Our Times

by A. N. Wilson

  The Suez crisis resolved itself into three broad phases: first, a period of negotiation, with other nations of the world; secondly, a period of military action; thirdly, a British withdrawal from Egypt, and the ruin of Eden’s political career.

  President Nasser assured the international community, and all those who might use the waterway for lawful trade, that there was no question of closing the Suez Canal. The Western powers were unimpressed, and on 2 August, the Foreign Ministers of the United States (Dulles), Britain (Selwyn Lloyd) and France (acting Foreign Minister Gazier) met in London to establish an international agency which would administer the safe passage of traffic in the Canal. The Soviet Union sent a representative to the conference, as did India; Egypt and Greece declined to be represented–Greece at this time having its own difficulties with Britain over the future of Cyprus. In all, twenty-two nations were represented at the conference. The American plan, publicly backed by Dulles, was for the creation of an international Suez Canal Board to be associated with the UN. President Eisenhower was very much against military action, and certainly against UK or French independent military action. Privately, however, when staying at Hatfield with Lord Salisbury, Dulles confided his ambivalence about Suez. Speaking à deux with Eden, Dulles admitted that Eisenhower was against military action, but that he, as Secretary of State, ‘did not want to know’ British military plans.6 Eden, who did not enjoy a cordial relationship with Dulles, nevertheless drew the conclusion that Britain could count on American moral support, should he decide to take military action. This was a fatal mistake, and showed the truth of Churchill’s advice ‘We must never get out of step with the Americans’. Another feature of the whole affair was that the British diplomats, crucially Sir Roger Makins in Washington and Gladwyn Jebb in Paris, were kept in the dark by Eden about his true intentions. The first conference ended, then, with a broad resolution, led by Dulles, to set up a Suez ‘users’ association’ to protect the interests of the twenty or so nations involved.

  For the month of August, attention was diverted from Egypt by the terrorist activities of the Greek Cypriots, led–at first furtively, later openly–by Archbishop Makarios. If the Greeks succeeded in driving the British out of Cyprus, and the Egyptians sent them away from North Africa, it would become more obvious than ever that the days of the British Empire were definitely over. To an older generation of Imperialists, it had been clear that if the British ceased to administer India and Ireland, the days of its Empire would rapidly dissolve. Hindsight finds this obvious, but at the time of Suez, only a little more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, things looked different. The Dominions of the British Commonwealth–Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa–were all in various ways happy to be ruled under the British Crown. They looked to the Queen as their Head of State, and she, much more than the generality of her politicians, persisted in believing in the Commonwealth as a useful political entity. Meanwhile, in 1956, not merely the island of Cyprus, but also the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Somaliland (with Italian Somaliland, later Somalia), Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya and the Gambia, Northern and Southern Rhodesia were still part of the British Empire: that is, most of the African continent. In addition, Jamaica and other islands of the West Indies, and Malaya in the Far East, were still part of the Empire. What had begun in a previous century as a supreme trading advantage had developed into a crippling financial burden which Britain could not afford. In August 1955,10 percent of Britain’s gross national product was spent upon defence. It reckoned on sustaining more than 800,000 servicemen. Plans were under way, long before Suez, to get rid of the Empire. (In September, while the powers were discussing the future of the Suez Canal, the Colonial Secretary went to the Governor of the Gold Coast, proposing that the country be granted independence on 6 March 1957 and all the African countries named above, with the exception of Southern Rhodesia, would follow in the next decade.)

  In the autumn, as people returned from summer holidays, and political parties and trades unions assembled for their conferences, there was a general consensus on the left that the government should not intervene militarily in Egypt. Troops had been mobilising and it was no secret that Eden favoured a military option. He saw Nasser as an Arab Mussolini, and the seizure of the Canal as a repetition of those acts of brigandry in the 1930s–Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, Hitler’s carving up of Czechoslovakia–which, because they went unchecked, ‘led to’ the Second World War. Eden, who, with Churchill, had regarded negotiated peace as ‘appeasement’ and an encouragement to aggression, was bound to think in this way. Not to do so would, by implication, suggest that the 50–70 million victims of the Second World War had died in vain.7

  Matters in the Middle East were soon to change radically, in any event, as a result of the acts of open hostility between Israel and her immediate neighbours. While in London, Selwyn Lloyd tried to establish the ground rules by which the Suez Canal Users’ Association might actually work in practice. Dulles, back in the US, gave a press conference which seemed to backtrack from any suggestion of unconditional support for Britain. While these uncertainties persisted, there were outbreaks of firing along the Israeli–Jordanian border and the British government, in compliance with its treaty obligations, gave warning to Israel that British forces were committed to come to the aid of King Hussein.8

  But in fact, on 14 October, General Maurice Challe, Deputy Chief of Staff of the French Air Force, had gone to see Eden with a secret plan devised with his own prime minister, Guy Mollet: that the English and the French should ally themselves with Israel and tacitly disregard the treaty obligations into which they had entered with Jordan, Syria, Iraq and other Arab powers. On 29 October, Israeli troops crossed the Sinai Desert with the aim of wiping out the Fedayeen bases in the Suez Peninsula. The Tripartite Powers (Britain, France and the US) warned that it would take ‘immediate action’ against Israel, and insisted that Israeli forces be moved back at least ten miles from the Canal Zone.

  What happened next is, on the face of things, puzzling. Israel immediately complied with the Tripartite Declaration, that if withdrawal had not happened within twelve hours Anglo-French forces would intervene. On 30 October, Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, asked the Prime Minister in the House of Commons whether he could give an undertaking that no military action would take place until the whole matter had been referred to the Security Council of the United Nations. Eden replied ‘with regret’ that he could give no such undertaking. When Egypt rejected the Anglo-French ultimatum, British and French bombers flew over Egyptian military targets–on 31 October–and bombing began. (The US had already condemned Israel in the Security Council as the aggressor in this conflict.) On 2 November, Israeli forces won a significant victory over the Egyptian army in the Sinai Peninsula; British and French bombers had largely wiped out the Russian-built Egyptian air force, on the ground.

  While the General Assembly of the UN called for an immediate ceasefire, and a withdrawal of Israeli, French and British troops from Egypt, Eden defended his position. In a broadcast of 3 November, he asked, ‘Should we have put the matter to the Security Council and left it at that? Should we have been content to wait and see if they would act? How long would this have taken?’ The sole purpose of British and French policy, he said, was to separate the warring armies of Egypt and Israel, and to do the work which the UN had failed to do. To the Crown Prince of Baghdad he repeated that ‘the sole purpose of the intervention of British forces is to put a stop to hostilities between Israel and Egypt… We hear that the Israeli forces intend to abide by our latest request not to advance further than ten miles from the Canal although the gates of Egypt [does he mean Cairo?] are now open to them. This is at least something gained and I hope it will soon be apparent to the world that our action was the only one which could have brought about this result. As soon as we have occupied the key points on the Canal, we shall ask the Israelis to withdraw from the Egyptian territory.’

  In t
he light of what the Americans subsequently tried to do in the Middle East in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it was indeed ‘ironic’ that President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles did not support Eden’s policy, even if they found him unappealing as a character. Eisenhower later told Richard Nixon that Suez was ‘his major foreign policy mistake’.9 Keeping the peace between Israel and her neighbours; tacit support for the survival of Israel as a political entity; wooing of pro-Western oil-rich Arab powers against radical or Islamist anti-Western governments:…if viewed from the perspective of later ‘neo-con’ politics, Eden’s intervention in Suez looks like a resolute piece of realpolitik.

  In a letter to his Constituency Association, dated 3 November, Sir Winston Churchill expressed wholehearted approval of Eden’s policy, and added, ‘I am confident that our American friends will come to realize, not for the first time, we have acted independently for the common good.’ Whatever the private truth of this optimistic assertion, the American President, who was on the eve of going to the polls in an election, was not going to commit himself to any support for the Anglo-French action. Indeed, he denounced it as being ‘in error’.10

  Dwight Eisenhower, the great ‘Ike’, whose slow handling of the occupation of Europe in 1944–45 had guaranteed the enslavement to Soviet tyranny of all the peoples of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, was now engaged in a clumsy global war against ‘communism’–by which he chiefly meant that very Soviet tyranny his own military blunders had empowered. He had no wish to antagonise those members of the Security Council, including the oil-rich Saudis–who had condemned the Anglo-French action. If Britain further humiliated and bankrupted itself on the world stage it would be no disaster in the eyes of this President who followed Roosevelt and Truman in earnestly wishing for the dismantlement of the last vestiges of the British Empire. So Churchill’s hope for American support over Suez was misplaced; misplaced, too, would have been any hope of American help for the Hungarians, who saw the Soviet tanks roll into the streets of Budapest without a single military threat from the great enemy of communism. ‘The eyes of the world are upon you,’ Ike had said to the US forces occupying Europe in June 1944. ‘The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.’

  The letters to The Times caught the mood of the country, with a great majority opposing the military intervention, and more than one correspondent being aghast that the Suez crisis should have averted attention from the tragedy in Budapest. On 4 November, Malcolm Muggeridge and Robert Speaight–the actor who had immortalised T. S. Eliot’s Becket in Murder in the Cathedral–wrote from the Garrick Club, ‘The bitter division in public opinion provoked by the British intervention in the Middle East has already had one disastrous consequence. It has deflected popular attention from the far more important struggle in Hungary. A week ago the feelings of the British people were fused in a single flame of admiration for the courage and apparent success of the Hungarian revolt. Now, that success seems threatened by Russian treachery and brute force, and Hungary has appealed to the West…It is the first, and perhaps will prove the only opportunity to reverse the calamitous decisions of Yalta’…(That is, the conference at which a decrepit, drunken Churchill discovered that Roosevelt, himself on the verge of death, had in effect agreed to let Stalin gobble up Eastern Europe when the war against Hitler had been won)…‘The Prime Minister has told us that 50 million tons of British shipping are at stake in his dispute with President Nasser. What is at stake in central Europe are rather more than 50 million souls. It may be objected that it is not so easy to help the Hungarians; to this excuse they are entitled to reply that it was not so easy to help themselves.’11

  On the same day, 6 November, The Times published a letter from the daughter of a former Prime Minister, Asquith–Lady Violet Bonham Carter–‘I am one of millions who watching the martyrdom of Hungary and listening yesterday to the transmission of her agonizing appeals for help (immediately followed by our ‘successful bombings’ of Egyptian ‘targets’) have felt a humiliation, shame, and anger which are beyond expression…We cannot order Soviet Russia to obey the edict of the United Nations which we ourselves have defied, nor to withdraw her tanks and guns from Hungary while we are bombing and invading Egypt. Today we are standing in the dock with Russia…Never in my lifetime has our name stood so low in the eyes of the world. Never have we stood so ingloriously alone.’12

  Lady Violet, pillar of the Liberal Party and mouther of all the familiar Liberal world-views, might have recalled that Churchill, whom she loved and idolised, had achieved the height of his fame when Britain, only sixteen years earlier, had been alone–if not ingloriously alone. While some, such as Muggeridge, deplored the Suez action because it shattered national unity, and others, such as Lady Violet, because it offended against the laws of the UN and–perhaps the same thing in Lady Violet’s eyes–morality, there were others who deplored it simply because it was unpopular, with Arabs, Russians, Americans and others.

  But although the bulk of the press, the Labour Party and that equally influential party, the left-leaning London dinner party, were all against Suez, together with the rent-a-mob of poets, dons, clergy and ankle-socked female graduates who deplored British action, they did not necessarily constitute the majority of unexpressed public opinion. Roy Harrod, the Keynesian economist of Christ Church, Oxford, and tutor to generations of future economists, believed that ‘the more level-headed British, whom I believe to be in the majority though not the most vocal’ supported the ‘notable act of courage and statesmanship’ displayed by the government.

  By 6 November, both the Israeli and the Egyptian governments had agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, and the Anglo-French occupying forces had agreed to withdraw and hand over, if necessary, to a UN peace-keeping force.

  The background to this had, however, been politically and economically humiliating to Britain. The Canal was blocked. A run on the pound had developed and some 15 percent of Britain’s gold reserves had vanished. The Machiavellian Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, who had supported the Suez venture from the outset, now reversed his position. He was told that the pound could only be supported with a loan from the International Monetary Fund, and that this loan, which would come from the United States, was dependent upon the ceasefire being immediate, and British troops withdrawing.

  Had Macmillan still been Foreign Secretary, he would have been implicated, as were Prime Minister Eden and Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, in every stage of the debacle. As it was, he could convey to his friends in the United States (his wife’s late nephew, heir to the Dukedom of Devonshire, had been married to Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, sister of the future President) that he had never been a keen supporter of the Suez enterprise and was now in favour of British withdrawal.

  Brendan Bracken wrote to Beaverbrook on 7 December, ‘Macmillan is telling journalists that he intends to retire from politics’ rather than serve under his great rival, Rab Butler. ‘His real intentions are to push his boss out of Number 10 and he has a fair following in the Tory Party.’ American academic opinion veers to the view that, at this stage of the Suez drama, Macmillan was actually in touch, directly or indirectly, with Eisenhower. ‘It appeared that Eisenhower, and certainly Macmillan, were attempting to ease Eden from power.’13 Another has observed that ‘although documentation is not clear cut’–and of course, Macmillan would have been much too clever to leave documentation–‘there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Washington was heavily involved behind the scenes’.14

  Those who write or speak of the Suez fiasco sometimes overlook the fact that, from a military point of view, it was a success; Nasser’s forces were defeated, and had an Anglo-French force remained in the area, to occupy the entire zone, they would have brought ‘peace and order to the Middle East’ to use Roy Harrod’s phrase. But Eden, and England, were victims of the Fates, or the Americans. Had Britain been at the zenith of power, a bad press at
home, and a divided Cabinet, would not have led to a failure of nerve such as occurred after the Egyptian and Israeli ceasefire. This could have been hailed as a triumph for the decisive military astuteness of France and Britain who had acted, if not according to the letter of the UN, then at least in accordance with its spirit. They could have claimed, as Eden did, that they intended only to bring peace and stability to the region, to silence the incitements to war and mayhem, and the destruction of Israel, coming from Nasser, and to establish that there is still a place in the world for nations acting as policemen to brigand states. But such words as Eden might have attempted along these lines were drowned out by a chorus of anti-war feeling at home and anti-British sentiment abroad.

  By 22 December, six weeks after their dispatch, the last British troops were withdrawn from the Suez area. His nerves and health in tatters, Eden had become a pariah-politician who could do no right. On 23 November, Eden and his wife flew for a three-week holiday at Goldeneye, Jamaica, at the house of his friend Ann Fleming and her husband, the inventor of James Bond. The hideaway ‘is much patronized by tax evaders and affluent idlers’, complained Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary. ‘With petrol and oil rationed again in England, the retreat of the Prime Minister to a parasites’ paradise seemed to rank prominently in the annals of ministerial follies.’15

  It was on another cruise, a recuperative journey to New Zealand the following year, after his resignation, that Eden found himself on board the Britannic. The waiters and stewards rigged up a boxing ring and Eden awarded the prize to the best pugilist, two bottles of beer and two hours’ overtime bonus. The winning steward was John Prescott who, when Deputy Prime Minister to Tony Blair, would notoriously land a punch during an election campaign.