Books
The Temptation of Sir Anthony
By IAN GILMOUR
7HE problem set by the career of Sir Anthony Eden is how the competent and skilful statesman of the thirties, forties and the early fifties was tempted to become the gun- boat gambler of Suez. Mr. Randolph Church- ill does not solve this problem. He does not try to, since he is not aware that it exists. For one thing he thinks it reasonable enough for Britain to have launched an attack upon Egypt; for another he does not think that even in the thirties Sir Anthony was much good.
Mr. Churchill points out that since Eden did not resign until 1938, he must take his share of the blame for the disasters of the thirties; and he seeks to emphasize this point by repeatedly listing the appeasers and putting Eden's name at the end of them. The style and intellectual level of the book can be judged from this sentence: 'It is strange that an ignorant illiterate jumped-up Austrian who could not even speak the German language correctly should have had the measure of educated civilised Englishmen such as Baldwin, Simon, Hoare, Halifax and Eden, while Baldwin, Simon, Hoare, Halifax and Eden, with all their advantages of superior education and tradition, misunderstood what Hitler had in mind.'
In refusing to differentiate Eden from other pre-war ministers, Mr. Churchill takes a radically different view from his father. In The Gathering Storm Sir Winston Churchill wrote: 'In spite of my differences with the Government, I was in close sympathy with the Foreign Secretary (Eden). He seemed to me the most resolute and courageous figure in the administration, and although as the Private Secretary and later as the Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, he had had to adapt himself to many things I had attacked and still condemn, I felt sure his heart was in the right place and that he had the root of the matter in him . . . I knew well what his difficulties were with some of his senior colleagues in the Cabinet and with his chief, and that he would act more boldly if he were not enmeshed.'
There seems to be every reason for preferring Sir Winston's opinion of Sir Anthony's pre- war services and abilities to that of his son.
Mr. Churchill omits Sir Winston's testimony from his book, but he still does not make out his case against Sir Anthony. And his failure properly to assess Sir Anthony's role in those years is not compensated by other merits in his narrative. He tells us that it was Sir Anthony's practice to employ ghost writers and he refers more than once to Sir Anthony's liking for clichés. On one of the occasions that he does this he tells us that Sir Anthony's clichés were the result of 'strong midnight oil.' One would almost be tempted to believe that Mr. Churchill has been employing the same ghost writer; but Chapter One of the book begins with an article written by the author when Sir Anthony became Prime Minister (and when Sir Anthony's ghost must have been fully occupied) the first page of which contains 'Sir Galahad', 'rungs of the political ladder', and 'a new star in the political firmament.' There can be no doubt, therefore, that Mr. Churchill's cliches are his own.
Mr. Churchill has had the courage to change his mind on Suez. At the time he wrote an article in which he said ' I walked around United Nations lobbies with a very much higher head than I did three weeks ago, when our cause seemed to he in such sorry disarray.' Now he says that he is 'prepared to stand in a white sheet and admit that he was wrong.' All this is very creditable; and there is no doubt that in publishing a condensed version of the Suez chapters of this book in the Daily Express last year he performed a valuable public service. It would be all right for Britain to try to forget Suez if it had been merely a cosy little domestic affair. But it was not, and even if we forget about it, other people ,are going to remember. It is therefore salutary that the events of three years ago should be kept before the public, and nobody was better fitted to do this than Mr. Churchill.
What is more doubtful is whether Mr. Churchill's recantation was worth more than a newspaper series. He has some interesting things to say about why the British Govern- ment agreed to the cease fire and, except on one point, he is certain about col- lusion. Otherwise he has nothing new to say and a good deal that is silly. He describes M. Pineau as a 'right wing de Gaullist', though M. Pineau is a Socialist and so •little of a de Gaullist that he voted non in last year's referendum. And he contradicts himself on the Labour Party's attitude to force within the space of three sentences.
As well as these factual and logical defic- iences, there is an even greater lack of back- ground information and analysis than in the earlier chapters. Mr. Churchill says that 'the proof that there was collusion is massive and conclusive' but says that Sir Anthony's denial that he had any foreknowledge of the impending Israeli attack upon Egypt must be accepted. It is not certain how consistently Mr. Churchill believes this himself since on a later page he talks about 'some members of the British Cabinet . . . getting wind of what was planned for the end of the month', but if there was collusion, it is barely credible that Sir Anthony was ignorant of it. Mr. Churchill reasons that since 'Eden is an honourable man, his word must be accepted.' Nobody would suggest that Sir Anthony is not an honourable and a patriotic man, but these qualities did not prevent him and his govern- ment planning and waging an aggressive war and sending an ultimatum which Mr. Church- ill describes as 'fraudulent'. It is difficult to see therefore why they should necessarily have prevented him making an incorrect denial of foreknowledge of the Israeli attack if he thought that it was in the national interest to do so. Some people would no doubt think such conduct not only honourable but sound and justified as well. Alternatively Sir Anthony's ill-health is sufficient explanation for his lase of memory.
Unfortunately in changing his mind and admitting he was wrong about Suez, Mr. Churchill has not exchanged error for truth but error for another error. He quotes a denunciation of Mr. Gladstone's invasion of Egypt by his grandfather—the best thing in the book—and says that it 'may perhaps be thought to crystallise the gravamen of the case against what Britain did seventy three years later.' But Lord Randolph's case was that Mr. Gladstone should not have attacked Egypt at all; whereas his grandson's case seems to be that Sir Anthony Eden should have attacked Egypt sooner, more competently, and should not have stopped his attack when he did.
The idea that Suez failed only because the Anglo-French forces were stopped before they had occupied the whole canal is as widely held as it is rarely argued. It is widely held because those who supported Suez arc reluctant to admit that they were completely wrong, and that the agression against a small country was indefensible; and it is rarely argued because it is not seriously arguable. For what would have happened if the attack had been continued? Assuming that the Russians had not sent volunteers to Egypt or rockets to London, and assuming that Britain had not gone bankrupt, the Anglo-French forces would have been in possession of a badly blocked canal and would either have had to sit there while Egyptian guerrillas harrassed them, President Nasser fulminated against them from Cairo, and the entire rest of the world urged them to leave. Or they would have had to advance and capture Cairo.
Assuming that they succeeded, much of the Egyptian army would have gone underground and we should have had an infinitely worse Cyprus on our hands. President Nasser would have gone to Damascus, or possibly Moscow, and the entire Arab world would have turned against us to an even greater extent than it did. Kirkuk oilfield would have gone up in smoke
as well as the pipeline, and there would have been serious trouble in Kuwait and the rest of the Persian Gulf. None of this is consideied by Mr. Churchill.
In the book there is a letter written by Sir Anthony to Sir Winston in 1938. It contains these words: 'Then there is the Italian position in Abyssinia . . . I am afraid that the moment we are choosing for its recognition will not benefit our authority among the many millions of the King's coloured subjects.' The man who in 1938 showed such solicitude for the feelings of what are now called the underdeveloped countries eighteen years later acted with reckless disregard of them. This change in Sir Anthony may have been due simply to ill-health. More probably his anxiety that the mistakes of the thirties should not be repeated blinded him to the fact that the conditions of the fifties were utterly different. Or it may be that he merely mirrored a change that had taken place in the British people: the contracting pains of a declining empire had made the British frustrated and violent. Perhaps British foreign policy has been consistently cynical over the last twenty-five years—the Hoare-Laval pact, Munich, the Palestine war—and all that happened at Suez was that the cynicism took the form of violence instead of the form of making concessions at other people's expense. Or perhaps it was largely due to Sir Anthony being surrounded by particularly unsuitable associates and advisers, Whatever the reason or combination of reasons why the game- keeper turned poacher, Mr. Churchill's book* does not help us to understand the trans- formation; nor indeed does it help us to *The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden. By Randolph Churchill. (MacGibbon and Kee . 25s.) understand anything else about Sir Anthony. For the solution of the Eden problem we shall have to wait at least until Sir Anthony's memoirs.
Previous page
