Suez 1956, page 18
By-election results showed a drift away from the government by a middle class frustrated by inflation, which ate away at fixed incomes, by domineering trade union bosses (the poor level of management, not least in the newspaper industry, was rarely commented upon) and by formerly respectful foreigners who loaded their grievances on Britain. Terrorism in Cyprus by supporters of union with Greece and riots in Aden were bad enough, but the discord was at its loudest in the Middle East.
Judged by the only test of a policy – success in the creation of a stable system – British diplomacy in the Middle East has failed lamentably since last May for all the hopes pinned to the Baghdad pact, and this failure is symptomatic of a lack of nerve in high places . . . The instruments of British policy are some power, some moral authority and, necessarily in a dangerous world, a great deal of skill and forethought. It is terrifying to think to what extent this last essential has been lacking from the direction of our affairs in the last nine months.27
The Spectator followed up with weekly attacks on Eden, accusing him of committing ‘almost every possible mistake’. ‘It is only the loyalty which attaches to any leader and a certain hold on his party born of years of political apprenticeship which have saved him. Both of these can evaporate.’28
Egged on by his equally touchy wife Clarissa (a cousin of Randolph Churchill, incidentally), the highly strung Eden veered between anger and mortification at his unfavourable publicity. But instead of coming out fighting, his tendency was to hide behind his press secretary, William Clark, who had the impossible task of reproducing the glowing coverage Eden had enjoyed in his golden days as Foreign Secretary.
On the face of it, Clark was an inspired appointment. As diplomatic correspondent of the Observer, he had travelled the same international circuit as Eden and could talk with him on equal terms. That Clark was to the political left of his employer was also seen as an advantage, since he was expected to tone down the hostile comment from the Labour-leaning newspapers. But the relationship soon foundered. Eden’s biographers are inclined to push the entire blame for this on to Clark, who was said to offer the prime minister unsolicited advice. But this is to misunderstand the role of a public relations counsel. Eden had never matured beyond a media world in which journalists were respectful and asked the right questions, usually in a pre-agreed order. It was Clark’s job to show that while any government is entitled to put the most favourable slant on its management of events, there had to be some give and take in dealings with the press. When Clark thought that a particular policy was likely to be ill received in Fleet Street he said so, warning that there was little he could do about it. This was incomprehensible to Eden and to those like Alec Douglas-Home, then commonwealth secretary, who, according to Eden’s latest biographer, thought Clark was ‘getting above himself ’.29
Maybe Clark expressed himself tactlessly, but to take the word of Lord Home, one of the worst communicators in modern British politics, on the proper function of a public relations adviser is to lose all sense of proportion. The only member of Eden’s government capable of getting on with the press was Macmillan. It is no coincidence that he turned out to be a more successful prime minister than either Eden or Home.
After six months in the job Clark was a disillusioned man. It was partly his inability to cope with Eden’s erratic mood changes. But he also realised there was nothing he could do about the whispering campaign against the prime minister. Over the clink of establishment glasses the favoured subject of conversation was the state of Eden’s health spiced by speculation as to how long he could bear the strain of his job. By mid-January 1956 there was press talk of his imminent resignation, fostered by the carefully worded ambiguity of one of his closest colleagues. Sir Anthony, said Rab Butler, is ‘the best prime minister we have’, thus trumping his earlier wisecrack that he would ‘support the prime minister in all his difficulties’.
Eden’s frailties had long been a matter of concern. His periods of sick leave were so frequent as to be the subject of bad-taste jokes. At a cabinet meeting presided over by Churchill and during one of Eden’s absences the discussion turned on the preoccupation of the minister of agriculture, Thomas Dugdale, who was getting praise from farmers and blame from animal lovers for a plague that was wiping out the country’s rabbit population. ‘I’m very worried about this myxomatosis,’ said the prime minister. ‘You don’t think there’s any chance of Anthony catching it?’30
It did seem that Eden was susceptible to every passing germ. Stretches of frenetic work were interrupted by debilitating sickness and lengthy convalescence. As early as the mid-1930s a bumpy European flight had brought on a heart spasm and doctor’s orders to rest for six weeks, while a bout of jaundice took him out of the 1945 election campaign. But it was just as likely to be a common cold that would lay him low.
As Eden’s private secretary from 1951 to 1954, ‘the dominant preoccupation’ for Evelyn Shuckburgh ‘was the secretary of state’s ill health’.
He was constantly having trouble with his insides. We used to carry round with us a black tin box containing various forms of analgesic supplied by his doctor, ranging from simple aspirins to morphia injections, and we dealt them out to him according to the degree of his suffering. It was understood that if an injection was required the detective was sent to perform it; this task at least the Private Secretary was spared. The truth is that Eden’s complaint had not been properly diagnosed and when I expressed concern to his doctor about all these pain-killers, he replied that he was responsible for a very important national figure and conceived it to be his duty ‘to keep him on the road’. When Eden acquired a loving wife, Sir Harold Evans was called in and a proper diagnosis was made. But it was very late in the day.31
In 1953 Eden had gone into hospital to have his gall bladder removed. In the course of the operation his bile duct was damaged, leaving him with recurring attacks of cholangitis, an inflammation of the bile duct, which led to sudden high fevers and exhaustion. Anecdotal evidence suggests that to overcome the tiredness he was prescribed amphetamines, which can certainly energise the patient but in many cases also cause hyperactivity and aggressive outbursts, side effects that now make the use of amphetamines a rarity.
D. R. Thorpe invokes Eden’s medical records held at Birmingham University to refute what he describes as ‘many inaccurate statements made about [Eden’s] medicines and the “uppers” and “downers” he supposedly swallowed.’32 But his comments are restricted to the period of the Suez crisis. It is Eden’s state of mind – and the medicines that may have affected his judgement in the lead-up to Suez – which are critical.
By the spring of 1956, Eden was vulnerable. Criticised unfavourably (and often unfairly) in the Tory Party as a poor substitute for Churchill, losing support in the country (according to a Gallup poll in the six months up to March 1956, the prime minister’s approval rating fell from 70 to 40 per cent33), unable to rely on his senior colleagues, who, at best, were unreliable team players, and failing to understand, let alone solve, the economic problems that beset the country, Eden let his frustration and anger show all too obviously. Knocking back the painkillers and energy boosters along with a generous intake of alcohol did not help to steady his personality. Without question he was not the politician to cope with a crisis. But he was in prime condition to create one.
11
Selwyn Lloyd was in Cairo, dining with Nasser at the Tahera Palace. Joining them at the table were Dr Mahmoud Fawzi (‘a smooth and rather slippery character’, decided Lloyd1), General Hakim Amer, Egyptian commander-in-chief (‘Nasser’s vacant-faced but staunchly loyal henchman’2), Humphrey Trevelyan, British ambassador, and Harold Caccia, one of Lloyd’s private secretaries. It was 29 February 1956. During dinner the conversation focused on the Baghdad Pact and the rivalry between Egypt and Iraq. According to Lloyd:
Nasser said that there was no chance of improvement in Anglo-Egyptian relations unless we gave an undertaking that there should be no new Arab members. Iraq could remain a member, although, as he said that, I had the impression that he meant to have Iraq out by fair means or foul. I said that the trouble was Egypt’s propaganda against Britain everywhere in the Middle East, the Sudan, Libya and East Africa. Radio Cairo’s broadcasts in Swahili were just incitements to murder. Nasser admitted that this propaganda was put over on his directions. I then said that I was prepared to put to my colleagues the proposition that we would undertake not to try to persuade any other Arab country to join the Pact, provided he would stop his propaganda. He said that he was prepared to agree to that and we should talk more about it when we met again the following morning.3
Towards the end of the meal, Trevelyan was called out by one of the embassy staff, who handed him an urgent telegram. It revealed that General Sir John Glubb, who commanded the 17,000-strong Arab Legion on behalf of King Hussein of Jordan, had been summarily dismissed. Trevelyan held back on the news until he was with Lloyd on the way back to the embassy. The foreign secretary was, as Trevelyan recorded, ‘greatly upset’.4 Partly it was irritation at losing a loyal servant to a client state. But Lloyd had known for some time that Glubb’s days were numbered. He had been under pressure since the assassination of his mentor, King Abdulla, four years earlier. Hussein, Abdulla’s grandson, a twenty-year-old leader with a reputation to make, did not take kindly to inferences that roles had been reversed, that it was Glubb who ran the country on behalf of his young protégé. The Sandhurst-trained Hussein was also at odds with Glubb over strategy. The general had had his work cut out trying to contain Israeli–Arab fighting along 400 miles of open frontier. But as Israeli incursions were stepped up, Hussein called for a more proactive policy. A British officer, even one devoted to the Arab cause, was not likely to adopt the role of aggressor.
So it was not Glubb’s retirement which disconcerted Lloyd – the old soldier was nearly sixty, after all – but the manner in which he was sent packing and the timing of his departure.
Lloyd was convinced that Nasser had known of General Glubb’s dismissal and half convinced that Nasser had planned it to coincide with his visit. It put him in a most embarrassing situation. He was being attacked in the British Press for coming to Cairo at all. This would be interpreted as a deliberate affront which he had to swallow. He toyed with the idea of refusing to go to the meeting with Nasser which had been arranged for the morning, but rightly decided to keep the engagement.5
The second meeting started badly, with Nasser congratulating Lloyd on having orchestrated the sacking of Glubb as a way of improving Anglo-Egyptian relations. Was this a bad joke? Lloyd failed to appreciate the humour, but he recovered sufficiently to renew his attempt to find some common ground. ‘The proposition emerged that there should be no new Arab members of the Baghdad Pact, that Nasser would acquiesce in Iraqi membership of it and stop anti-British and anti-Pact propaganda and that he would at the same time try and revive the Arab League Security Pact with Iraq as a member of it also.’6 There seemed to be no prospect of a settlement on Israel, but Lloyd was sufficiently encouraged by the meeting to take Trevelyan seriously when, on the way to the airport, he urged the foreign secretary to give Nasser the benefit of the doubt.
We had the choice of two unpalatable courses. We could make a bargain such as Nasser had proposed. We could not expect genuine co-operation from him in return for it. We should have to look out for Egyptian attempts to injure our interests elsewhere in the Arab world, but we might be able to take the edge off Nasser’s hostility and arrive at a modus vivendi of a sort. The alternative was to adopt a thoroughly tough policy against him. We must then expect unrelieved hostility from him. We knew that he had the power to hurt our interests. If we decided on this course, we must hit hard and accept all the serious international consequences which would follow. I recommended that we should try the first course. I was supported by Harold Caccia, who said that it was at least questionable whether we had now got the power to carry through a tough forward policy.7
The mood was quite different in London, where Eden was in a panic. Knowing how the press would react to yet another British defeat in the Middle East, his impulse was to tell Lloyd to set off immediately for Amman to persuade King Hussein to reverse his decision. He had already sent a telegram to the king asking for time to consider the situation.8 ‘Go now,’ he urged Lloyd. Even the bag carrier was not that compliant. He had endured just as much humiliation as he could take for one trip.
Reckoning that by the time he arrived in Jordan Glubb would already have left the country, Lloyd decided to stick to his schedule, with the next stop Bahrain. There he was met by a demonstration that threatened to turn violent. Following on from Glubb’s dismissal, treated by the British press as a national insult with the rotund and avuncular Glubb somewhat bizarrely standing in for a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia, the incident in Bahrain, heavily embroidered by imaginative hacks, filled the headlines. Lloyd was variously reported as having been stoned by the mob, rescued by the police, besieged in the residency and, finally, smuggled out at dead of night to flee his tormentors. A more objective version comes from Donald Logan, who was travelling with Lloyd.
He was in the first car with Harold Caccia, we were in the second or third, and there was a small group of students by the road. A few stones were thrown, and there were a few boos and cries as the cars passed. We arrived eventually at the Resident’s house and swapped impressions.
We were in the Resident’s house for some time, because the demonstration went on to block the road, and we had to wait while the police cleared the road. The students were later established to be representatives of the Committee of Education, who were agitating for more local control against the influence of the ruling family.9
But it was the torrid accounts favoured by the popular press which stayed in the public mind. These and the accompanying editorials, which put all the blame on the wicked Egyptians. Eden came to the same conclusion. Or, rather, for him, it was Nasser alone who was the enemy. Not for a moment did it occur to the prime minister that in removing Glubb, Hussein had acted not only in his own best interest but in that of Britain also. In restoring his authority, the young king had upstaged Nasser, thus bolstering Jordan’s independence, while allowing for further cooperation with the West. Instead, Eden listened to the siren voices of the Suez Group, who chorused that they had been right all along in opposing the evacuation of the Canal Zone. He demanded action to save his dwindling reputation. But to do what? His first instinct was to punish Jordan by freezing the British subsidy, running at some £12 million a year, and by withdrawing all military support, thus exposing the country to neighbouring predators. Arguing powerfully against this was Anthony Nutting, minister of state at the foreign office, a rising star of the Tory Party, who had every expectation of early promotion while Eden remained prime minister. Nutting took the line that hurting Jordan would force Hussein to turn to Egypt, the one thing Eden wanted to avoid. It was a theme that Glubb himself adopted. Writing in The Times, he warned against getting tough with Jordan. ‘Suddenly to cut off the subsidy would either destroy Jordan or force the King into the arms of friends who would almost certainly ruin him.’10
Arguing far into the night of 1 March, Nutting also made the point that blaming Nasser for every British mishap in the Middle East was to play the game as Nasser wanted, elevating the Egyptian leader to the status of ruler of rulers, commanding loyalties across the region. Eden would have none of it.
I could see no wrong in anything Nasser did, I was told, despite the fact that for months he had been trying to undermine every British interest and ally in the Middle East. ‘You love Nasser,’ he burst out, ‘but I say he is our enemy and he shall be treated as such.’ I retorted that I had always tried to avoid taking likes or dislikes for individual foreign leaders and I reminded Eden that it was he who had taught me this salutary rule, even though he did not always obey it himself. ‘All I am trying to do,’ I concluded, ‘is to establish the true facts and to avoid attributing to Nasser victories which are not properly his.’11
But Eden was no longer interested in establishing facts. As he saw it, even in the unlikely event that Nasser was not the cause of Glubb’s removal, he was just waiting for the opportunity to do some further damage to Britain. ‘From now on Eden completely lost his touch. Gone was his old uncanny sense of timing, his deft feel for negotiation. Driven by the impulses of pride and prestige and nagged by mounting sickness, he began to behave like an enraged elephant charging senselessly at invisible and imaginary enemies in the international jungle.’12 This became clear when Eden had to defend his position in the House of Commons. The debate on 7 March was a disaster for the prime minister. With Lloyd’s continuing absence abroad, he decided to wind up for the government, a tactical error since instead of delivering a reasoned opening speech to set the tone for the debate, all he could do was to try to deflect the barbs of his critics, not least those in his own party, whose case was best summarised by Julian Amery in a letter to The Times.
The dismissal of General Glubb from the command of the British-paid Arab Legion and the stoning of the Foreign Secretary in the British Protectorate of Bahrein attest the bankruptcy of the policy of appeasement in the Middle East. These are the ineluctable consequences of the retreats from Palestine, Abadan, the Sudan, and the Suez Canal Zone.
We are now very close to the final disaster. The challenge to our influence in Jordan and on the Persian Gulf, if left unchecked, must lead to the break-up of the Baghdad Pact. Our oil supplies, without which we cannot live, would then be in immediate danger; our communications with other Commonwealth countries would be threatened; and all Africa would be opened to Communist advance.
