Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit by Philip Stephens

1

Broken Dreams
‘I think champagne was produced, but there was little sparkle in the
atmosphere,’ the British diplomat would say of the clandestine gathering
at the large but anonymous villa on the rue Emmanuel Giraud in Sèvres,
a south-western suburb of Paris. ‘The stars shone as brightly as I have
ever seen them. It seemed wholly incongruous.’ Donald Logan, in
October 1956 a young high-flier at the Foreign Office, was conscious of
the cloak-and-dagger nature of his mission as he was driven to
Villacoublay Air Base for an RAF flight back to London. But the foreign
secretary’s private secretary could not have guessed the magnitude of the
duplicity that was to follow. Nor that history would regard him as the
eyewitness to a calamity that would shatter Britain’s international
reputation and lower the curtain on its imperial illusions. The document
that Logan carried to the prime minister, Anthony Eden, in Downing
Street on the evening of 24 October 1956, hastily typed in French, was
posterity’s proof of a dark conspiracy between Britain, France and Israel.
Three months earlier, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser had
nationalised the Suez Canal. The waterway between the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea – Britain’s strategic link to the Middle East and beyond
– had been under de facto British control for seventy years. Eden’s
decision to retake it by military force would break the prime minister and
leave Britain lost in a world over which it no longer ruled.
This had been Logan’s third trip to Paris in as many days. On the first
he had accompanied the foreign secretary, John Selwyn Lloyd, to the
same house. On the second he had travelled back to London with Selwyn
Lloyd’s French counterpart, Christian Pineau. He had been careful, he
later recalled, to merge into the background when the French delegation
arrived in London, lest his presence be noted by the waiting
photographers. On his third trip he travelled back to the villa with Patrick
Dean, the assistant under-secretary at the Foreign Office, to meet a
French team headed by Pineau and a high-level Israeli delegation led by
its prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Dean signed, on behalf of the
foreign secretary, what became known as the Protocol of Sèvres. A week
later, Israeli troops advanced rapidly towards the Suez Canal after
launching an invasion across the Sinai desert. Within days, RAF
warplanes were bombing Egyptian airfields and British and French
paratroopers were descending from the skies in a carefully
choreographed operation to seize the canal. The House of Commons was
in uproar, as was the United Nations in New York. A story of political
folly as well as diplomatic deceit, ‘Suez’ was destined to become a
metaphor for Britain’s post-imperial decline.
*
Sir Anthony Eden finally claimed the keys to 10 Downing Street in April
1955. Events would show that this supremely qualified politician had
served too long as an understudy. Winston Churchill had hemmed and
hawed before surrendering power, torturing his anointed heir by reneging
more than once on solemn pledges to make way. Wilfully blind to
Britain’s shrinking role, he clung on to the hope that he could serve as
broker between Washington and Moscow to secure a warming of East–
West relations. In the winter of 1953, Churchill’s private secretary John
Colville wrote in his diary that Eden’s ‘hungry eyes’, as Churchill called
them, had become ever ‘more beseeching and more impatient’. By the
summer of 1954, so desperate had Eden become that when Churchill
decided to return to London by sea after a meeting with President Dwight
D. Eisenhower, he felt compelled to join him. The two men boarded the
Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth in New York, and Eden confessed to
Colville that he had come along only ‘to get a firm date for Winston to
hand over to him’. How strange, Colville mused, ‘that two men who
knew each other so well should be hampered by shyness on this score’.
Eden secured a date, but within a month Churchill had reneged once
again. Eden would have to wait until the following spring.
Thirty-one years in the House of Commons and twenty-four years
since his first ministerial post, with three spells as foreign secretary – no
one could claim that Eden was unqualified for the job. At fifty-seven he

Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit by Philip Stephens