Cabinet's Finest Hour

by Owen, David;

  To any Prime Minister, let alone Eden with his vast experience as Foreign Secretary, Challe’s suggestion of collusion with Israel would have been viewed as fraught with political dangers at home and abroad. On his record, the cautious, pro-Arab Eden might have been expected to have ruled out involving Israel from the moment he first heard the idea. But Eden left the French in little doubt that he was desperate for a victory and would join them. Challe sensed that Eden was ‘thrilled’, Millard, his private secretary, felt he was merely ‘intrigued’. Nutting, previously very close to Eden, asked “why did the man, whose whole political career had been founded on his genius for negotiation, act so wildly out of character?”1 A war started in dishonour ended, not altogether surprisingly, in disaster and the man responsible for that, Eden, was in no fit condition to make a decision.2

  Over the next few days Eden also decided that he would proceed without informing the United States of his intentions, foolishly believing he could keep Israeli involvement secret. In several respects this was a massive misjudgement. Eden allowed only two senior Foreign Office diplomats to be told of the collusion and specifically excluded the Foreign Office legal adviser, whom he knew would say the plan could not be justified by international law. Instead Eden was content to rely on advice from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, who maintained that intervention could be legally justified.3 But constitutionally the Lord Chancellor is not the legal adviser to the Cabinet, that is the job of the Attorney General.

  Eden swept his Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd off to Paris within hours of his having landed from UN meetings in New York. As far as one can determine, neither had had any formal or professional briefing from the Foreign Office, though Eden could rely on the support of the senior diplomat, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick. His failure to consult the Foreign Office was but one of many examples of how personalised and unstructured Eden’s decision-making had become in 10 Downing Street. Under Churchill during the Second World War the machinery of the War Cabinet had functioned fully, and different departments of state had had their input. Eden himself had always been a stickler for following due procedure. Now holding great power himself, he started to depend exclusively on his own political instinct. He was daily taking a mixture of a sedative to sleep and a stimulant (drinamyl) to counter the effect of the prolonged stress since the end of July. The quality of his political instinct and his decision-making abilities began to be noticed by his contemporaries as deteriorating, though they knew very little about his exact medical state.

  Lord Home was a supporter of Eden’s policy, serving on the all-important Egypt Committee, a form of War Cabinet. He was a generous and fair-minded man but even he has described Eden’s conduct at such meetings as “probably not as methodically conducted as at times of lesser stress”. 4 The permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Sir Richard Powell, whom Eden continually rang up, described him as “very jumpy, very nervy, very wrought”. He also described Eden as having “developed what one might call a pathological feeling about Nasser” and as being “in a state of what you might call exaltation … He wasn’t really 100 per cent in control of himself. Extraordinary, strange things happened.”5 Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson, chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, speaking in April 1957 to John Colville, used the same word, ‘exaltation’, saying that Eden “during the final days was like a prophet inspired, and he swept the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff along with him, brushing aside any counter-arguments and carrying all by his exaltation”. Dickson added that he “had never been spoken to in his life in the way the PM several times spoke to him during those tempestuous days”.6 The Chiefs of Staff were very reluctant to have the Israelis as allies.7

  On 29 October Israeli paratroopers, led by the then unknown commander Ariel Sharon, later Prime Minister of Israel, dropped into Sinai. The following day the British and French, as agreed with the Israelis, issued their ultimatum demanding a ceasefire and threatening to intervene if this were not agreed. Gamal Abdel Nasser rejected the ultimatum and on 31 October Anglo-French military action began.

  It is easy to be overly moralistic about what is done to win in times of war and collusion is certainly not unknown. By the time of the invasion Eden and Selwyn Lloyd were not alone amongst British ministers in being party to the collusion. It has been clear since January 1987 – when, under the thirty-year rule, the Eden Cabinet papers were first made public – that the Cabinet was told about the collusion with France and Israel on 23 October. An Annex reads “From secret conversations which had been held in Paris with representatives of the Israeli Government, it now appeared that the Israelis would not alone launch a full scale attack against Egypt. The United Kingdom and French Governments were thus confronted with the choice between an early military operation or a relatively prolonged operation.” This was the moment for the Cabinet collectively to have challenged that collusion and Eden’s judgement. So why didn’t they? Why, despite some initial dissent, did they go along with the policy?

  The short answer is that any Prime Minister, supported by the Foreign Secretary, has great influence on a Cabinet decision on international affairs and, seen as an expert on Egypt by his colleagues, Eden was in a special category. This power over international affairs is similar to but even greater than the power of a Prime Minister, when supported by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on domestic affairs. In addition, personal ambition and party manoeuvring played a crucial part, especially for Harold Macmillan, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Harold Wilson wittily described Macmillan’s position on Suez as being that of ‘first in, first out’. No reading of the many memoirs of the politicians and others closely involved in the Suez Crisis can possibly conclude that Eden was loyally supported throughout by his Chancellor.

  In Cabinet, Macmillan was, superficially, committed to Eden’s policy.8 He advised Eden after privately seeing Eisenhower at the White House on 25 September that “Ike [Eisenhower ] is really determined, somehow or other, to bring Nasser down. I explained to him our economic difficulties in playing the long hand and he seemed to understand.” The British Ambassador, who had accompanied Macmillan and did not see his note to Eden at the time, later commented that he could see “no basis at all for Harold’s optimism” about Eisenhower’s support.

  Eden’s authority was never more brittle than on the morning of 6 November. He must then have sensed the possibility of an overt challenge from Macmillan, the one man who would have swayed a Cabinet that was not yet ready to disown Eden. But Eden moved first. He summoned the Cabinet to meet in his room in the House of Commons at 9.45 am. Aware that he could not expect to maintain a majority in the Cabinet for continuing the invasion, he said that owing to the Americans’ likely support of economic sanctions in the Security Council later that day there was no alternative but to announce a ceasefire.

  It was a diplomatic debacle. In Eisenhower’s words, “I’ve just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things.” It would have been better from Eden’s personal point of view, and for British and French prestige in the Middle East, to have delayed calling the Cabinet together until 7 November, allowing time to take the whole Suez Canal while using the veto with the French on any UN sanctions resolution. There was no question that this is what Guy Mollet, the French Prime Minister, and David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, would have preferred, but Eden felt, for the sake of his own position, that he had to act quickly and pre-empt Macmillan upstaging him in the Cabinet as the advocate of accepting Eisenhower’s position.

  Later Mollet, meeting on 6 November with Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor, was told: “France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States … not Germany either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world: that is to unite Europe … We have no time to waste; Europe will be your revenge.” The Treaty of Rome, the first step to creating the European Union, was signed by the original six continental European countries, with Britain remaining outside, the ver
y next year, in 1957.

  Had been there an inquiry into the Suez Crisis, as undoubtedly there should have been, lessons would have been learned that might have prevented many of the mistakes made later by Tony Blair over Iraq. The handling of such a complex international crisis from No. 10 was a recipe for disaster which, had it been fully exposed, might have emboldened civil servants, diplomats, military figures and even Cabinet ministers at the time of the Iraq Crisis to have challenged Blair’s overall handling of the war. The invasions of Egypt and Iraq were initially militarily successful but the aftermath was a deep and public political failure. There were, however, crucial differences between 1956 and 2003. Blair was acting in support of a US President; Eden was doing quite the opposite. Blair was supporting an inexperienced and immature President; Eden was ignoring a proven military commander and level-headed leader. As time passes it is becoming ever clearer that Iraq was far more damaging to Britain’s long-term interests than Suez.

  Eden resigned from the House of Commons in early January 1957. There was a genuine feeling that his mishandling of the issue, of his colleagues and the paucity of Cabinet discussion was in large part due to his ill health. The Suez invasion, however, left lasting damage to Parliament’s credibility in failing to bring the Cabinet’s decisionmaking, judged illegal by its own law officers, to account. For many years very few people even knew Eden had lied to Parliament and there was a total refusal on the part of Parliament to learn the lessons, let alone to establish an official inquiry.

  There was a measure of continuity and consensus in the post-war governments that is widely judged to have been broken by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. Not because she was a woman, though that helped, but because she had a political ideology very different from her post-war predecessors.

  On the eve of becoming leader of the Conservative Party, Thatcher said on television: “All my ideas about [Britain] were formed before I was seventeen or eighteen.” There is a good deal of truth in this comment. It explains her black-and-white view of life, which was part of her appeal, as well as the source of an off-putting certainty. On the day of her election as leader, she told ITN: “You don’t exist as a party unless you have a clear philosophy and clear heritage.”

  On 31 March 1982, there came what Thatcher described as “the worst moment of my life”. John Nott, her Defence Secretary, arrived bearing intelligence about an impending Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. Thatcher’s biographer, Charles Moore, offers a vivid reconstruction of a meeting that evening in the Prime Minister’s room in the House of Commons. Nott and his permanent undersecretary, Frank Cooper, told her that the recapture of the Falkland Islands was all but impossible. She knew from her Foreign Office private secretary in No. 10 that this view was shared by the Chief of the General Staff. The then Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, was away in New Zealand but he was likely to be cautious. In the middle of the discussion, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord, arrived from Portsmouth in uniform. He had dropped in to his office in the Ministry of Defence to find a naval staff briefing on the Falklands that advised: ‘Don’t touch it.’ But Leach was a man of resolution and intelligence, as I knew from my time as Navy Minister between 1968 and 1970 when he was head of naval plans. Leach asked the Prime Minister for political clearance to assemble a task force.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  Leach explained about ships, aircraft carriers and helicopters.

  “How long can it take to assemble the task force?” she enquired.

  “Three days,” replied Leach.

  “How long to get there?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Three weeks?” Thatcher exclaimed, with no idea of how far away the Southern Atlantic was. “Surely you mean three days?”

  “No, I don’t,” Leach said.

  “Can we do it?” she asked.

  “We can, Prime Minister.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Leach replied: “Because if we don’t do it, if we pussyfoot … we’ll be living in a different country whose word will count for little.”

  The retaking of the Falklands was the decisive event that changed the nature of Thatcher’s premiership. Few British Prime Ministers would have reacted as she did and sent a naval task force to retrieve a small, distant archipelago of little strategic significance. She established a War Cabinet having consulted Harold Macmillan who advised her against the inclusion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Most of her Prime Ministership she ensured that the Cabinet as a whole was kept well informed. There was no abrogation of Cabinet government, though her later treatment of Cabinet colleagues left a lot to be desired. As I know from my own conversations with her during that war, while utterly determined, she was surprisingly cautious and in private she was more anxious than belligerent. Her ‘rejoice, rejoice’ statement on the steps of No. 10, following the landing of British troops on South Georgia, is often quoted as an example of hubris, but it was as much relief as exaltation.

  The political tragedy for Margaret Thatcher is that she repeatedly pitted herself against her own source of power in Parliament, a group of pro-EEC Conservative MPs. She had reached a stage where not only was she not listening to her parliamentary colleagues but she appeared to enjoy deriding their European views. The Cabinet still functioned but it had been reduced in stature and in quality. People of substance, who well knew that Cabinet government was a great constitutional safeguard, allowed this to develop over the years to the detriment of the British democratic system. It was not just because Thatcher was a woman that the Cabinet had been so supine but it was a material factor. With the Cabinet too weak to act, it was left to the Conservative MPs to bring about Thatcher’s political end. A leader who had won three general elections was removed by her own MPs, not by the nation’s voters, and yet within the rules of our parliamentary democracy. For those who believe in representative democracy and decisive leadership it was an example of the parliamentary democratic control mechanisms acting as it should.

  The successor to Margaret Thatcher was John Major, a low-key figure who benefited from being thought a eurosceptic but who turned out to be a committed supporter of the EU, though one who managed to negotiate an opt-out for the UK on the euro currency and from the Schengen open borders area. His seven years in office are marked by one high point, the military collaboration with President H W Bush during the first Gulf War of 1991, which comprised a multinational force, with Muslim countries participating and which successfully threw Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. John Major was also somewhat responsible for restoring the Cabinet as a group with power to conduct policy from their own departments with less frequent interference from No. 10. Major was easy to depict as weak, but this was not as true as it appeared. It was nevertheless the way Blair sought to depict him when leader of the Opposition.

  After the landslide victory of 1997, Blair at first governed cautiously, accepting the financial expenditure projections of his predecessor and, with the use of referenda, introducing Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. Cabinet government was still practised but early on there were signs of a dual Presidency emerging. Blair was concerned with overall image, the EU and foreign and defence policy whilst his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, largely oversaw finance and domestic affairs at the expense of both the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues. Blair’s main achievement as Prime Minister was undoubtedly the Good Friday Agreement signed in April 1998, which built on the multi-party talks that had begun under John Major in June 1996.

  When the will to take up arms in Afghanistan and later in Iraq returned to America after 11 September 2001, President Bush rightly seized the moment. He took military action in Afghanistan against its Taliban government that had for years been sheltering Al-Qaeda. Other deeply dysfunctional states, such as Somalia and Sudan, had also allowed Al-Qaeda to operate within their borders, but the extent of Afghanistan’s ha
rbouring of international terrorist organisations had meant there was a strong case for pre-emptive action even before 9/11. Afterwards that case was overwhelming. Tony Blair was described by the Labour historian Lord Morgan in the immediate wake of 9/11 and afterwards:

  Blair seemed a political colossus, half-Caesar, half-Messiah. Equally, as times became tough following the Iraq imbroglio, he became an exposed solitary victim, personally stigmatised as in the ‘cash for peerages’ affair. Blair discovered, like Lloyd George and Thatcher before him, that British politics do not take easily to the Napoleonic style.

  We know that, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Tony Blair asked John Scarlett of MI6 and Stephen Lander, head of MI5, “Who’s done this?” “The most likely is Osama bin Laden’s organisation,” Lander replied, adding that he felt bin Laden was most probably linked to Afghanistan’s Taliban. Blair was apparently taken aback. “If it’s coming from Afghanistan did I know about this?” A JIC report from 16 July sent to Blair had warned that Al-Qaeda, operating from bases in Afghanistan, was in the “final stages” of preparing an attack on the West, with UK interests “at risk, including from collateral damage in attacks on US targets”. Understanding such reports fully and knowing when to call on the specialist expertise at your disposal is an issue for any President or Prime Minister. But Blair had never served in government, even as a junior minister. There is no escaping the conclusion his negligence in not questioning officials about the significance of the report demonstrated his lack of ministerial experience. Such experience would have instilled a readiness to order further studies from the briefing notes and intelligence reports. That was simply not done over Afghanistan in 2001, either in the White House or in No. 10. Nor over Iraq in 2002.