The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed the loss of the United Kingdom’s superpower status and undermined Anthony Eden’s premiership. Three decades later, historian Peter Hennessy wrote a brief “oral history” of the political class’s response to her humiliation.
Ben Pimlott, biographer and editor of Hugh Dalton, produced an engaging metaphor the other day to mark the release of the third and final volume of his Daltonian trilogy. Compiling an oral archive by taking a tape recorder to those who knew or worked with Dalton was like talking to someone’s footnotes, he wrote. That image came back to me again and again last month as I traveled to the country with my BBC Radio producer Mark Laity, talking to Suez survivors.
My “footnotes” ranged in age from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties, they were impressive people – former cabinet ministers, chiefs of staff, permanent secretaries, private secretaries and military commanders or planners. Most had never spoken publicly about Suez before. Only the publication of the Suez papers in the Public Record Office on 2 January had released their tongues. Sir Richard Powell, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defense in 1956, told me: “I feel very strongly that if you take a pledge of faith you must respect that trust for the rest of your life and just because the documents have now been published and they are in the public domain I would feel able to go beyond that.”
As Sir Richard said of the Suez affair in A channel too far on BBC Radio 3 last Saturday: “All the officials were suspicious, they all felt doubt and hesitation… that would be typical of them, to have doubts but to follow the instructions.” For some it was a matter of anger rather than doubt or hesitation. But none of them has been tempted in the intervening years to “do a Ponting” and show all that, in its own way, is a remarkable tribute to the ethics of the old administrative clan.
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The most difficult moment for those in the know must have been shortly after the event when Sir Anthony Eden denied British collaboration with Israel prior to the attack on Egypt (the Israeli attack provided the cover story, the need to separate the combatants, used to justify the Anglo-French invasion). During his final appearance in the House of Commons on 20 December 1956, Eden said, under questioning: “There were no plans to join forces to attack Egypt … there was no foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt.”
Sir Donald Logan, private secretary to Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, was the only person from the British side to attend both meetings at Sevres on the outskirts of Paris, where the agreement to cooperate with the French and Israelis was concluded. He was in the officials’ box in the House of Commons when Eden denied prior knowledge. I asked him how he reacted.
Logan: I felt that at that moment his attempt to justify his intervention to separate the forces simply exploded.
Hennessy: Have you ever felt that you should have done what Clive Ponting did in another generation?
Logan: In those days civil servants were not expected to betray their ministers and I certainly didn’t feel that way, no.
Hennessy: You don’t consider lying to the House of Commons a cardinal sin on the part of an elected politician?
Logan: Whatever I may think, I think it is for ministers to decide their own conduct in the House of Commons.
Commons and for the House of Commons and the public to judge ministers on their performance. I think the idea that a civil servant should stand up and say “The Minister is not telling the truth” every time this is likely to happen is a recipe for chaos and certainly disloyalty.
The Logan line was picked up, with minor changes, by other officials I spoke to who knew what had happened at Sevres before the Israelis struck on October 29, after which you didn’t need any training in British intelligence to put two and two together. Would today’s Whitehall generation see it that way? Most but not all would be my guess.
However, two of the public servants I interviewed for A channel too far indicated that they had reviewed their positions in 1956 – Lord Gladwyn, Ambassador in Paris, and Lord Sherfield, Ambassador in Washington. Eden and the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, traveled to Paris to consult their French opposite numbers, Mollet and Pineau, on 16 October. Lord Gladwyn met them at their airport. In the car Eden told him that he would not be allowed on the date. “I was angry and said that this was the most extraordinary thing that could happen, but there was nothing I could do about it.”
What he did do was write a furious letter to Lloyd, which appeared in Eden’s Downing Street files released at the Public Record Office last month. He considered his position but stayed as resigning “wouldn’t have done anybody any good”. Lord Sherfield, like Lord Gladwyn, was told nothing. Had he known and been instructed to deceive Eisenhower and Dulles “I don’t think I could have been party to the deception.”
A story I hoped could be confirmed could not. It’s this. A group of senior Foreign Office diplomats, kept out of the story on Eden’s instructions, knew something bad was going on, didn’t know what to do about it, and sought the advice of a senior, respected Privy Councilor, Lord Attlee (who, of course, didn’t know anything either). They met him at his residence in the Temple. “You are civil servants”, the old prime minister is said to have said in his most lively Major Attlee style, “Go away and do as you are told”.
Does anyone know if it is true?
(Further reading: Where from Aldermaston?)
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This article appears in the April 8, 2026 issue of the New Statesman, decline
