This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

John Burgoyne was a genuine 18th-century multi-tasker. Though an army general, he surrendered humiliatingly to the rebels at Saratoga early in the American War of Independence. He wrote plays and an opera libretto. And, for over 30 years, he was an MP.

In 1761, Burgoyne was nominated for a parliamentary seat at Midhurst by an army colleague who had bought into its franchise. To avoid a contest, the local powerbrokers agreed that he would stand along with William Hamilton (husband of Emma, Lady Hamilton). On 30 March, the two candidates were returned unopposed.

After this unchallenging ‘campaign’, Burgoyne resumed his military activities abroad until early 1763, when he finally took his seat in the Commons. There, he was praised for his exploits with his regiment in Portugal.  

He favoured a hard line towards the restive American colonies, even voting against repeal of the unpopular 1765 Stamp Act. In February 1766, he made a very rare speech in support of the Declaratory Act, which explicitly confirmed Parliament’s sovereignty over the American colonies.  

His Midhurst patron died in 1761, so Burgoyne had to look for another seat at the 1768 general election. The influence of the aristocratic Derby family, into which he had married, secured him the nomination for Preston. However, this election was no formality. There was a dispute between local Whigs and Tories over the extent of the Preston franchise. Outbreaks of violence were sensationalised in the press: “murdering, maiming, pulling down the houses, destroying places of worship… are among the acts of the inflamed mob".

At the 2 April poll, the Tory mayor’s count led to the two Tory candidates being narrowly elected. The Whigs’ own poll, unsurprisingly, showed a clear win for Burgoyne and his fellow Whig. Petitions to the Commons ensued, and with government support, the latter view prevailed in November 1768, and the Whig candidates were declared elected.

Nevertheless, Burgoyne was charged with inciting violence at the election. He admitted that he had attended the poll with two loaded pistols, guarded by soldiers for his protection, and was fined £1,000. He was not, however, jailed, as some of his fellow defendants were.

The next decade of relative peace saw Burgoyne focus more on his parliamentary and literary interests. He spoke often in the House, generally supporting the government/court line, though he declared “in great national points… I would ever hold myself at liberty to maintain my own opinion".

In 1772-73, he attacked Robert Clive and the East India Company’s running of India, moving the appointment of a select committee, which he then chaired. Though it uncovered, in Burgoyne’s own words, “crimes… which shocked human nature even to conceive”, it ultimately did not win support from the government, and in May 1773, his vote of censure against Clive was defeated.

Though an opponent of Lord North’s government, he supported its policy on the rebellious American colonies. In April 1774 he warned: “I look upon America as our child, which we have already spoilt by too much indulgence."

He saw active service in America in 1775, and, in 1777, he commanded the fateful expedition into New England that ended in disastrous surrender at Saratoga. Burgoyne was taken prisoner, but was eventually allowed to return home.

Back in Parliament, he strongly defended his conduct, especially in a speech on 26 May, 1778, when he sought to refute in detail all the criticisms made against him, and unsuccessfully demanded a full inquiry.

Thereafter, he publicly supported American independence, and allied himself with the Whig opposition. A parliamentary inquiry into the 1777 expedition was eventually set up, but no conclusion was ever published. When North resigned in 1782, Burgoyne’s star rose, and he was given command of the army in Ireland.

He held on to his Preston seat throughout, despite being strongly opposed in 1780 and 1784, and subject to unsuccessful petitions to Parliament by his opponents.

The remaining parliamentary years until his death in September 1792 were unremarkable, other than his participation in the dramatic Warren Hastings impeachment affair. Though an MP for more than three decades, it is for his military exploits that Burgoyne will best be remembered.

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

Meritocracy in politics and government service generates social mobility. That social mobility can be disruptive, painful both for established elites and for those seeking room at the top. Certainly that was the experience of the ‘new men’ who served King Henry VII (1485-1509).

They were mostly lawyers and financial officials, but they were versatile in their service to the king. In his council they shared power with great noblemen, bishops and other university-trained clerics, but they were among the most consistent attenders. At court they were close to the king, hunting and gambling with him as well as organising the magnificent display designed to overawe his subjects. They ran all the new or refurbished financial institutions through which he doubled his income over the course of the reign. In the Star Chamber, in the county commissions of the peace, and as town recorders and stewards, they imposed the justice that the king promised his people in the wake of the Wars of the Roses. They were diplomats and they raised and commanded troops to defend Henry’s claim to the throne and his position in Europe.

In the process of enforcing the king’s power they made enemies. Merchants did not like their aggressive pursuit of customs duties. Landowners did not like their relentless search for the feudal revenues due to the king. Churchmen did not like their rigorous assertion of the king’s control over the church’s landholding and the fringes of the church courts’ jurisdiction, where it overlapped with that of the king’s common law courts. Those touched by the slightest taint of treason did not like their fierce policing of dynastic loyalty. Those who traditionally governed different parts of England did not like their growing influence in the localities, through the judicial system, through the management of the crown’s landed estates, through their access to the king to colour his views of local affairs. As a London chronicler put it: never mind who had the mayoral sword borne before him, Edmund Dudley, the king’s fiscal enforcer, “was mayor, and what his pleasure was, was done”.

It was easier to say such things because the new men fitted too well the stereotype of the low-born man of overweening ambition who, contemporaries thought, should never be trusted with power, because he was bound to use it in self-interested ways. Those raising popular rebellion, from Jack Cade in 1450 to the Pilgrims of Grace in 1536, harped on this theme. In 1497 Perkin Warbeck applied it directly to the “caitiffs and villains of simple birth” who had been “the principal finders, occasioners and counsellors of the misrule and mischief now reigning in England” because Henry, “putting apart all well-disposed nobles”, trusted only them.

Those Warbeck named were both powerful and upwardly mobile. Sir Reynold Bray, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was the second son of a surgeon – a blood-letter and bone-setter, not a university graduate in medicine – from Bedwardine, Worcestershire. Sir Thomas Lovell, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the son of a second son of a minor Norfolk gentry family. Sir Richard Empson, leader of the king’s council and learned in the law, was the son of a minor property-owner in Towcester, Northamptonshire. Henry Wyatt, master of the king’s jewel-house, was of sufficiently obscure origins that he had to ask the heralds to grant him the same coat of arms as a better-known family of Wyatts, being, he asserted with studied vagueness, “descended” of their “house, blood and name”.

The new men also got rich in the king’s service. Fees for offices and gifts from suitors gave them money to spend on land and inside information and political influence enabled them to buy at good prices. Bray assembled lands worth more than £1,000 a year – more than the average income of the 50 or so peers then in the House of Lords – Lovell and Dudley about half that amount, Empson a third. Wyatt’s dealings can be tracked in detail, because his grandson rebelled against Queen Mary and the family deeds were confiscated along with their estates. He spent some £10,000 in 130 or so transactions, sometimes buying plots as small as an acre and a half, to build a concentrated estate around his home at Allington Castle in Kent. Two-thirds of the deals were packed into the years 1524-8, when he served as Henry VIII’s treasurer of the chamber and could thus draw on most of the government’s revenue as a personal credit account. Wyatt, like his fellows, exploited his cash liquidity by buying land on mortgage or buying up questionable titles and defending them at law.

Sharper dealing still was Dudley’s trademark. A Sussex gentleman, Roger Lewkenor, was indicted for murder at Horsham on 13 July 1507, but pardoned on 30 January 1508, a pardon for which he paid the king £200 in a deal brokered by Dudley. By 1509 Dudley had all Lewkenor’s land, though in his will he told his executors to let Lewkenor buy it back. The sordid details can be sketched in from the questions put to Lewkenor in a subsequent lawsuit, even though his answers do not survive: “Who paid for his meat and drink while he was in prison and such fees as belonged to the officers of the prison; And for such apparel as he had new made for him when he was delivered out of prison; Item who got him his charter; And what his charter cost; And who paid for it; [And] who paid the fees and charges when he pleaded his charter; And who agreed with the heir of the man that was murdered?” Doubtless it was Edmund Dudley.  

The king seems too often to have turned a blind eye to such self-help. It was convenient not to have to reward his servants out of his own hard-won fund of land, a source of revenue on which he could draw without having to trouble Parliament for taxes. It was also useful to have servants who carried the authority in local society generated by wide estates and big houses. Lovell built a palace at Elsings in Enfield, Middlesex, large enough to accommodate the royal court on progress. Bray bought an expensive house at Eaton, Bedfordshire, Empson a house at Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, with gatehouses so large that his neighbours complained they encroached on the king’s highways. Wyatt at Allington and Sir Edward Poynings at Westenhanger, both in Kent, bought 13th or 14th-century castles to lend an air of ancient authority and then built comfortable new lodging ranges inside them. Wealth, influence and office-holding equipped the new men to build up large followings in local society. When Lovell listed the 1,365 men he had retained to serve in his retinue should he be called on to raise troops for the king in 1508, they included seven of the nine richest taxpayers in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, the wealthiest residents of a string of villages and small towns in Oxfordshire, seven past and future mayors of Walsall, Staffordshire, and many of the local elite of cloth-working yeomen from Halifax, frequently active as manor-court jurors, constables and other local officials.

Their evident power, their growing wealth and their ruthlessness in pursuit of the king’s interests and their own put noses out of joint. The Duke of Buckingham, England’s premier nobleman, was outraged that upstarts did not pay him the respect he deserved. He sued the king’s solicitor Thomas Lucas for allegedly remarking that “the said duke hath no more conscience than a dog” and had a stand-up row in court with Lovell in 1514. The Duke claimed that he had been deprived of land by an inquisition taken in Henry VII’s reign, “when no one could have justice”. The inquisition’s finding, countered Lovell, “was as true as gospel”. When arrested for treason seven years later, Buckingham was said to have a list of those he would execute when he became king, featuring Lovell at number two behind Henry VIII’s chief minister Cardinal Wolsey. Some churchmen were equally irate. In a row over the jurisdiction of his diocesan courts, Bishop Nykke of Norwich memorably called Sir James Hobart, the attorney-general, an “enemy of God and His church”.

The enemies of the new men got their chance at Henry’s death in 1509. It was helpful to the new regime to blame some of Henry VII’s servants for the less palatable aspects of his policy, and open season was declared on Empson and Dudley, who were tried on improbable charges of treason and executed in 1510. Yet many of their colleagues worked on for many years in the service of Henry VIII, Poynings until 1521, Lovell until 1524, Wyatt until 1536. In some ways the survivors had been less controversial figures, but they had also been better networkers. Lovell was of humbler origins than Dudley and just as eager, though perhaps more subtle, in asserting Henry VII’s rights, but he was close to other leaders of Henry VII’s regime in a way that Dudley was not.

When the lord chamberlain Lord Daubeney, made his will in 1508, he named Lovell together with Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as overseers, “for the singular trust and confidence that I have and long have had in them”. In 1509, Oxford’s will named “my old friend” Lovell as the first of his executors, and in 1523, when the Abbot of Waltham sent Lovell a buck for dinner, his household accounts show that he ate it with Fox, perhaps talking over their decades in power.

Such working friendships with those drawn from more traditional elites helped to preserve the new men’s careers, but they also lent strength to Henry’s regime. He could not have governed England with new men alone, but he could not have governed in the intensive way he did without them. That set the pattern for his Tudor successors. Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil were only the greatest of those who would follow in the new men’s footsteps, using their skills in the service of their monarchs, building up their own power and wealth, but having always to negotiate the turbulence created by the speed of their ascent.

Dr Steven Gunn of Merton College, Oxford, is completing a book on Henry VII’s new men and the making of Tudor England.

This article is from the February issue of Total Politics

Some people believe in a halcyon age of Parliament, when men stood tall, spoke with passion, precision and principle. They did things differently then.

A close study of history reveals the past not to be that much of a foreign country at all. I hope these columns convey some common threads running through Parliament’s history. Much stays the same: the policies, the concerns, even the language. So it was with Aneurin Bevan’s NHS Act in last month’s issue, so it is now with Rab Butler’s Education Act, debated in January 1944.

That was a peculiar debate indeed, yet somehow familiar. Still six months shy of D-Day, Britain had a national coalition. The Tory education minister, Rab Butler, sat on the frontbench alongside a Labour parliamentary secretary, James Chuter Ede (South Shields). In this phoney war of national interest, MPs of all parties were referred to as honourable friends.

The debate was also pockmarked by Labour attacks on private schools. John Parker (Lab, Romford), invoked Disraeli’s two nations and demanded that private schools be “dealt with”, despite having been a younger contemporary of his “right hon friend” Rab Butler at Marlborough. Arthur Greenwood (Lab, Wakefield), de facto leader of the opposition during the war, urged for an education system “rid of class distinctions”, yet he educated his own son at Merchant Taylors’. As the Labour Party should know today, that is an enemy they cannot slay while certain among their number continue to endorse it. Still, Kenneth Lindsay (Lab, Kilmarnock) acknowledged that while fee-paying ought to be abolished, “fees are linked with freedom” and if they go, “there must be a choice of schools open to every parent”. A Blairite in their midst even then.

Elsewhere, the Butler Act irrevocably altered the semi-independent grammar schools by coaxing them into the new aided secondary sector. Butler wanted “to preserve tradition and variety” but, by his own admission, so tempting was the new state-financed offer, “some may wish indeed to become controlled”. In a sense, the modern academies programme is an attempt to revert to a semblance of that status quo ante. Modern Conservative supporters of grammars are the political descendants of the likes of Captain Edward Cobb (Con, Preston), who warned against obliterating the independence of grant-aided schools, and Arthur Colegate (Con, The Wrekin), who refuted Labour and Liberal charges that grammars were guilty of “snobbery”. Meanwhile, Butler wanted the “three Rs” to be replaced with “the broader training of a citizen for all”. He was attacked by Lewis Silkin (Lab, Peckham), who lamented that “after 73 years of universal education we have still not reached the stage when every child is familiar with the three Rs”. These basics were fundamental. Sixty-eight years later, we are still waiting.

This article is from the January issue of Total Politics

The famous radical political writer and campaigner William Cobbett tried for many years to get elected to Parliament, eventually succeeding in December 1832.

Cobbett spent his early life as a pro-establishment figure. He denounced Thomas Paine – “wretched traitor and apostate” – although he later became an admirer. The motto of one of his newspapers, The Porcupine, was “Fear God, Honour the King”.

Through the 1800s, his journalism became more radical, prompted in part by the pervasive corruption. He began to consider whether he would have more influence if he was also in Parliament, and his opportunity came in June 1806, when a Honiton MP had to stand for re-election following a lucrative public appointment. After failing to find anyone else to become an anti-corruption candidate, Cobbett decided to stand, promising never to “receive… one single farthing of the public money”, and never to give “one farthing of my own money to any man in order to induce him to vote, or to cause others to vote, for me”.

Arriving in Honiton, he discovered that Admiral Thomas Cochrane, inspired by Cobbett’s appeal, also proposed to stand. Cobbett decided to withdraw in favour of this potentially stronger candidate, though Cochrane then failed to win the election.

At this time, Cobbett was working on large projects to record Parliament’s history and proceedings. His Parliamentary History and Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates still rank as primary historical texts. Sadly, poor business skills meant that he had to sell them to his printer, to continue their production. Thus, Parliament’s official report is ‘Hansard’, not ‘Cobbett’.

George III’s death in January 1820 triggered a general election, and, on his return from a period living in America, Cobbett turned to the potentially winnable constituency of Coventry. But despite a slight early lead, he finished a poor third behind the successful Whig incumbents. He tried to challenge the result, claiming widespread intimidation, but a Commons petition presented on his behalf got nowhere.

At the next general election, in 1826, Cobbett stood for Preston, again a winnable prospect. One opponent was a young Whig, Edward Stanley, later to be, as the Earl of Derby, three times Tory prime minister. After a turbulent campaign, Cobbett was again well beaten. Once more he tried to challenge the outcome by petition, but without success.

By then, he knew that he would not be elected without parliamentary reform extending the franchise. Unlike many Radicals, he reluctantly supported the Whigs’ very limited reform proposals when they came to power in 1830. After a titanic parliamentary struggle, the Great Reform Act was eventually enacted in 1832. The December 1832 general election, under the enlarged franchise, gave Cobbett perhaps his last chance to enter the Commons.

He had already arranged to stand for the new constituency of Manchester, but was then also asked to contest Oldham. At Manchester, Cobbett faced strong opposition from Whigs keen to keep him out of Parliament, and, when it became clear that he was going to win easily at Oldham, he withdrew from the Manchester campaign.  

Nearly 70 by then, he set off for the new Parliament in January 1833, declaring: “Now, I belong to the people of Oldham.”

From the start, he threw himself into Commons proceedings. His maiden speech on 29 January opposed the re-election of the Speaker, and began, controversially: “It appears to me that since I have been sitting here, I have heard a great deal of vain and unprofitable conversation.”
 
Despite the Reform Act, the Commons was still packed with establishment MPs, and the Whig government proved to be a grave – if not unexpected – disappointment to Cobbett, especially over Poor Law reform. He became a de facto representative of Oldham and the wider British underclasses.

Though an active participant, he had little time for Parliament’s arcane procedures. He criticised the size of the old Commons chamber as unfit to hold 658 members or to conduct civilised debate.

He was returned unopposed for Oldham in January 1835, but died five months later. Despite everything, Cobbett was proud of becoming an MP, and even planned to call his proposed autobiography The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament.

This article is from the January issue of Total Politics

When I asked Eric Forth, the MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, to be my mentor, he rapidly became not only my closest friend in Parliament but also my political hero.

Eric was an expert in parliamentary procedure. He taught me the importance of spending time in the chamber and the members’ tearoom (he said the only important work he ever did took place there), and roped me into talking out private members’ bills (or “regulatory bo*****s”, as he called them) on Fridays in Parliament.

He was a brilliant orator, but always interesting to listen to. In the chamber, he was the master of the sedentary intervention, and once famously put Menzies Campbell off his stride at PMQs when he shouted “Declare your interest” when Campbell raised the issue of pensions.

Eric was a thorn in the side of the leader of the day, and famously asked David Cameron at a parliamentary party meeting: “I believe in low taxes, big business and grammar schools – am I still a Conservative?”

One of my favourite Eric moments was when he stopped Oliver Letwin to ask if he could submit a paper he had written, to be considered as part of the party’s policy review under Cameron. When a clearly delighted Letwin replied, “Yes, of course, what is it about?”, Eric replied: “It’s titled ‘Why Global Warming is Bo*****s’.”

I miss Eric immensely, and threw myself into helping Christopher Chope MP talk out unnecessary private members’ bills on a Friday as my tribute. The No Turning Back group, of which Eric was a stalwart member, was given a stock of his flamboyant ties by his widow Carroll, and set up the annual Eric Forth Memorial Award for the MP who had done most to carry on Eric’s work. Winning the first award was one of the most special moments of my time in Parliament.

Philip Davies is the Conservative MP for Shipley

This article is from the January issue of Total Politics

The warrant for the execution of King Charles I is the most significant constitutional document held by the Parliamentary Archives, and perhaps the most dramatic of all records relating to English history. Charles came to the throne in 1625 and had a difficult relationship with Parliament from the beginning, leading to civil war in 1642.  

In 1649 he was tried for high treason in a court set up by the ‘Rump’ Parliament in Westminster Hall. The King disputed the authority of the court and refused to enter a plea; he was found guilty on 29 January and beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall the following day. The Death Warrant is handwritten on parchment, with multiple wax seals. It was signed by 59 of the commissioners who tried the King, including Oliver Cromwell, whose signature can be seen in the left-hand column.

The certificate has been in the custody of the House of Lords since 1660, when, following the restoration of the monarchy, it was used to identify and punish the ‘regicides’ who had signed it. Today, the original document is kept safely in the air-conditioned repository of the Parliamentary Archives in the Victoria Tower.

For more information, visit www.parliament.uk/archives

This article is from the January issue of Total Politics

In 1910, soon after being appointed home secretary, Winston Churchill found time to sit down with a recently published pamphlet entitled The Sterilization of the Degenerates. Its American author, Dr HC Sharp, opened with an apocalyptic warning that “the degenerate class” was reproducing more quickly than the general population and thus threatening the “purity of the race”. It was not only Dr Sharp’s diagnosis that interested Churchill, however, but also his prescription. Picking up a thick blue pencil, Churchill marked the passages where Sharp argued that sterilisation, which since 1907 had been mandatory for mentally unfit prisoners in Sharp’s home state of Indiana, should be practised on all degenerates. Churchill was sufficiently impressed to ask his officials how a similar law might be implemented in Britain. The reply, from Dr Horatio Donkin, chief medical adviser of prisons, that the Indiana law was “a monument of ignorance and hopeless mental confusion” did not dissuade Churchill. “I am drawn to this subject in spite of many parliamentary misgivings,” he explained. “It is bound to come some day.”

He was only half-right. Internationally, sterilisation programmes proved popular. In total, 32 US states followed Indiana’s lead in introducing compulsory sterilisation for the ‘mentally defective’. Similar laws were also passed in Scandinavia and Germany; indeed, the Nazi’s 1933 ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was explicitly modelled on the Indiana law. But in Britain compulsory sterilisation never reached the statute book. What was introduced, despite “parliamentary misgivings”, was legislation to segregate forcibly the “feeble-minded” from the general population, and sexually segregate them from each other to prevent their reproduction. This law, the closest Britain came to eugenic legislation, was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.

When Churchill had arrived at the Home Office, his in-tray contained the 1908 report of the Royal Commission on the care and control of the feeble-minded. This particular Commission, established in 1904 during Arthur Balfour’s previous Conservative administration, was a response to the concerns with national efficiency triggered by Britain’s poor showing in the second Boer War (1899–1902) and horror stories concerning the number of potential military recruits who had been turned away on grounds of physical incapacity. The Commission estimated that there were almost 150,000 “feeble-minded” persons – defined as “capable of earning a living under favourable circumstances”, but unable to compete “on equal terms” or manage their affairs with “ordinary prudence” – in Britain. Although constituting only 0.46 per cent of the population, the ‘feeble-minded’ were deemed a significant social problem, both because they made up nearly one-fifth of those in workhouses and 10 per cent of all prisoners, and also because of their reputedly rampant fecundity. In response the Commission proposed sterilisation and detention in ‘labour colonies’, where the ‘feeble-minded’ could be put to work.

The Commission’s recommendations were in danger of being lost amid the turmoil of the People’s Budget and the two general elections of 1910. To counter this, Churchill wrote to prime minister Herbert Asquith in December 1910, urging legislation to stop the “multiplication of the unfit” and arguing that “the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed”. He also supplied his cabinet colleagues with copies of another pamphlet, The Feeble-Minded: A Social Danger (1909), this one by Royal Commission member AF Tredgold. In his covering note, Churchill described it as “a concise, and, I am afraid not exaggerated, statement of the serious problems to be faced”. Outside Parliament, pressure was also brought to bear by The Times, the joint efforts of the Eugenics Education Society, established in 1907, and the National Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded, led by the formidable Ellen Pinsent. Frustrated by government inaction, the two groups drafted their own Feeble-Minded Control Bill and found a supportive backbencher – the radical Tory JW Hills – to introduce it. A second backbench bill, the Mental Deficiency Bill, was introduced by another Conservative MP, Gershom Stewart.
Both were withdrawn in 1912 when the new home secretary, Reginald McKenna, finally introduced the government’s Mental Deficiency Bill. The bill proposed adding a new category of ‘feeble-minded’ to English law; those deemed so could be compulsorily detained, and segregated from society, even though they had neither committed a crime nor been certified. A new central Board of Control to co-ordinate the care of the mentally defective was to be established. This would oversee the new sexually segregated colonies. Notably absent from the bill was any provision for compulsory sterilisation.
There followed an extraordinary – if numerically one-sided – parliamentary battle. Stewart’s bill had received Conservative, Liberal and Labour backing, and there was similar cross-party support for McKenna’s bill. In July 1912, a motion to have the bill postponed fell by 242 to 19.
Leading the opposition was the maverick Liberal Josiah Wedgwood, the self-styled “last of the radicals”. The great-grandson of the founder of the pottery dynasty, Wedgwood had entered Parliament as MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1906, and was to retain his seat for 36 years. He became a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s first cabinet, and already by 1910 disaffection with the Liberals combined with marriage difficulties – “I was nearly off my head at the time”, he later recalled – helped to explain his extraordinary commitment in opposing McKenna. During a last-ditch stand over two late-night sittings in July 1913, Wedgwood tabled 120 amendments and made 150 interventions, sustaining himself, it was said, on sticks of chocolate, brought by a sympathetic Conservative from the Commons bar, and swigs of barley water. The Daily Mail praised him for setting a new record for parliamentary obstruction, but the final Commons vote was lost by a crushing 180 to 3.

It is easy to see a romantic grandeur in Wedgwood’s heroic defeat. In recent years, historians have also suggested that the absence of Churchill’s favoured policy of sterilisation from the Act, and the fact that the test of ‘feeble-mindedness’ was one of capacity – whether or not an individual can care for him or herself – rather than heredity, marked a defeat for the eugenicists. That, however, would be too positive a reading of the Act and the motives of its supporters in the House.

It is certainly true that MPs supporting the bill made humanitarian, financial and moral arguments more often than they made a eugenic case. The Royal Commission had highlighted how “costly and ineffective”, not to mention inhumane, it was for the mentally defective to be in prisons and workhouses. Many MPs envisaged the proposed colonies not as places of punishment, but as a form of institutional care, with therapeutic possibilities. Under the Act, for example, the law relating to having “unlawful and carnal knowledge” of a mentally ill woman was changed so that the onus was now on the man to prove that he had no reason to suspect that the woman was “defective”.

This moral agenda, however, often tipped into misogyny. Thus Alfred Lyttelton regaled the House with tales of women with “no control over themselves”, transmitting “loathsome diseases”, and returning to the workhouse each winter with a new illegitimate child. A move to create a new category of  “sexually feeble-minded” for promiscuous women was defeated, but the Act did include the clause that being in receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to, or being pregnant with, an illegitimate child was sufficient to render a woman feeble-minded, and hence liable for compulsory institutionalisation.
Wedgwood’s grounds for opposing the bill were equally varied. Besides railing against “eugenic cranks”, he complained of the class and gender bias, and objected to the lack of any adequate inspection regime for the labour colonies. Alongside the Marquess of Salisbury, who led the Lords’ opposition, Wedgwood also complained about the precedent created by ceding parliamentary power to medical experts and strengthening an already over-mighty executive by leaving the determination of rules under the Act to ministers. Most fundamentally for Wedgwood, the bill was an assault on individual liberty: “a Bill for putting people who have committed no crime whatever to prison for life”.

Recognising the range of arguments, however, should not blind us to the centrality of eugenics to these parliamentary debates. It was a eugenic analysis that defined the problem of feeble-mindedness. And the segregation solution was as eugenic in its motivations as sterilisation. Indeed, many eugenicists favoured segregation because they feared sterilisation might promote sexual immorality. Others, like Churchill, preferred sterilisation on cost grounds but were, as he explained in his letter to Asquith, ready to accept segregation until such time as the public came round. Eugenics also set the tone for parliamentary debates. The bill’s extra-parliamentary opponents, including those redoubtable Catholic men of letters, Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, mocked “the feeble-minded bill” for its eugenic character. The Eugenics Society greeted its passing as a triumph.

In the broad sweep of history, the Mental Deficiency Act was one of the throes in the ‘strange death of liberal England’. Its immediate consequences, however, were far milder than the furore surrounding its passage might suggest. Local authorities were slow to build new institutions, parents proved unco-operative in having their children labelled feeble-minded, and many doctors were reluctant to certify patients, when the science behind the category was so obviously dubious. After a year, the Board of Control reported that there were only 6,612 persons in specialist institutions for the mentally defective, and the bulk of these were transfers from asylums and workhouses.

In the longer run, many were unjustly detained under the terms of the Act, a fact highlighted in the National Council for Civil Liberties’ groundbreaking 1951 report, 50,000 Outside the Law. It took another eight years before the Mental Health Act 1959 finally repealed McKenna’s legislation. By that time, few could be found who openly endorsed eugenic assumptions. When, in 1974, Keith Joseph complained – in terms that would have had Churchill reaching for his blue pencil – of the threat to the “balance of our population” from adolescent girls “in social classes four and five” reproducing too quickly, the resultant outcry killed off his hopes of the Tory leadership, and led to the right wing rallying behind Margaret Thatcher. But that is another story.

Dr David Stack is a reader in history at the University of Reading

This article is from the January issue of Total Politics

Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. At the outset of a sometimes-tawdry parliamentary debate in February 1948 about the nation’s medical services, Aneurin Bevan, Labour’s minister of health, made a distinction “between the hard-working doctors who have little or no time to give to these matters, and the small body of raucous-voiced people who are alleged to represent the profession as a whole”.

This statement was, alas, founded in brio, not proof. A 1948 survey showed that only 10 per cent of doctors backed the new NHS legislation. The British Medical Association (BMA) described Bevan as a “would-be Führer”; Bevan branded them “politically poisoned people”. Hugh Linstead, a Tory MP and early NHS supporter, bewailed this counterproductive “gladiatorial contest”.

Rab Butler responded for the opposition, paying tribute to Bevan’s “dialectical and debating skill, which is second to none in this House”, but criticised his bellicose speech: “One never thought that the minister of health was possessed of a bedside manner.”

Doctors’ salaries caused a fundamental policy disagreement. The BMA and the Conservatives opposed a basic state salary on the grounds that it would damage the medical profession for doctors to become merely another layer of civil servants. The Liberal chief whip, Frank Byers, slammed “that small clique in the BMA” for grossly misleading the medical profession, and described the Tory position as “utterly puerile”. No Liberal, he said, “wants to see a state-salaried medical service”.

Dr Stephen Taylor, a physician and Labour MP, summed up the central dilemma facing the BMA, which could apply as much to the organisation now as it did then: “The burden of their message ranges from emotional condemnation of the whole Act to admissions that much of the Act is good, except for four or five essential details.” Today’s BMA, having previously said it would consider supporting the Health and Social Care Bill with revisions, has signalled its “opposition to the whole bill”. Curiously, freedom from state direction mobilised the doctors against the government in 1948, but it is that which they seemingly oppose in 2011.

By his own later admission, Aneurin Bevan “stuffed their mouths with gold”, and in the process bound the medical profession so tightly that healthcare in Britain was altered forever. A generous state stipend and the fog of history conceal a once fiercely-cherished independence. It is only one aspect of the changes that occurred, but a no less crucial one.

Aneurin Bevan said in 1948: “We have never been able yet to appoint a minister of health with whom the BMA agreed.”  As Andrew Lansley is finding to his extreme discomfort, we still haven’t.

Next month: William Cobbett

This article appeared in the December issue of Total Politics

The early Tudor kings, Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509) and Henry VIII (1509-47), presided over a very different realm from their late-medieval predecessors. In the aftermath of the civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses, the government of England had become increasingly centralised. The wealth of the crown vis-à-vis its greatest subjects had increased and political power came to be increasingly exercised at Westminster and at the king’s court rather than on the estates of the great territorial magnates. Politics under the early Tudors then was principally court politics, and the struggle for access at court and to the king himself defined the reign of Henry VIII in particular.

Thomas Wolsey was Henry VIII’s first chief minister. He was born in Ipswich around 1471, of humble origins, and went to Magdalen College, Oxford, before being ordained into the clergy in 1498. His ability in administration was soon recognised, and he became senior bursar of the college. Wolsey was clearly ambitious: he continued to acquire church livings and in 1503 he became chaplain to Sir Richard Nanfan, the governor of Calais. It was Nanfan’s influence that secured him a position as a royal chaplain, and by November 1509 he had become almoner to the new king. Thereafter Wolsey’s rise was meteoric. His 16th-century biographer, George Cavendish, later observed how he was “the most earnest and Redyest among all the Councell to avaunce the kynges oonly wyll & pleasure without any respect to the Case. The Kyng therfore perceyved hyme to be a mete Instrument for the accomplyshment of his devysed wyll & pleasure.”

Wolsey was largely responsible for organising Henry’s invasion of France in 1513, and the king’s appreciation of his abilities became evident in further promotion and offices. In February 1513, Wolsey became dean of York, in February the following year Bishop of Lincoln, in August Archbishop of York and in September 1515 a cardinal. Finally, in December that year Henry appointed him Chancellor of England.

Wolsey’s titles and offices – archbishop, cardinal and chancellor – would have guaranteed him a near pre-eminence in political power and influence over the king in the late Middle Ages, but the nature of the early Tudor political world was very different. In 1495, in response to plots against him from within his own household, Henry VII had created the Privy (or secret) Chamber. This department of the household was staffed by humble, menial servants and provided a safe refuge for the king away from the public world of his court.

During Henry VIII’s reign, the Privy Chamber was politicised as the king filled it with his aristocratic friends and jousting companions. As their power was based upon their personal friendship with him, these young, intimate body servants challenged the position at court of both the high nobility and influential churchmen like Wolsey. Access to the king, and to the informal channels through which patronage flowed and counsel was given, became the dynamic factor in early Tudor politics.

Throughout the 1510s and most of the 1520s, Wolsey, while he held no formal position in the king’s household, enjoyed access to Henry by virtue of the king’s absolute confidence in him. The cardinal acted as an intermediary between the king and those who found themselves absent from court for whatever reason.

In November 1523, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and the king’s lieutenant in Ireland, wrote to Wolsey and provided a vivid account of the physical and emotional strains of military service: if not relieved of his post and allowed to return to court, the earl feared he would die. However inclement the Irish weather, Surrey’s anxieties were in no small part due to his perception that he was being sidelined politically by his absence from court. Soon after writing, he was allowed to return to England as a result of the cardinal’s intervention with the king.

Wolsey’s letter to that effect juxtaposed the physical and emotional reasons for Surrey’s return with the political, and showed how the cardinal’s power depended on his access and proximity to Henry. It was something not lost on Surrey and other powerful individuals in Henrician England.
Wolsey, however, was unique in early Tudor England, as his political power depended not only on his proximity to the king, but also on his control of the formal institutions of power and justice as Chancellor of England. While in the later Middle Ages the slow and cumbersome machinery of the common law courts had vied with informal, local arbitration by lords and other powerful individuals in offering justice to the king’s subjects, under the early Tudors the ‘equitable’ (that is, based on conscience rather than formal legal process) jurisdiction of the king’s council and the Court of Chancery developed and expanded. The council had always exercised a limited judicial function, but under Wolsey’s guidance the number of cases it heard increased from about 12 per year at the beginning of the reign to 120 or so by the mid-1520s.

In 1519, Wolsey announced that the conciliar Court of Star Chamber (named for its star-patterned ceiling, also called the chambre de etoiles) would be impartial and have no regard to local political sensibilities. He aimed to increase
people’s direct reliance on the crown, rather than on local landowners, to settle their disputes. This initiative was a victim of its own success. By 1520, he was forced to send many cases out to local arbitration. Similarly, Wolsey’s chancellorship saw an increase in the number of cases coming before the equitable jurisdiction of Chancery. Wolsey’s power was thus located away from the king, whether it be in the formal setting of the ‘starred chamber’ in the palace of Westminster or in his own house at Hampton Court. The dispensation of justice in Star Chamber and Chancery was the most tangible expression of Wolsey’s power, one satirised by the contemporary poet John Skelton:

Why come ye not to court?
To which court?
To the King’s court,
Or to Hampton Court?
Nay, to the King’s court!
The King’s court
Should have excellence
But Hampton Court
Hath the pre-eminence . . .

Wolsey’s institutional power was, nevertheless, very real. In 1516 he made a speech in Star Chamber in which he stated that those who dispensed justice (judges and landowners) should not be above the law, and that the crown was the fount of all justice. To underline Wolsey’s ‘new law of Star Chamber’, the fifth Earl of Northumberland was summoned into court for his contempt of the council’s judgement and committed to the Fleet prison, while Justices of the Peace and other local agents of law enforcements frequently found themselves before the council to account for their behaviour.

The grandiose style in which Wolsey conducted himself in dispensing justice, and the exemplary punishments handed out, made the cardinal unpopular with his aristocratic rivals. This unpopularity was further increased by his control over the means of communication with the king, and Wolsey realised the importance of controlling these to maintain his position. In 1519 he secured the replacement of the so-called ‘minions’ – young, aristocratic companions of the king – with four older and more discreet knights in the Privy Chamber.

The revolt over the Amicable Grant (an attempt by Wolsey and the king to fund another war with France through extra parliamentary taxation) earlier the same year had compromised his position with the king, and there were calls from the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk for a reassertion of the wider council’s role in government. At Christmas that year Wolsey drew up, in his own hand, a list of household officials who were to be dismissed and the compensation to be offered them.

In January, the cardinal joined the King at Eltham and the so-called ‘Eltham Ordinances’ were promulgated. Wolsey succeeded in regulating the size and membership of the council, and in halving the size of the Privy Chamber to 15. The Eltham Ordinances probably marked the high point of Wolsey’s domestic political ascendancy. Despite these successes, just as he had risen to power by fulfilling the king’s will, his fall was not due to the machinations of his noble opponents but his simple failure to meet Henry’s most important wish.

By 1527 Henry was determined to divorce his queen, Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey was well aware that his political power depended on his ability to secure the divorce. In 1528 the king declared war on the Habsburg Netherlands in order to put pressure on Catherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The plan backfired and Wolsey was blamed for the unpopular war. The cardinal was faced with a no-win situation. If he failed to secure the divorce, his influence with Henry would perhaps be fatally undermined. On the other hand, a divorce meant marriage to Anne Boleyn, whose family and supporters could destroy his influence with the king.

By September 1529 Wolsey’s position seemed untenable – a Franco-Imperial alliance had hamstrung his diplomatic efforts, while at home Anne was in the political ascendancy. The following month, amid rumours that Wolsey was in league with the papacy and had conspired to prevent Henry from obtaining his divorce, he was stripped of the office of Chancellor and banished to his archbishopric of York. Throughout the early months of 1530 rumours abounded of his rehabilitation, yet in November Henry ordered his arrest. On 29 November, while travelling south from York to the Tower of London, Wolsey died at Leicester Abbey before the king could take his revenge on his erstwhile chief minister.

Wolsey’s power was based upon the twin pillars of access to the king and office. Acting as Henry VIII’s chief minister, he could successfully control access to the king, seeing off challenges from within the court in 1519 and 1525. Similarly, as Chancellor of England, he could laud it over his aristocratic rivals and hand out exemplary punishments to their servants. Yet, his power depended on his success in accomplishing the king’s wishes, and when royal support was withdrawn the minister quickly fell from grace.

David Grummitt is a lecturer in British history at the University of Kent

This article is from the November issue of Total Politics

Like his father James, John Stuart Mill was a leading 19th century political and social philosopher. However, he took his theorising one step further when he became a Liberal MP for three years.

In 1823 he joined the East India Company as a clerk in his father’s office, where he rose to the post of chief examiner just before the company’s abolition in 1858.

His growing fame as a radical campaigner encouraged the Irish Tenant League to invite him to stand for them in 1851 in an Irish constituency, but he politely declined, claiming that his post as a de facto civil servant disqualified him.

He confessed in his Autobiography that, though often urged by friends to pursue a parliamentary career, he thought it unlikely because of his radical views, and the need for a costly election campaign.  

When invited to stand for the two-seat borough of Westminster in the 1865 general election, he accepted, though on his own strict terms. He saw the Commons as a useful platform, while disclaiming any personal ambition: “My only object in Parliament would be to promote my opinions.”

His absence abroad and growing controversy over his singular opinions meant he risked defeat by the Conservative candidate, WH Smith (of newsagent fame). Coming over from France to participate in the campaign, however, seemed to work, and he was comfortably elected.
The new Parliament did not meet until the following February, when Mill, despite misgivings, took the religious oath as a new member. He refused an invitation to a Speaker’s dinner, objecting to its strict, formal dress code.

Inevitably such a celebrated new member provoked a backlash, and his initial forays in the chamber – including his maiden speech on 14 February, and a later speech on the bill suspending habeas corpus in Ireland, which vividly attacked British rule – were much criticised.  
Disraeli derided him as “the finishing governess”. Even a fellow Liberal, Robert Lowe, said that Mill was “a little too clever for us in the House. He reasons with a degree of closeness and refinement that some of us, at least, are not quite accustomed to.”

After this poor start, Mill took his colleagues’ advice on parliamentary oratory, and, when on familiar topics, was more successful, though he complained about “the tiresome labour of chipping off little bits of one’s thoughts, of a size to be swallowed by a set of diminutive practical politicians incapable of digesting them”.

Many major speeches were in support of women’s voting and property rights. In May 1867, he boldly proposed a small but fundamental amendment to the franchise provisions of the Tory government’s Reform Bill, replacing the word ‘man’ with ‘person’. Despite some inevitable ribaldry from the all-male House, he later described this as “by far the most important, perhaps the only really important, public service I performed” as an MP.

Mill also took a leading role in the controversial campaign against the former Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, who had brutally quelled a rebellion in 1865, killing nearly 500 black residents. British opinion was split, but Mill, through his Jamaica committee, denounced it as outright murder.  

He took up the case in Parliament. His committee supported legal actions against Eyre, but they failed and Mill disbanded the committee in 1868. When Gladstone, three years later, agreed to reimburse Eyre’s legal expenses, Mill wrote in disgust: “After this, I shall henceforth wish for a Tory government.”

Mill’s notoriety as an MP rebounded on him at the 1868 general election, when he was again opposed by WH Smith. Despite a sweeping Liberal victory nationally, Mill came last behind Smith and his fellow Liberal candidate.  

He had spent much of the campaign supporting other radical candidates, even those standing against Liberals. Heavily outspent by Smith (by nearly £7,000), the Westminster Liberals unsuccessfully petitioned against Smith’s election on grounds of financial wrongdoing.
Mill rejected offers of other seats, and was glad to be able to focus more fully on his writing and public campaigning on issues such as women’s rights.  

His time in Parliament was later summed up by Gladstone: “For the sake of the House of Commons at large, I rejoiced at his advent and deplored his disappearance. He did us all good.”

This article is an extended version of one that appeared in the November issue of Total Politics

The five plates on the wall in my constituency office serve to remind me of five coalmines in the former Fife coalfield. One plate shows the Valleyfield Colliery, where my father worked for nearly 40 years underneath the River Forth.

Another plate shows No 7 pit in Cowdenbeath opened in 1890, and lists all the provosts of the town. My wife’s grandfather, James Russell, whose name is inscribed on that plate, served as provost from 1920 to 1927. Her uncle, who worked in the local pit, was involved in a serious accident at the age of 18 and lost his right arm when he had to replace a conveyor belt that had come off. He lost his balance on the wet greasy ground and fell into the machinery.

My favourite plate is from Bowhill Colliery, which opened in 1896. The plate is inscribed with paintings of miners down the pit digging coal, pushing wagons filled with coal and erecting pit props. In the centre of the plate are four verses of a poem, The Image of God, written by the miner poet Joe Corrie:

Crawlin’ aboot like a snail in the mud,
Covered wi' clammy blae,
Me, made after the image o’ God –
Jings! But it’s laughable tae.

Howkin’ awa' 'neath a mountain o' stane,
Gaspin’ for want o' air,
The sweat makin’ streams doon ma bare backbane,
And my knees a’ hawkit and sair.

Strainin’ and cursin’ the hale shift thro’
Half starved, half blin’, half mad
And the gaffer he says, “Less dirt frae you,
Or ye go up the pit, my lad!"

So I gi’ my life tae the Nimmo squad
For eicht and fower a day.
Me! Made after the image o’ God –
Jings! But it’s laughable tae.

The plates were in great demand during and after the miners’ strike, as it became clear that many pits would close forever, resulting in the destruction of the mining communities. These were close-knit, supportive groups of families who had several generations of young and old working in the same pits and supporting each other during pit disasters that were the dread of all mining communities.

The Miners’ Gala days were great social events when everyone dressed in their best and marched behind beautifully embroidered banners, and held picnics at the public parks or nearby beaches with children’s races and local bands to provide entertainment. Each village or town had its own local club or institute where socials, concerts and weddings took place.

These artefacts bring back to the light memories of the period when trade unions were strong and powerful, but, sadly, they are also a reminder of the demise of mining communities. The Fife Coalfield no longer exists. Every pit has disappeared. The smoking coal bings (waste tips) have been flattened and grassed over and the miners' rows have been demolished. Small, spindly motorway trees have been planted where the miners' houses stood. It is a cleaner and greener area now, but it feels empty.

During the strike, I stood on many picket lines in the early hours of the morning, including Agecroft Colliery in Greater Manchester where I now live. The plates are a personal memento mori, too – they recall my father’s death; he died during the miners’ strike. It was the end of an era.

This article is from the November issue of Total Politics

In the British political lexicon, Suez has become a byword for failure, and like Munich before it, the burden of the word is now assumed to be so obvious that it no longer needs stating. Whenever an overseas military intervention is contemplated, it’s almost inevitable that the media will ask: ‘Will this be another Suez?’

But as the failures surrounding 2003’s Iraq invasion indicate, the Suez story still needs an occasional telling. Perhaps the key point in relation to British politics is that, in the autumn of 1956, Britain’s machinery of government was deliberately short-circuited by the prime minister, Anthony Eden, and a few leading personalities from the Conservative government and Whitehall – with dire consequences.

True, in the immediate wake of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, Britain’s governmental system worked in a traditional manner to a traditional end – regime change in the Middle East. The full cabinet decided that Nasser must be deposed and the canal returned to international control.

The House of Commons, on 2 August, also had a chance to voice its opinion before breaking up for summer recess. Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour opposition, stated that Nasser’s actions were “all very familiar”. He said: “It is exactly the same as we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war.”

As the summer elapsed, the Foreign Office – assisted by the British embassy in Cairo – considered which Egyptian figures might be contacted to form an alternative administration (Nasser had made plenty of enemies when consolidating his power after the coup of 1952), while the defence planners prepared for a military invasion.  

At this stage in its history, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was neither a closely scrutinised nor co-ordinated department, and while various assassination plots against Nasser are alleged in the voluminous Suez literature, it cannot be denied that Nasser’s security forces rounded up a British spy ring in late August.

None of this was particularly exceptional. Back in 1951, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had contemplated military action against Iran to prevent the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the seizing of the Abadan oil refinery complex. But when President Truman advised against force, Attlee listened. Two years later, during Winston Churchill’s peacetime administration, the responsible Iranian prime minister was overthrown in a joint CIA-MI6 operation. The only problem, as leading Tories saw it, was that the US had emerged as the senior partner in the enterprise.

The extraordinary nature of the Suez enterprise only really begins on 14 October 1956, by which stage a diplomatic solution, which had been eagerly sought by the Americans, was close to conclusion. (Nato allies attacking a third world country was not a message Washington wanted to send out in the midst of the Cold War.) In meetings at the UN, Britain’s foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, had agreed ‘six principles’ with his Egyptian counterpart, Mohammed Fawzi, for the future running of the canal. But on Sunday 14 October, in secret, Eden received two French emissaries at Chequers. Their aim was to scupper the proposed settlement and bolster Eden’s wavering appetite for a short colonial war.

As joint owners of the Suez Canal Company, France had been Britain’s partner in the military build up after 26 July. The French had two other reasons for wanting Nasser ousted: his material support for the Algerian rebels and a burgeoning military relationship between France and Israel. It was the Israeli angle, albeit emphasising the regional complexities of the Suez crisis, which formed the basis of the game-changing message delivered by the French visitors.

Albert Gazier was acting head of the Quai d’Orsay. General Maurice Challe was a member of prime minister Guy Mollet’s personal staff. Under instructions from Paris, the French ambassador to London did not accompany them to Chequers. Eden followed this dubious example by excluding key figures from the civil service at the meeting. The only other person present was Anthony Nutting, a minister in the Foreign Office.  

The French emissaries began by saying that Israel was in a dangerous mood. Given that Britain had played a massive role in heightening Israel’s anxieties, this was hardly a revelation. As foreign secretary between 1951 and 1955, Eden had negotiated an evacuation agreement with Nasser, concluded in October 1954, whereby Britain’s supposedly temporary occupation of Egypt – it began under Gladstone in 1882 – finally came to an end in June 1956. However, by withdrawing 80,000 British troops from the Suez canal zone, Eden had removed a critical buffer between the Arab world’s most populous state and newly-created Israel. The existential threat felt by Israel was compounded by Nasser’s major arms deal with the Soviet Union in September 1955. Israel was not inclined to see the Suez crisis resolved peacefully.  

But the immediate danger to peace, stated the French emissaries, was not an Israeli attack on Egypt, but one on Jordan. Fedayeen raids on Israeli targets – and the following reprisals – raised border tensions. Jordan was a treaty ally of Britain. An Israeli attack on Jordan would therefore bring in the British. And with France close to Israel, the scenario being suggested was of Britain and France, united in their efforts against Nasser, on opposite sides of the escalating Israeli-Jordanian dispute.

To ensure that the regional picture was better suited to British and French interests, Gazier proceeded to outline another possible scenario. Israel might be encouraged to attack Egypt near the Suez canal, thus tapping into Israel’s mounting domestic pressures for a preventative war against its southern neighbour. Britain and France could then intervene to separate the belligerents and then go on secure the canal.  

According to Nutting’s memoir, No End of a Lesson, Eden “could scarcely contain his glee” while listening to this reckless scheme. Nevertheless, to suggest that the British prime minister was being played by the French would be mistaken. Rather, Challe and Gazier merely pushed against an open door. Eden had staked his political reputation on Nasser behaving himself after the conclusion of the 1954 agreement, a deeply unpopular scuttle in the eyes of Tory imperialist diehards. The Suez nationalisation was, of course, anything but good behaviour.

Eden thus seized the ‘French plan’ with alacrity and proceeded to short-circuit the British governmental process in an effort to keep the ménage à trois a secret. A few cabinet colleagues were kept fully appraised, plus a handful of civil servants, but the circle of trust was drawn so tightly that even military commanders, who really needed to know what was going on, were not told.

The most infamous part of proceedings occurred between 22 and 24 October in a private villa in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris. On the final day of the discussions a document was drafted in French and signed by the representatives from Britain, France and Israel. It is hard to imagine another smoking gun being so neatly and concisely crafted as the Protocol of Sèvres. Eden, who did not dignify the proceedings with his presence, was livid that the war plot had been committed to paper. Despite his best efforts, he was only able to destroy the British copy. Sniffing perfidy, the French and Israelis held tightly on to theirs.

Israel invaded Egypt on 29 October, as per the terms of Sèvres. The next day Britain and France issued an ultimatum calling on both sides to cease fire. Having digested the news, Gaitskell told the Commons that he could not find any legal argument for what Britain was doing. Consequently, unless British military action was deferred until after the UN Security Council had considered the matter, Labour would oppose the government. As such an assurance was not forthcoming, the opposition divided the House. In the days that followed, Speaker William Shepherd Morrison, struggled to maintain order.

Where the Commons went, the country followed, spurred on by a deeply polarised press. Eden had tried to win over The Times personally by telling its foreign editor more about the war plot than he had most of his cabinet colleagues, but the confidence was misjudged. The paper proceeded to sit awkwardly on the fence.

Despite the claims of its own journalists since 1956, the BBC’s coverage of the Suez war – under pressure from No10 – emphasised national unity over impartiality. Having only started broadcasting the previous year, ITV was less conflicted by national responsibility and editorial integrity. When the chairman of the Independent Television Authority, Sir Kenneth Clark, was asked by Eden to take a certain slant in the ‘national interest’, he politely refused.

Nothing encapsulated the polarisation of Britain better than the events of Sunday 4 November. While the cabinet met to decide on the final phase of the Suez operation (the landings at Port Said), Trafalgar Square was the scene of a massive ‘Law, not War’ rally. The hero of the latter was Aneurin Bevan: “If Sir Anthony is sincere in what he says – and he may be – then he is too stupid to be prime minister,” he announced. When part of the crowd later broke off and marched towards Downing Street, chanting, ‘Eden Must Go’, mounted police were sent charging down Whitehall and into the demonstrators. The noise was heard in the Cabinet Room, but did not prevent the landings from going ahead.

The reinvasion of Egypt (less than five months after the earlier occupation had ended) began on 5 November, only for the efforts to be stopped at midnight the same day, British time. American financial pressure, which had prompted a run on sterling, was the main factor behind the ceasefire. Less than half of the canal had been seized, and Nasser remained firmly in power.

If the main domestic lesson of Suez was that the proper working of government becomes even more essential at a time of a political crisis, the key external lesson was that Britain could no longer act independently of its friendly superpower when their interests diverged.

As for the wider impact of Suez, today historians no longer refer to it as a harbinger of the end of empire. In one recent collection of essays published after the fiftieth anniversary of the crisis, Tony Stockwell concluded that “the ebb and flow of empire washed over the supposed Suez watershed”. Referring to Eden’s post-Suez resignation and his replacement by Harold Macmillan, Stockwell added: “One Edwardian prime minister was succeeded by another who presumed that there were still ‘places where it is of vital interest to us that we should maintain our influence’.” The last decade would certainly seem to underline this final point. ■

Michael Thornhill is the author of Road to Suez: The Battle of the Canal Zone