime Minister, however, was an embarrassment. It was perceived that the strongest of his appetites, stronger even than his need for brandy and cigars, was lust for power, and it outlasted his physical and mental capabilities–as the merciless diaries of his doctor recorded. Any suggestion that he was too old for the task, whether it came from colleagues or the press, would be treated as examples of disloyalty. ‘He spoke bitterly of the folly of the Tories in rashly throwing away all he had to give.’ (In fact, it was his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, who was urging the old man to retire. ‘I think I can harangue the bastards for fifty minutes,’ he said of what would be his last speech as leader to the Party Conference at Blackpool. ‘If they try to get me out, I will resist.’15
‘Poor Anthony will be relieved at this,’ the old man remarked, after one of his many ‘turns’, but he continued to stay on in office, rather than allowing Anthony Eden, his chosen heir since 1940, to take over the leadership. Although he liked to praise Eden, Churchill also had grave doubts about his judgement, and worries about the younger man’s state of health. In both areas, Churchill was right to be worried. On the very eve of his resignation, Churchill held a dinner for the Queen at Number 10 Downing Street. When the evening was over, his doctor went to see the old man in his bedroom. He was still wearing his Garter (of which he was a Knight), his Order of Merit and his knee-breeches. He sat silently and then suddenly blurted out, ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’16 The next day, wearing one of the last frock coats to be seen in London outside a theatrical outfitters, the grand old Victorian went to Buckingham Palace to kiss the Queen’s hands and resign his office. Robert Anthony Eden, two months short of his fifty-eighth birthday, succeeded him as Prime Minister.
5
Suez
Eden, the only male British Prime Minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the twentieth century. Many also regarded him as the most disastrous, though there is so much competition for the role that attempts to draw up an order of prime ministerial incompetence, during the period 1956 to the present day, would be invidious. Some now question whether he was dependent upon Benzedrine, as was rumoured during his time in office.
He took some sleeping pills called Sparine, but the medical records, now held at Birmingham University, suggest that it was not until his very last two weeks in office that he took Benzedrine.1 Certainly, his health had not been good. For many years he had suffered from duodenal ulcers, and he followed a sparing diet. A grumbling appendix had been operated upon in 1948. He suffered from migraines and nervous collapses. In April 1953, Churchill had removed a cigar from his lips in order to ask his doctor whether it was true, ‘What…they are saying about smoking and cancer of the lungs.’ Moran replied, ‘It is not proven.’2 Meanwhile, Eden as Foreign Secretary was in agony with gallstones and on 12 April a botched operation at the London Clinic to remove his gallbladder led to his body being poisoned. High fever had followed and his life had been despaired of. Had it not been for an American doctor, Richard Cattell, who unblocked Eden’s biliary duct and cured his jaundice, he would never have been Prime Minister at all.3
While these medical dramas unfolded in the life of a British Foreign Secretary, events were unfolding in Egypt which would be forever associated, not merely with the name of Eden, but also with the humiliation of Britain as a world power. On 18 June 1953, King Farouk had been forced to abdicate, and Egypt was declared a republic by General Mohammed Neguib. It was noted, by the Foreign Office and by those newspapers which concerned themselves with foreign affairs; but there were other events of greater moment in the world, of which a potential war in Indo-China, economic troubles in Western Europe and French fears about a resurgent West Germany were themselves less obviously and urgently worrying than the escalation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Churchill, as an old Imperialist, had supported to the end of his premiership a heavy commitment of British troops to the Suez Canal Zone. Eden, more aware of the way the world was moving, had negotiated with the Egyptians and the Americans a slow withdrawal of these British forces over a twenty-month period. Churchill was dismayed by Eden’s attitude to America. ‘We must never get out of step with the Americans–never’, was Churchill’s line.4
Eden extracted from John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State, the undertaking that America would keep the Canal open, whatever happened, and that it would support British interests in the region. The Americans, however, disliked Eden, partly because of his cosying up to the Chinese in Indo-China, and his success in diffusing the crisis there. General Neguib, meanwhile, had lost popularity in Egypt, owing to his too conciliatory attitude towards the British, in particular over their continued occupation of the Sudan–scene of the Battle of Omdurman where in 1898 Churchill had taken part in the famous cavalry charge. By October 1954, Neguib’s position had been taken by a much younger and more radical figure, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Eden’s policy in the Middle East had really centred upon Jordan and Iraq, two Arab powers sympathetic to British interests. The policy was complicated on the one hand by British support for the fledgling State of Israel (established only in 1948 against huge opposition from the Arab world). General Sir John Glubb–‘Glubb Pasha’–was the commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion, committed to fighting Israel if that country attacked Jordan. The Saudis also looked threateningly at Jordan, and were trying to undermine the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. In this confused scene, in which the King of Jordan could be made to seem like a puppet of the British Imperialists, Colonel Nasser, young, dynamic, fiery, and backed by Saudi money and Russian armaments, kept up non-stop vituperative propaganda against the British. On the radio from Cairo, he reiterated, with clear and loud voice, that the destruction of Israel was the overriding purpose, not only of Egypt, but of the entire Arab world.
Clearly, the Jordanian royal family were rattled, and in March 1956 Glubb Pasha was sacked. Eden, sensing the hand of Nasser threatening Britain’s former allies in Amman, urged a joint Anglo-American move against the government of Egypt, blocking sterling balances held by the Egyptian government, imposing economic sanctions and withdrawing aid for the Aswan Dam. John Foster Dulles did indeed put a stop to aid for the Aswan Dam project, but this was as far as the Americans were prepared to commit themselves.
There was an inherent paradox in the whole position of Britain in the Middle East. On the one hand, it was committed, through the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, to fight Israel if Israeli forces crossed the Syrian or Jordanian borders. The British Foreign Office was then, as it would remain for decades, basically ‘pro-Arab’ and anti-Jewish. And yet Nasser’s behaviour over the Suez Canal put Eden in the position of lining up with Israel against its Arab enemies.
Buried in the British psyche was the link which the Suez Canal forged between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. It was the short passage to India, it was the stylish short cut f
or those with white faces to lord it over those with brown faces; it was this canal in which Disraeli had negotiated with such panache a British share, paid for with cheap loans from the House of Rothschild, a souvenir of the heyday of Imperial British glory. And on 25 July 1956, Colonel Nasser announced that the Canal had been nationalised by the Egyptian government.
Speaking to his people, Nasser told them that ‘120,000 Egyptians had died in forced labour while digging the canal’. It was a distressing statistic, even though it was drawn from the pages of Herodotus (died 425 bc) and referred to an attempt to dig a canal in the seventh century before Christ. In fact, in the ten years of the digging of the nineteenth-century canal 1,394 paid Egyptian employees died.5 Medical supervision had been of a Western standard and the death rate among the canal workers during that period was lower than the Egyptian national average on other building sites. Nasser, however, and his millions of Arab supporters, saw the Canal, and the contemporary British attitude towards it, as a symbol of an outmoded European colonialist attitude towards the peoples of the Middle East. The question was, would the British rise to the bait, or would they seek some other way out of the crisis? For the Russians, watching the crisis develop, the questions were slightly different, but no less momentous. Would the Russian support of Nasser, and other potential anti-Western governments in Africa and Asia, strengthen the hand of the Soviet Union in its Cold War against the Western powers? Would Britain (in Suez primarily, but by implication elsewhere) obey the letter of international law, or would it ‘go it alone’ in an attempt to open the Canal and assert its strength? And if it did so, without obeying the letter of United Nations resolutions, would this strengthen the Soviet Union when it chose to deal with satellite states within the Iron Curtain whom its masters in Moscow deemed to be recalcitrant? For if Britain chose to ‘discipline’ Egypt, what was to stop Russia doing the same for Hungary, in its attempts to have a more democratic, less Stalinist form of communist state?