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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain

A return to the grand themes

Raymond Carr reviews the new book from Wm. Roger Lewis

In one of the finest lectures in this book Louis sees the Suez crisis of 1956 through the personalities of three fellows of the Oxford College of All Souls: Roger Makins as Ambassador to the US, Lord Hailsham as Lord Chancellor and Patrick Reilly as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Sidelined by Eden, Makins was the impotent witness of ‘one of the great misunderstandings of the 20th century’: that Egypt could be successfully invaded in the face of the open hostility of the US. Hailsham thought Suez a shambles and was enraged at being left uninformed by Eden. For Reilly Eden’s secret collusion with France and Israel to topple Nasser ‘irrevocably damaged Britain’s reputation for ethical conduct in foreign affairs’. Reilly held that the French, appalled at Nasser’s rallying of Arab opinion against them in Algeria, had seduced Eden but, he added, Eden wished to be seduced.

The slogan ‘all history is social history’ has proved something of a broken reed as a call to arms by the radical left. Comparative history has stood the test of time. In one of the most powerful intellectual contributions to this book, Geoffrey Wheatcroft employs comparative history to destroy the myth that partition was the creation ‘with malice aforethought’ of retreating colonial powers in Ireland, India and Palestine. A united Ireland and India, he argues, were a creation of British rule. British governments were ‘reluctant, even desperate, to avoid partition at all costs’ until it became the only possible course. The Irish Protestants of the north refused to be ruled by a local parliament dominated by Irish Catholic nationalists; Moslems by a Congress with a majority of Hindu nationalists. The Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin worked for a united binational Palestine: neither Arabs nor Jews were willing to accept this. Wheatcroft concludes with Evelyn Waugh’s observation: ‘The foundation of empires are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment always’.

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