Cyprus
Consider the case of Cyprus. Suez, after all, was a relatively sudden affair; the great bulk of the Conservative Party were wholly unaware that any assault was planned. The repression of Cyprus was calculated, put into operation, and defended as just and necessary over a period of years. Yet,' when British resistance to a settlement finally .collapsed last winter, the Government abandoned everything which, it had insisted, could not be abandoned without irreparable damage to British safety, morale, and prestige.
Writing at the time, Christopher Hollis noted that this was symptomatic of what the political party has now become : a 'strange amalgam of elaborate organisation with total lack of principle.' Here was the Government advancing as excuses for the settlement the precise arguments it had for years rejected (and indeed savagely punished, when they were expressed by Cypriots). do not find,' Mr. Hollis said, in the leaders of either of the political parties any deep sense of the harm that they have done to the moral life of the country by their continual habit of tricking their supporters.' For Conservatives to allow their Whips to impose on them the policy of vigorous and sometimes vicious repression in Cyprus was bad; to allow the policy to be reversed with hardly a murmur was despicable.
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