Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A lesson still worth learning

Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office, who was present. At the end of a bibulous evening, Prime Minister told Foreign Secretary how to deal with the Arabs, beginning with the troublesome Egyptians:

Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, ‘Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.’

That was saying it in terms which the most vehement neoconservative nowadays might hesitate to use, at least in public; and it might almost have planted a seed in Eden’s mind. Five years later he tried to do something rather like that, in the single most dramatic episode in British post-colonial history which has often been seen as the most disastrous folly of national policy since the war, at least until Iraq. The coincidence of the 50th anniversary of Suez — British paratroops landed at Port Said on 6 November 1956 — with the intractable calamity in Mesopotamia makes Eden’s adventure much more relevant. Anthony Nutting, who resigned from the government in protest (and to whom the gifted but petulant Eden never spoke again), subsequently wrote a book about Suez with a title taken from Kipling, No End of a Lesson. Today we might ask whether the lesson was learned, or what we need to learn again.

Three new books are happily complementary. Barry Turner, a professional author, has written an excellent straightforward narrative of events; the American scholar Wm. Roger Louis Jr of the University of Texas, the greatest chronicler of the decline and fall of the British empire, has published a large collection of essays; and Martin Woollacott, a former foreign editor and columnist of the Guardian, has written a short, stimulating essay which might equally have adapted its title from the book J.

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