BOOKS
The causes of Suez
J. Enoch Powell
FROM THREE WORLDS by William Clark
Sidgwick & Jackson, f13.95
After 30 years the memory which abides with me of the Suez episode that began with Egypt's nationalisation of the Canal on 26 July 1956 is of complete bewilderment and the sense of watching an unintelligible drama. It was not surprise that Egypt had appropriated the Canal. It was astonishment that anybody could have expected anything else and consequently at the paroxysms of indignation which gov- ernment and opposition, press and public, exhibited.
What did they think was going to happen after the last British troops evacuated the Canal Zone on 13 June 1956? I had been one of the 28 (26 plus two tellers) Con- servative Members who voted on 29 July 1954 against the conclusion of the treaty with Egypt under which that evacuation took place. But I had done so not in the belief that indefinite British occupation of the Zone was practicable but in protest against a treaty which purported to give Britain rights of re-occupation and a policy which proclaimed that Cyprus, Jordan and Kenya afforded adequate geographical al- ternatives.
The frisson of angry surprise and the instant impulse to prepare for a resort to arms which greeted the inevitable punctur- ing of those myths were therefore emotions I could neither share nor understand. Hunched in a remote and subordinate cranny of government — devising a rent bill at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a matter of fact — I was not disposed to go overboard when our armed forces were launched into the attack in November; but what on earth was intended to come out of it and how an occupation found untenable could be ten- ably restored and sustained by force was beyond the comprehension of this un- moved spectator.
How did it happen, and what did it mean? And what if anything does it mean still? William Clark, who was press adviser to Anthony Eden during his premiership, wrote, while under sentence of death from the cancer of which he died last year, a book of memoires d'outre tombe in the unconventional yet quite literal sense of that description. In them he included his diary entries of the days from Nasser's announcement to his own resignation on 6 November when the ill-fated invasion was ignominiously terminated by a ceasefire. As usual with any major historical event, the causes can be perceived at alternative levels, and as usual all are — partially true. In the situation which he occupied William Clark's eyelevel was necessarily that of personalities, above all the perso- nality of the prime minister, who combined the propensity to violently emotional reac- tions with deep anxiety about his alleged indecision. The prime minister's wife, Clarissa, appears in the story as an aggra- vating factor: 'He [the PM] rang up Claris- sa, who is becoming his unofficial and wholly bad press adviser, and asked her advice.' At this level of causation the outcome with a different personality at No 10 would have been different; but is that historical reality? 'The fact is', wrote Clark himself on 15 August, 'that if we lose out in the Middle East, we shall be immediately destroyed.'
The entry on stage of the French is equally significant. 'The French have been pressing Anglo-French union again [11 September]. We feel it is impossible at present because of the Commonwealth.' Indeed, in the very thick of the Suez preparations (14 September) 'the Cabinet was about Plan G — the current plan for Britain going in with European federation'; and then (18 September) 'the Cabinet held its second meeting on Plan G for British association with the Messina powers in Europe. Clearly the general view is that it will be very dangerous for us to stay out because we risk a German dominated Europe.'
The Suez event was a parting of many ways; but justice is not done to their complexity by perceiving it as merely the last spasm of an Empire-orientated Bri- tain, a Britain conditioned to regard 'losing out in the Middle East' as immediate destruction. Nor does the crude coinci- dence of the Suez episode with the run-up to an American presidential election tell all about the changes in Anglo-American rela- tions which flowed from 1956. The assump- tions of total British dependence on the USA with which the Clark memoirs show successive British governments operating in the aftermath of World War II and which were pleaded as necessitating the climb-down in November 1956 were already undergoing an examination which 1956 only accelerated. The pattern of the 1970s and the 1980s was already beginning to be woven on the warp of America and the woof of the European continent. 'A pleasant, cheerful FO character said [30 October] "It's rather fun to be at No 10 the night we smashed the Anglo-American alliance."' William Clark put his resignation in on the day of the ceasefire. It is not altogether clear why. 'I must go, clearly, because I cannot defend a policy I candidly dislike,' he wrote on 4 November, having already told Sir Walter Monckton, the Paymaster General, on 1 November that 'I felt I might have to resign as I thought the policy bad and disastrous.' Yet Clark had known all along of the military preparations 'Mus- keteer I' and 'Musketeer II' and had been dismayed when Dulles seemed to have aborted them with his Suez Canal Users Club; and after the Anglo-French meeting in London in September he had put out 'a dull communiqué, and no one has the least idea of what big things were abroad.' The operative straw seems to have been his exclusion from the inner circle during the 24 hours of the joint Anglo-French ultima- tum, though back in August Clark had recorded quite dispassionately that 'a good deal of effort is going into trying to find a proper pretext for taking military action. This is because we need to justify our action, though its real basis is sales populi suprema lex.' So in the end what was wrong was the pretext.
Professionally that is understandable enough. To the lay reader the revelation of Clark's memoirs is the complete self- assurance with which the effective influ- ence of No 10 over what does and does not appear in the national media is assumed, whatever slips may occur between cup and lip. There reigned at No 10 — and reigns no doubt to this day — the conviction that the press relations people can 'fix it' the way they are instructed to. Yet the two professions remain deliciously distinct.
I do find the habit of ministers of being bloody when things go wrong a trying feature of this job. Success is theirs, failure is ours. I see now why civil servants get so desiccated. Perhaps the secret of all these people at the top is that they have vertigo but out of a feeling of 'the show must go on' they smile in public and are sick off stage.
Not all of them, I think.
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