Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [135]
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.