Suez Revisited

Abstract

The Suez Canal still flows as strongly through recent British historiography as it once did through Clarissa Eden’s drawing room. The literature continues to grow and the opening of official papers in January 1987 prompted fresh appraisals. According to the received wisdom, Suez shattered the illusion of Britain as a great imperial power. The Eden government had ‘lived in blinkers’ largely unaware ‘of the fundamental shifts in power and influence produced by the Second World War’.¹ By contrast, it is asserted that the crisis ‘affected Britain’s international position surprisingly little, even in the Middle East’.² Both the traditional and revisionist views are open to criticism. Suez did not shatter an illusion of power. Since 1945 policy-makers wrestled with the problems of diminishing power. The post-mortems that immediately followed Suez greatly exaggerated its effects. Britain, it was said, had been reduced ‘from a 1st class to a 3rd class power’.³ Recent reassessments have rightly emphasised that Britain continued to exercise influence in the Middle East, intervening in Jordan in 1958 and again in Kuwait in 1961. And Anglo-American relations were quickly repaired by the Macmillan government. That said, Suez remains a climacteric. Britain, as Guy Millard, Eden’s private secretary, pointed out, ‘could never again resort to military action, outside British territories, without at least American acquiescence’.⁴ This essay focuses on two issues: British policy in the descent to Suez 1954–56, and secondly the role of divided opinion in the Cabinet, civil service and Conservative Parliamentary Party. Sir Pierson Dixon, Britain’s United Nations representative in 1956, observed that Britain ‘threw away the moral position on which our world status depended. We were greater than our actual strength so long as people knew that we went to war in defence of a principle’.⁵ A major theme of the essay is the failure of the Churchill and Eden government to project abroad British values and culture.