Britain’s Suez debacle: the end of an imperial illusion

Seventy years ago, PM Eden launched a disastrous military adventure against Egypt in an attempt to reclaim control of the Suez Canal and overthrow Nasser. Its abrupt collapse exposed Britain’s declining power and its growing dependence on the US, writes JOHN ELLISON

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THE core facts about Britain’s shameful attempt, swiftly aborted, 70 years ago, to regain control of the Suez Canal and to depose Egypt’s president, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, can be extracted from David Kynaston’s solidly informative volume of British history — Family Britain (1951-57). 

And more can be learned, especially about “the inside story,” from an Egyptian standpoint, from editor-journalist and Nasser confidant Mohamed Heikal, whose Cairo Documents was published in Britain in 1972.

On July 26 1956, under Colonel Nasser’s direction, a group of Egyptian military engineers took over without difficulty the up till then British-French controlled Suez Canal, the narrow waterway joining the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.  

On August 2, Britain’s Conservative prime minister Anthony Eden (with firm Cabinet support, including that of chancellor Harold Macmillan), told the Commons that this could not pass unchallenged.  

Furthermore, he seemed to have the support of Labour opposition leader Hugh Gaitskell, who spoke harshly of Egypt’s leader. It was as though the Suez Canal, which had been “guarded” by British troops until their gradual withdrawal over the past year, now completed, was as much British territory as the River Thames.

The Downing Street position became increasingly bullish over the months to come, while Gaitskell became doubtful enough about it to say, in an emergency Commons debate on September 12, that no British military action should proceed without United Nations authority. But UN security council deliberations in October were no help to Eden and co.

In this situation the BBC’s blessing was sought and commanded, as retailed in Barry Turner’s 2006 Suez 1956. Its board of governors on September 13 accepted the government’s wish “to do nothing to underline the existence of party division and disunity at a time of crisis.” 

To cap that, in the last week of October, the board’s chairman, Lord Cadogan, accepted the assignment of a Foreign Office liaison officer to Bush House “to advise the BBC on the content and direction of their overseas programmes.”

It should be said that the Egyptian government, in nationalising the canal, had not broken international law. 

The pre-nationalisation situation was that the Suez Canal Company had been given the right, until 1968, to operate the canal and guide the ships running through it, but it was an agreement not between nation states, but between the Egyptian-registered company and the Egyptian government, the company being subject to Egyptian law. True, Britain owned a substantial share in the company.

But before the war commenced, a sneaky scheme was engineered to make it appear less nakedly aggressive. On October 22 secret British-French-Israel meetings in the Sevres Paris suburb led to an agreement that Israeli forces would take the lead in invading Egypt, providing superficial justification for a British-French entry.

The plan was to divide the two opposing armies (although one, Israel’s, belonged to an ally) and then to place an Anglo-French force in the Canal Zone around Port Said. The existence of this clandestine deal with Israel was repeatedly denied by Eden and co, but was before long the subject of much publicly aired suspicion, and was openly admitted by Israel in 1996.

On the 29th, Israeli armoured forces invaded Sinai, and on the 30th Eden informed the House that Nasser was facing an Anglo-French ultimatum — being offered 12 hours to surrender control of the Suez Canal or face the consequences. In so proceeding, no consultation with the Eisenhower-led US government had taken place, as if it had not been spotted that the US had pushed Britain off its throne as the number one imperialist world power.

The 31st was the day of the air assault, which speedily bombed most of the Egyptian air force out of existence — more than a hundred planes eliminated — with no shortage of human victims.  

A TV and radio broadcast on the 3rd by Eden categorised the attack as no more than “a police action,” as if the murderous bombing of a foreign nation’s territory had been a job for the constabulary.

But opposition in much of the world to the attack was strong. The US dissociated itself from the hostilities, and the UN general assembly on November 1 called for a ceasefire. On the 6th, Eden caved in, declaring a ceasefire, and on December 3, the withdrawal of British forces was announced.

It had been a crisis in which, to quote Kynaston: “Britain’s inability to act independently of her American ally,” and the “futility of clinging on to illusions of empire,” were demonstrated. In Britain itself, public reaction on Sunday November 4 featured a “Stop the War” rally in Trafalgar Square organised by the National Council of Labour (with involvement of the Movement for Colonial Freedom), attended by many thousands, with “LAW not WAR” banners prominent.

The event had been followed by a march along Whitehall, held back by mounted police. That night, a broadcast by Gaitskell expressed determination: “We are doing all this alone, except for France: opposed by the world, in defiance of the world. It is not a police action; there is no law behind it. We have taken the law into our own hands.”

Gaitskell’s firmness in opposing the intervention was not, however, a sign of things to come from Labour’s leadership. Ralph Miliband, in his Parliamentary Socialism (1961), was pungent in his assessment. 

“Labour’s campaign,” he wrote, “came to an end as abrupt as the government’s military operations, and Labour pressure upon the government soon subsided altogether….The same pattern was repeated in every other field of policy. It was in fact the Conservatives who went on the offensive in the following two and a half years.”

Standing back from the bloody Suez Canal mission, in his profoundly analytical Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm offered more historical context, which included the forced acceptance by Britain of the independence first of India, and of advances towards it by other colonised countries, and also Britain’s diminished power in the Middle East, where, in particular, its occupation of Palestine had been replaced by Israel’s.

Hobsbawm was succinct in his depiction of the fiasco. “The operation, barely launched, was called off under the pressure of the USA, pushed Egypt towards the USSR, and ended for good … the epoch of unquestioned British hegemony” in the Middle East.

Formidable, and even extraordinary, journalist Robert Fisk, was to write about the event in his mammoth The Great War for Civilisation. Eager always to hear “the other side’s” version of events, in 1986 he interviewed Egyptians who had played a part in defending their country. For Egyptians, he noted, the war was not the “Suez crisis” or even the “Suez war,” but was the “Tripartite Aggression.”

The Anglo-French force, he wrote, landed (on November 5) around Port Said, many soldiers being brought in from Cyprus on ageing British warships. British and French paratroopers were dropped in their hundreds to assist. 

The poorest part of Port Said, he wrote, was marked on British maps as “Wog-Town.” Fisk concluded, referring to Eden’s resignation from office, sick and humiliated, in January 1957, and prompt replacement by Macmillan: “Henceforth, Britain would be the servant of US policy.” Never a truer word was spoken.

Mohamed Heikal explained in his “Cairo Documents” that prior to the coming to power in July 1952 of the then unknown Colonel Nasser, Egypt’s foreign and internal trade was virtually controlled by foreigners; and that Nasser, over time, “gave Egypt back to the Egyptians.”

On July 26, in his publicly broadcast speech, Heikal explained, Nasser inserted the codeword “de Lesseps” (the name of the French diplomat who in the 1860s had overseen the construction of the Canal). The codeword was the instruction for the takeover.  

Heikal tells us too that in Port Said, 1,120 Egyptian civilians were killed in the attacks, and that resistance in the city continued, even after its occupation. British, French and Israeli soldiers were of course victims too.  

Downing Street’s adventurism had been hubris; something tragically to reappear more than once when in the future Britain was to aid and abet the equally grandiose global warlord ambitions of the United States, so dangerously displayed today.

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