With the British people’s ejection of Churchill at war’s end, everything changed. The mood for independence was as strong as ever. The British Labour party saw the possibility of a new relationship between the two countries and sent Lord Mountbatten to India as the last viceroy, with instructions to disengage as fast as possible. In the House of Commons Churchill was appalled, talking about Britain ‘scuttling’ away from responsibilities. He blustered that in planning to quit ‘territory over which we possess unimpeachable sovereignty’ the Labour government was ‘ready to leave the 400 million Indians to fall into all the horrors of sanguinary civil war – civil war compared to which anything that could happen in Palestine would be microscopic; wars of elephants compared with wars of mice. Indeed we place the independence of India in hostile and feeble hands, heedless of the dark carnage and confusion which will follow.’ As he put it later, to leave India was simply ‘shameful’.
For Churchill the villains of the piece were not the Indian people, but their leaders. (In December 1946 he was still talking of the ‘Hindu Raj’.) The political class were ‘men of straw of whom in a few years no trace will remain’. And the proposal to divide the subcontinent into predominantly Hindu and Muslim states would mean destroying what he saw as the greatest British achievement – unifying an enormous expanse of often warring states. Years after the event, he was still talking of ‘Britain’s desertion of her duty in India’ as ‘the most serious political blunder … certain eventually to bring grief and sorrow to the entire Western World’. Nonetheless – and it was a testament to Churchill’s stature – he did eventually give his party’s assent to Mountbatten’s plans for a free, if divided, India, with the two new entities remaining within the Commonwealth. His prophecies of bloodshed and suffering at the time of independence came true, as people trapped on the wrong side of borders suffered the effects of mob violence or died attempting to escape it. But Churchill considered what was on offer to be better than some of the other possible outcomes, like independence outside the Commonwealth, and he recognized he was on the wrong side of history. In June 1948, George VI formally renounced the title of king-emperor – a ‘melancholy event’, said Churchill, ‘only typical of what is happening to our Empire and Commonwealth in so many parts of the world’. He didn’t like it, but he understood the current of events: no emperor, because soon there would be no empire. Once India had gone, what argument was there for denying freedom to Britain’s other colonies?
In the land for whose capture they had rung the bells of Westminster Abbey in 1917, things were going from bad to worse.
The League of Nations, whose Mandate the British were supposedly exercising, had long withered away under the burden of its own irrelevance. Yet British troops remained in Palestine, discharging one of the most thankless tasks on earth. For a start, the land had a great deal more significance for both Jews and Arabs than it did for Britons, whose presence was clearly temporary and whose main function soon seemed to be to get shot at by both sides. In 1945 Winston Churchill noted bleakly that he was ‘not aware of the slightest advantage that had ever accrued to Great Britain from the painful and thankless task’ they had given themselves in the Holy Land. And yet a permanent solution which would satisfy both sides seemed maddeningly unachievable. With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the full extent of Jewish suffering in Europe had become horribly apparent to the world, and the Zionists’ cry of ‘never again’ was unanswerable. The United States declared its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland, and the promises made by the British to the Arabs crumbled as growing numbers of European refugees smuggled themselves towards Palestine. Many of those the British intercepted were interned on the colony of Cyprus. But the arrival off the coast of Palestine in July 1947 of the SS Exodus, an old packet steamer with over 4,500 Jews aboard, showed how hopeless the British task was. The boat was halted and its desperate passengers, many of whom had only recently been liberated by the allies from concentration camps, were sent back to Europe. The French, who had allowed the refugees to board the vessel in Marseilles, refused to allow them to land on their return (unless they did so voluntarily), and the British decided to disembark them forcibly in occupied Germany, where they were accommodated in Nissen-hutted camps for displaced persons inside the British zone. Returning the Jews to camps in Germany – camps of any kind – turned an attempt at fair-minded migration management into a public-relations catastrophe.
In Palestine itself, the thankless mission of the soldiers trying to keep the two communities apart grew ever worse. There were 100,000 British troops – infantry, mechanized troops, elite airborne units and artillery regiments – deployed, along with thousands of members of the Palestine Police Force. Yet every week brought more evidence of their inability to keep a lid on things.
The British found themselves attacked by mobs, blown up by landmines, machine-gunned, mortared and kidnapped. Grenades were thrown from passing cars, haversack bombs left in public buildings. In the most spectacular attack, Jewish terrorists smuggled bombs into the basement of the King David Hotel, part of which served as British headquarters in Jerusalem, and murdered ninety-one people. The British military had a choice – get a grip and enforce law and order, or quit the country. But Clement Attlee had been elected prime minister to create the New Jerusalem in Britain: there was no interest in the old one and no enthusiasm for a new colonial war so soon after the ruinously expensive victory over Germany. In the end, in perhaps the most shameful demonstration of the emptiness of their imperial pretensions, the British declared that since they could not get Arabs and Jews to agree, they would hand the problem to the new United Nations. They then walked away. As the Chief Justice of Palestine put it in a letter, ‘it surely is a new technique in our imperial mission to walk out and leave the pot we placed on the fire to boil over’.
The Mandate in Palestine had been a thirty-year exercise in hubris, and the British got out quickly and (for them) relatively painlessly. When Sir Henry Gurney, the unflappable Chief Secretary to the Mandate, was asked by a Jewish delegation what he planned to do with the keys to his office, he replied, ‘I suppose I shall put them under the mat.’ On the morning of 14 May 1948 the Union Jack was lowered and the Red Cross flag raised in its place. Gurney left the building, was escorted to an airstrip and flew via Malta to Britain. He was being driven into London as the clocks struck midnight and the whole sorry Mandate interlude was finished. By then the shooting had already begun in Jerusalem.
The comfort blanket under which the British snuggled was called the Commonwealth. This was a concept no one could really object to, for the simple reason that no one has ever been able to say precisely what it is. The word started being bandied about in the 1880s, as the British sought a new relationship with Australia. The young Queen Elizabeth had a stab at explaining what it was in her Christmas message of 1953 – nothing to do with empire, but ‘an entirely new conception, built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man’, in which Britain was just one of many members, and leading ‘still backward nations’ on to a glorious future. In a later speech the queen’s advisers amplified this as ‘a group of equals, a family of like-minded peoples whatever their differences of religion, political systems, circumstances and races, all eager to work together for the peace, freedom and prosperity of mankind’. Who could possibly object to that?
In 1956, it fell to Elizabeth’s second Prime Minister, Anthony Eden – a clever, sensitive man – to learn the harshest lesson about how the days of empire were well and truly over. Despite the withdrawal from Palestine, Britain still appeared to have plenty of power in the Middle East, with outposts at either end of the Suez Canal, in Aden and Cyprus, and air-force bases in Iraq. It financed and officered the Jordanian army and in 1953 had collaborated with the CIA in orchestrating a coup to overthrow the popularly elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, when he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But – as the British were about to discover – this appearance of dominance was i
llusory, not so much because of anything observable in any of these places, but because of a change in world opinion. When the military ruler of Egypt, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized control of the canal in July 1956 he brought Britain into a head-on collision with reality.
This was the crisis which gave the British Empire its fatal wound. In a world where the initiative belonged to the people dismantling empires, the actions of a strutting military nationalist (as he was characterized in Britain) ought not to have caused quite so much surprise. Three months earlier, the young king of Jordan – a country created by the British – had turned on the commander of the nation’s army, the Arab Legion, Sir John Glubb (‘Glubb Pasha’), and given him twenty-four hours to return home. The expulsion of a much decorated professional soldier by a young man only recently out of Sandhurst marked the point at which the practice of (not so) discreet string-pulling by British advisers ended. Glubb arrived back in Britain with £5 in his pocket.
And now this. In the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, Colonel Nasser had chosen his enemy well. The son of a wealthy but bad-tempered baronet, Eden was handsome, charming, cultured (he had a rather fine eye for painting) and elegantly dressed – he even gave his name to a type of hat. The immediate impression was of a man who would have been more at home in Edwardian England than the post-war, post-imperial world in which he found himself succeeding Churchill in Downing Street in 1955. Eden had been conceived in the year of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, had been deeply mentally scarred by the First World War – which had killed two brothers and from which he emerged as the youngest brigade major in the British army – and belonged to that tradition of politicians who entered public life because it seemed the thing to do (both Lord Grey, Whig Prime Minister at the time of the Great Reform Act, and Sir Edward Grey, the long-serving Liberal Foreign Secretary said to have remarked in August 1914 that ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ were distant relatives). But Eden had succeeded Churchill as prime minister when the lamps were going out all over the empire and when imperial self-belief, if not yet quite snuffed out, was certainly guttering. Even Eden’s apparently imperial moustache was nothing like the extravagant growths of a Burton, Kitchener or Lugard. (In 1938, the Earl of Crawford had described Eden as ‘altogether a most uncomfortable dinner companion’ because of his vanity, including a ‘moustache curled inside out’, which ‘always galls me’. By the time of the confrontation with Nasser it was feeble thing, which his wife had to blacken with her mascara before a television appearance.)
When he reached Downing Street Anthony Eden had served three periods as foreign secretary and considered himself to be on the right side of history – ‘It was I who ended the “so-called colonialism” in Egypt,’ he exclaimed at one point in the confrontation which now developed, ‘and look at what Britain has done all over the world in giving the colonies independence.’ He had said repeatedly that Britain could not expect to behave in the latter half of the twentieth century as it had behaved in the nineteenth. The Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal was not an imperial question, but an international one: freedom of navigation was essential to freedom of trade. And as the waterway by which oil was shipped to Britain, the canal was clearly a vital national interest. The legal justification which the British government sought for its anger was less than clear-cut, since the Attlee administration had nationalized the coal, steel and railway industries in Britain after the war. But – deny it though he might – there was a sense of imperial anger at work in Britain: Egypt had, after all, spent decades as the Veiled Protectorate. Race played its part, too. ‘Politicians don’t know Orientals like we do,’ grumbled a retired brigadier at a gathering of old soldiers, ‘they don’t know that the only way to deal with them is to kick their backsides.’ The Prime Minister was already smarting from the slight to Britain’s reputation caused by the expulsion of Glubb Pasha (although not sufficiently animated to ensure that the man received his general’s pension). And, in characteristic voice, the press turned on the Prime Minister. The Times declared, ‘The seizure is an act of international brigandage,’ while the Daily Mail bellowed that ‘The time for appeasement is over. We must cry “Halt!” to Nasser as we should have cried “Halt!” to Hitler. Before he sets the Middle East aflame, as Hitler did Europe.’ Since Eden had been conspicuous in his opposition to the appeasement of the 1930s, this was an especially hurtful (and stupid) accusation. Having lost two brothers in the First World War, and a son in 1945, Eden also had a great deal less enthusiasm for killing people than many a newspaper editor. His problem was that he was altogether too thin-skinned to shrug off the newspaper name-calling, and sat around in Downing Street waiting for the first editions of the newspapers to arrive so that he could immerse himself in the latest torrent of abuse from Fleet Street. As with so many bullies, the vulnerability of their victim merely egged on his oppressors.
In the event, what finished off British delusions about the country’s place in the world was not what happened in Cairo or London but attitudes in Washington. Perhaps the British government might have defied the United Nations, with its feeble decision-making mechanisms, which ensured that the Russians could block any action against Egypt. But to do so required the support of the United States, which was on the verge of a presidential election and therefore in its customary four-yearly state of paralysis. The American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, made it clear that the United States was pinning its colours firmly to the fence. ‘The United States cannot be expected to identify itself 100 per cent either with the colonial powers or the powers uniquely concerned with the problem of getting independence as rapidly and as fully as possible,’ he announced. ‘The shift from colonialism to independence will be going on for another fifty years.’ Eden thought Dulles had deliberately misrepresented the British case: the issue was not colonialism but securing international control of the canal and freedom of movement. He was too much of a gentleman to tell the world that if anyone wanted an example of a truly imperial transoceanic canal they might care to look at Panama, a country created by United States power and now cut in two by a waterway secured by US troops stationed along its banks.
What’s more, the external appearance of this dapper figure in his well-cut suits was deceptive. He had serious health problems. A botched operation for gallstones had left him with a damaged bile duct, making him prone to recurrent infections, biliary obstruction, fevers and liver failure. In October 1956 he was hospitalized after his temperature had reached 106 degrees. Doctors had also prescribed the amphetamine Benzedrine, which is now known to cause insomnia, restlessness and mood swings. Increasing exhaustion and lassitude left him moody and short-tempered under pressure: British policy was in the hands of a man whose physical condition almost precluded measured judgement. At one point he spluttered about Nasser on an open telephone line to his junior minister at the Foreign Office: ‘I want him murdered.’
The assassination did not happen. But the French government, which already loathed Nasser for his vocal support of Algerian nationalists fighting to escape French colonial rule, weighed in on Britain’s side. The political influence of both these colonial powers had been eclipsed by the United States, which continued to warn that world opinion would not tolerate a military intervention to regain the canal. But British newspapers thundered on, the Daily Herald pronouncing on its front page that ‘Britain and the other Powers must swiftly show Nasser that they are going to tolerate no more Hitlers! … There is no room for appeasement.’ Did no one in government hear the echoes of the press campaign to send General Gordon up the Nile to confront the Mahdi?
It was the French who came up with the plot. They proposed that the Israelis launch a strike into Egypt, which would give Britain and France the excuse to intervene between warring forces, and so secure the Suez Canal. Because of the need for the utmost secrecy, almost everyone involved in planning what became an enormous national humiliation told lie after lie. The Israeli invasion went ahead at the en
d of October 1956, and, as agreed, British and French paratroopers were dropped around the waterway. It was the day before the American presidential election. As bad luck would have it, the Russians had chosen the same time to send their tanks into Hungary to suppress a popular uprising. Could Washington condemn that invasion without also condemning the Anglo-French operation against Egypt? Those infallible panic-indicators, the currency markets, immediately began selling sterling, whose value plummeted: the Bank of England could not arrest the fall without the help of the Americans, who refused to act until there was a ceasefire. Eden, who was now taking pills to send him to sleep and others to keep him awake, faced a choice between losing face and seeing the national currency and economy implode. It was clear that the entire operation had to be abandoned. At one point, British forces were landing and being withdrawn at the very same time. A broken Eden collapsed, telling his French counterpart, ‘I’m finished. I can’t hold on. The whole world reviles me … I can’t even rely on all Conservatives. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church, the oilmen, everyone is against me … I can’t dig the Crown’s grave.’ On 19 November, Eden’s doctors told him he had to have a complete rest, and the writer Ian Fleming and his wife Ann offered the Edens the use of Goldeneye, their villa in Jamaica, as a place to recuperate. The day after the Edens’ departure, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution by 63 votes to 5 demanding that the foreign forces be withdrawn from Egypt.
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