Eden’s folly

Until it was overtaken by the still more disastrous debacle in Iraq, the Suez Crisis of 1956 was widely judged to be Britain’s worst postwar foreign blunder. Not only, to use Talleyrand’s phrase, a crime, but an error of monumental proportions.

The deceitful plot by Britain and France, in secret collusion with Israel, to invade Egypt disguised as peacemakers; restore the recently nationalised Suez Canal to western control; and overthrow Egypt’s charismatic nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser into the bargain, went horribly and fatally wrong.