The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on May 20, 2009
The English Historical Review 2009 CXXIV(508):605-640; doi:10.1093/ehr/cep146
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
‘The Less Said about Suez the Better’: British Governments and the Politics of Suez's History, 1956–67*
Kingston University
From an early stage of the 1956 Suez Crisis serious questions were raised about British policy, most notably about alleged collusion with the French and Israeli governments. Unconvinced by the Eden government's denials, critics accused ministers of misleading parliament and the country, and particularly of intervening in Egypt on a false pretext. The subsequent military debacle merely compounded the problem. Subsequently, Labour and Liberal MPs and peers conducted a determined parliamentary campaign, boosted by fresh revelations made in successive publications, in support of both a public inquiry and an official history on Suez. Unsurprisingly between 1956 and 1964 successive Conservative Governments rejected such demands, given the involvement of several ministers in the Eden government. Despite fostering expectations of a change of course, the 1964-70 Labour governments merely followed the position taken by their Conservative predecessors, particularly given the continuities in official advice pointing to the adverse domestic and foreign policy consequences of commissioning either a public inquiry or official history about Suez. Highlighting the politics of Suez's history, this episode helps explain why over fifty years on Suez occupies still a prominent place in contemporary political vocabulary in Britain, as demonstrated by the manner in which debates about British intervention in the 2003 Iraq War have been framed in part by echoes of Suez.