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By Root 1304 0

could make right. But the world was smaller now, and Britain’s position within it smaller still. The Suez debacle was at least as great an imperial humiliation as the fall of Singapore. The symbols – the elegant yet sick Prime Minister, the increasingly valueless currency – were more eloquent than any speeches about the country’s ambitions in the world. Britain’s behaviour looked not merely high-handed but inept – it had lied about its intentions and then lacked the means to carry the day: a Full House of failure. The toothlessness of the British lion had been demonstrated to the world, as had the redundancy of imperial thought in the new world order: soon the United Nations would declare that all peoples had the right to self-determination. In an increasingly visible world there could be no more high-handed imperial adventures unless, like the Russians in Hungary, you were powerful enough not to give a damn.

It was all going so fast. An empire accumulated over centuries had vanished within a couple of decades. For the most part, independence came peacefully. But in a handful of places the British fought nasty little campaigns in which the challenge was essentially the same as that faced in the Boer War, in Ireland and in Palestine – how to fight an army which did not fight like an army: organizations which found shelter among the civilian population could rarely be brought to open battle and always retained the initiative. In 1951, Sir Henry Gurney – the man who had left his keys under the mat in the King David Hotel – was serving as high commissioner in Malaya, when he was shot dead in his official Rolls-Royce by guerrillas fighting to end British rule. In the nineteenth century a similar outrage would have brought down massive retaliation, disclosed to the public long after the event in jingoistic newspaper headlines. Thousands more people, including the last Viceroy of imperial India – assassinated by the IRA in 1979 – would lose their lives as the British tried frantically to discover an alternative identity and political strategy for the much more transparent post-war world.

Perhaps the most controversial of the British campaigns was in Kenya, against the Mau Mau, a clandestine organization whose power was bolstered by weird black-magic initiation rituals. Mau Mau was vicious and ruthless, with victims – some white, but the vast majority of them black – treated abominably. In one especially notorious incident, members of the organization set fire to the huts of villagers at Lari in central Kenya, then butchered them as they tried to escape: accounts described mothers being forced to watch as their children were killed and their blood drunk. Over one hundred Europeans were murdered. The reaction of the white settlers to the uprising was a mixture of hysteria and ruthlessness – they, after all, were the ones with the guns – and even though they had few friends among the government in London, it was soon clear that something had to be done. General Sir George Erskine, a career soldier who had acquired something of a reputation for lack of aggression during the Second World War, was dispatched to take command. He was no fan of the white settlers in Kenya, a country he is reputed to have called ‘the Mecca of the middle class … a sunny place for shady people’. But he used the long British experience of fighting guerrilla campaigns – which dated as far back as the Boer War – to good effect, using intensive intelligence-gathering, elaborate propaganda operations and creative pseudo-gangs to infiltrate the Mau Mau.

In April 1954 Erskine launched Operation Anvil, in which, first, the whole of the capital, Nairobi, was searched, most of the population questioned and 24,000 people detained in camps. His forces then moved systematically through the countryside, detaining tens of thousands more suspects who were sent to camps. The tactics were effective, but at great cost: hundreds of prison-villages were created, and in some of them conditions were dreadful. Some of the interrogation methods were as brutal as anything endured