Читать книгу: «An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo», страница 6
The psychic air of mid-twentieth-century England was thick with bad memories. Pat Jalland, in her history of English grief in a century of world wars, quotes from the memoir of J. S. Lucas, a private in the Queen’s Royal Regiment who, like Profumo, served in the gruelling campaigns in Italy. Before the action at Faenza in 1944, when Lucas was aged twenty-one, he was reunited with his friend Doug, beside whom he had fought in Tunisia. Doug had just asked him for a smoke when a mine exploded. ‘My hand was still opening the tin of cigarettes,’ wrote Lucas, ‘and even as I ran to where he lay, my mind refused to accept the fact of his death. One moment tall, a bit skinny, wickedly satirical, and now – nothing – only a body with a mass of cuts and abrasions and a patch of dirt on his forehead … I felt sure that some part of his soul must be hovering about. But he had gone – forever … between asking for a fag and getting one.’ That night at Faenza, in freezing cold, after heavy losses from shelling, the remnants of Lucas’s company took shelter, but he was too hungry and agitated for sleep. ‘Before my eyes there passed, in review, a procession of the mates I had lost – faces of chums who had gone in Africa, below Rome and in the battles above Rome. But most clearly I saw those who had died that day. Doug reeling backwards as the concrete mines exploded and Corporal Rich’s gentle eyes as he turned away with a goodbye “ciao”. The whole assembly of these dead comrades stood in a sombre semi-circle around me as if they were waiting and watching until the time should come when I joined their ghostly company.’ Next day Lucas was sent to the base psychiatric hospital at Assisi. There the medical officer strove to convince him that, although his grief and battle exhaustion were justified, his shame was not.29
A Midlands teenager remembered visiting Portsmouth during the 1950s, and being told that ‘Before the War’ this bombsite had been a chemist’s, or that hole had been a draper’s … ‘Before the War – Before the War’ was the sad, weird incantation of the times. All the youth could see were ‘stumps of shops, office blocks, houses, streets, piers, just stumps’. The sole undamaged residue of ‘Before the War’ was swaying wires above the streets, between the rubble and stumps, for trolley-bus power lines survive bombardment and blast. He also visited his mother’s family in Cambridgeshire. ‘There was the uncle who was half-blown to bits in the First World War, shouting and grunting meaningless sounds as he loaded hay on a truck, and then limping across and shaking my hand and screaming and laughing, and I was very frightened and people said it was a shame, and that he was very intelligent, and couldn’t help it, and how it wasn’t his fault.’30
There were widows and spinsters so lonely that they could fill their teapots with tears. In 1958 the novelist John Braine described eating poached eggs on toast in a London tea shop. The middle-aged woman next to him, ‘pale and drab in a skimpy cotton dress clinging to her scraggy body’, wore no wedding ring. When she was young, he thought, ‘some British general, breathing heavily, would have at last worked out the meaning of attrition and would have issued the order which deposited her future husband screaming on the barbed wire or drowning in the mud, and which left her, forty years later, eating a roll and butter and drinking a glass of orangeade, with dreadful slowness, alone in a London tea shop’. Later he glimpsed the woman again. ‘She was walking very slowly, her face a mask of misery, peering from side to side as if looking for help.’31
One night in 1963 another novelist, Frederic Raphael, struck up a conversation with two men on the late train from London to Colchester. The more loquacious, at first, was a reporter. He had been a warrant officer in the war, was captured by the Germans, and escaped three times. During one burst from captivity, he said, ‘he had killed an Austrian forest ranger whose boots he wanted. After killing him, he discovered the boots were the wrong size.’ The second traveller, returning from a dinner at the Society of Chartered Accountants, said little for a time, except to praise the scampi bonne femme. ‘Finally he broke out: “Have you ever seen a man’s face when he knows he’s going to die? I have. And if you’ve seen it once, you don’t want to see it again”.’ He had been a RAF navigator in an aircraft which had a forced landing on an airfield in an area north of Rome held by the Germans. The RAF men knocked out one German who attempted to detain them, and shot the other dead with his own rifle. ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face; not pretty. When he knew we were going to kill him. You can’t describe it. It’s just a thing you never forget. Thank God I wasn’t the one who had to pull the trigger. I’ll never forget the shot. Loudest thing I ever heard in my life.’ The German, he added, ‘had been a decent chap and shared cigarettes with the man who killed him.’ The reporter found Christmas unbearable. The frivolling children made him think of the bombs he had dropped which had incinerated children. Still, he opposed nuclear disarmament, and would drop the H-bomb himself if ordered to. ‘Oh yes,’ said the accountant, ‘so would I.’32
These were the ruminative confidences and formative memories that family men shared when unbending on a late night train in 1963. Jack Profumo’s England cannot be understood without them.
THREE
Lord
The Astors began at Cliveden with a row. William Waldorf Astor, the New York plutocrat, smarting from the way that he had been traduced by American newspapers during his failed candidatures for the state assembly, settled in England in 1890. Three years later he bought Cliveden, an Italianate pleasure palace perched on a high spacious site above a bend of the Thames, with a magnificent terrace commanding a prospect downstream towards Maidenhead, rather than a short view of the opposite bank.
Immediately he was mired in ill-will. He quarrelled with Cliveden’s previous owner, the Duke of Westminster, over so paltry an object as the visitors’ book. The Duke denounced the Yankee to the Prince of Wales. Astor gave a sturdy defence to the Prince’s Private Secretary, for he was intent on buying his way into the Marlborough House set. In 1895, for example, when he joined the prince’s house party at Sandringham, he made a show of paying £1,000 for a pair of bay carriage horses from the royal stud. In appreciation of Astor’s outlay, the Prince of Wales, with the Duke of Buccleuch in tow, attended a house party at Cliveden.1
Astor’s prickliness ensured his unpopularity. Staying with Lord Burton at Rangemore in 1897, the Marquess of Lincolnshire noted of his fellow guest: ‘Astor is another instance of the utter inability of American men to get on in England. Here is a man with millions – probably the richest man in the country; and yet he is given to understand that, though he is tolerated on account of his wealth, he is of society and yet not in it.’ Astor had represented Ferdinand de Rothschild when Empress Elizabeth of Austria visited London, but her suite ‘refused to call him “Thou”, though he implored them to do so. Astor assumes a … scornful deference to Ladies to whom he is speaking. He evidently resents the way he is treated; but tries not to show it.’ Two years later, Lincolnshire met Astor at Lord Lonsdale’s racing stud in Rutland. ‘He is a social failure. Pompous & proud, with an aggressive air of mock humility … The boy (who is Captain of the Boats at Eton) is at present voted a Prig.’2
Astor bought a London evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, in order to enhance his social influence, and appointed as its editor a Society swell, Harry Cust. Astor’s aunt Caroline, a snob who had imposed the notion of the exclusive ‘Four Hundred’ on New York City, had inaugurated the custom among New York millionaires of publicising their parties and controlling reputations by issuing tit-bits of news about their guests to the social columns. Astor tried to foist this foolery on London. He gave Cust a list of names, headed by the Duke of Westminster, of people who were never to be mentioned in the Pall Mall Gazette, in the mistaken belief that the English nobility cared about being mentioned in newspaper Society paragraphs. At first this was mocked, but in 1900 it brought his social nemesis.
Sir Berkeley Milne, a naval officer in command of the royal yacht (whom the Prince of Wales dubbed Arky-Barky), was taken to a musical evening at Carlton House Terrace by an invited guest who assured him that he would be welcome there. Astor ordered the interloper from his house and inserted a paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette announcing that ‘Sir A. B. Milne RN was not invited to Mr Astor’s concert.’ This upset the haute monde more than the Boxer rebellion in China, as Lincolnshire noted at a house party for the Prince of Wales and his mistress Alice Keppel: ‘HRH quite open-mouthed with fury: and vows he will never speak to him again.’ In retaliation for this royal ostracism, Astor called Mrs Keppel ‘a public strumpet’, and told people that King Edward VII (as the Prince became after his mother’s death in 1901) had been impotent for twenty years. He believed that the government wished to nominate him for a peerage in 1902, but that this was forbidden by the King, ‘who hated me’. Thereafter, he said, he never relented in seeking ‘to attain what Edward’s spite had withheld’.3
Cliveden was never a conventional English country house. It was not the centre of a great estate which gave the owner political influence and social prestige in the county. When in 1890 Lord Cadogan, who owned much of Chelsea but no landed estates, spent £175,000 to buy Culford in Suffolk, he acquired a house with 400 acres of parkland and 11,000 acres, and got his eldest son elected as MP for a nearby constituency two years later; and in 1893 the newly created Lord Iveagh, the brewery millionaire, spent £159,000 to buy the 17,000 acre Elveden estate, which made him a power in the district. Although Astor paid a vast sum for Cliveden, he got only 450 acres, comprising woods and riverside pleasure gardens. Cliveden proved a showhouse rather than a powerhouse.
In 1906 Astor gave Cliveden to his elder son, Waldorf, who that year married an American divorcée, Nancy Shaw. The young man, whom Lincolnshire had dismissed as a prig, left Oxford with a social conscience that was rare in an American millionaire. He deplored his father as a selfish reactionary, and wished to make amends by a life of public service. This paragon entered Parliament as MP for Plymouth in 1910, before becoming effectual proprietor of the Observer, a Sunday newspaper which his father bought in 1911. He was diagnosed with a weak heart, which made him medically unfit for trench warfare, and spent the early war years monitoring wasteful army organisation. This was an indelible stain on his reputation so far as some Tories and combatants were concerned. His hopes of appointment as the country’s first postwar Minister of Health were accordingly frustrated, and his advocacy of public health reforms got him called a ‘doctrinaire Socialist’ by reactionaries. Nevertheless, by his late thirties, Waldorf Astor was entrenched among the nation’s great and good. He was a patient chairman of committees, without a dash of flamboyance, whose attitude to his good causes could be described as reticent enthusiasm (rather as his attitude to his children might be called frigidly tender).4
Old man Astor, in the midst of the Kaiser’s war, by judicious distribution of £200,000 to King George V’s favourite war charities and the fighting funds of both the Conservative and Liberal parties, obtained first a barony and then a viscountcy. When he died in 1919, Waldorf Astor went reluctantly to the House of Lords. His wife was elected for the vacant Plymouth constituency, and became the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons.
Nancy Astor, when young, was generous, bold and funny, with quick-witted shrewdness and inexhaustible energy; but after turning fifty her sudden amusing parries turned to rash outbursts, and she became a domineering, obstinate and often hurtful spitfire. Her religion put claws on her. She converted to Christian Science in 1914, coaxed her husband into becoming a disciple of Mrs Baker Eddy, and nagged her children along the same lines. Her first marriage had ended because her husband was a dipsomaniac who became sexually importunate when drunk. She and Waldorf were both prudish teetotallers, and her temperance campaigning became notorious for its scolding tone. Before 1914 she kept two infatuated young men, Billy Grenfell and Eddie Winterton, enthralled as her amis de marie, though she was the sort of flirt who required only to be the centre of admiring attention: Billy and Eddie were never permitted any pounces.5
Nancy Astor had six children: Bobbie Shaw by her first marriage, and four sons and a daughter by her second. The eldest child of her second marriage, William Waldorf Astor (known to his friends as Bill and to his parents as Billie), was born in 1907, and became the last Astor to live at Cliveden. From his mother he received the least affection of all her children, although he strove to win her approval and pretended to believe her Christian Science indoctrination long after he had privately rejected it. She belittled, chastised, and rejected him; and resented the fact that her favourite son, Bobbie, would inherit neither the Astor money nor title. Even in old age she spread discord: as a man in his fifties, Bill would still tense when she bustled into a room; people saw him blanch before her jibes began; and his widow believed that the aortic aneurism that killed him at the age of fifty-eight was partly attributable to the anxiety that his mother had generated. Certainly, her angry obsessions wearied her husband: Waldorf described her in 1951, a year before he died, as ranting against ‘Socialism, Roman Catholicism, Psychiatry, the Jews, the Latins and the Observer’.6
The Astor children suffered from their family’s reputation for ostentatious wealth. Bill was held by his ankles out of a school window to see if gold would fall from his pockets. He was victimised by his classics tutor at Eton, Charles Rowlatt – ‘rather a nasty bounder at the best of times’, he told his mother, ‘so I hope you’ll … have his blood’. Rowlatt was an austere bachelor who commanded the Eton Officer Training Corps and heaped Bill’s next brother David with work and punishments: ‘What annoys me is the way when he loses his temper with me (a daily affair) he always ends up by saying something about all the family talking much too much,’ David complained; ‘I call it awful cheek but I daren’t tell him so.’ Nancy Astor was indeed of confounding volubility, and during the 1920s still retained her sense of the ridiculous, though this vanished with the complacent egotism and rudeness of her old age. In Rowlatt’s day she amused her children by mimicking the county ladies (and perhaps Eton ushers) deploring ‘those vulgar Americans’ at Cliveden.7
As an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, Bill Astor began to blossom, although Cliveden’s proximity to the university made it hard to break his shackles to his parents’ home. His outlook as an undergraduate was glossed by his acceptance of conventional proprieties: ‘I do like a disciplined life, belonging to a properly organised & ordered society either at the bottom, the middle or the top,’ he wrote shortly after the General Strike. Polo, hunting and racing were his chief avocations. He described a flat race in fancy dress at Oxford in 1928. ‘We had an oyster and fish and chips lunch and then fared out. I arrayed myself tastefully in a white turban, in which I placed two poppies; a blue sweater, high neck, a red and blue sash and pyjama trousers of broad pink and white stripes. I had a hireling of Mac’s, called Nippy, who really went very well. There were all sorts of costumes, Proctors, Scouts, clerics, beards, and so on. It was as muddy as a ditch.’8
Bill Astor was thoroughly anglicised for a child of American parents, although he was never convincing as a traditional Englishman. ‘There are a lot of Middle West people on board,’ he wrote to his mother from the liner Olympic as it approached New York. ‘The language of course is a difficulty as I understand not everything they say & they hardly understand a thing I say, otherwise we get on splendidly.’ He was trained for the responsibilities of public life, and instilled with an international outlook. When in 1929 he was sent to Hanover to live in a family and learn German, provincialism made him shudder. The audience at the local opera house were, he reported, ‘repulsive: in the intervals they go up to a large hall & walk round & round it, very slowly & solemnly: all in ugly ill-fitting dresses & suits’. He recoiled from ‘the dirt and perversion and vulgarity that abounds in Berlin’, as he reassured his parents. ‘The Germans deliberately go out to bring nasty things into their plays. Not funny, just horrible.’9
He was also instilled with his father’s sense of duty. Both men were meliorists who wished to be competent and kind; but whereas the older man, at a pinch, gave precedence to competence, Bill’s preference was for kindness. In 1932 his father secured his appointment as personal secretary to the Earl of Lytton, chairman of the League of Nations’ investigation into Japanese aggression in Manchuria. This visit to China (during which he had an affair with a young Russian woman who was a refugee from the Soviet system) triggered his lifelong compassion for war refugees, displaced persons and civilian casualties. Subsequently he attended the League of Nations’ discussions in Geneva on the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, deputising for Lytton who was ill. He was adopted as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for East Fulham (no doubt helped by the assurance that Astor money would pay his election expenses and subsidise constituency party funds) and in 1935 joined his mother in the Commons. He subsequently took a tall house in Mayfair at 45 Upper Grosvenor Street. Only a year later he became, through family influence, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Samuel Hoare, who was successively First Lord of the Admiralty and Home Secretary. Bill Astor, who was conscientious and keen to please, visited Czechoslovakia in 1938, and returned with undiminished support for Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.
The phrase ‘the Cliveden set’ first appeared in a socialist Sunday newspaper of November 1937 in a story about pro-German machinations. The phrase was promoted by the Marxist Claud Cockburn in his newssheet The Week, and popularised by left-wing journalists, who made play with the Astors’ (remote) German ancestry. Cliveden, in this smear campaign, became the headquarters of a conspiracy of manufacturers, bankers, editors, landlords and diplomatic meddlers, all intent on appeasing Hitler. The Astors at Cliveden, who had been shunned by the Prince of Wales’s set at the turn of the century, were to be reviled at the time of the Profumo Affair. But these cycles of denigration were nugatory beside the abuse in the late 1930s, when communists and their sympathisers concocted their shabby half-truths about the Cliveden set. Harold Nicolson’s trenchant assessment of the Cliveden set was fairer than the communist propaganda. ‘The harm which these silly selfish hostesses do is really immense,’ he noted in April 1939 of Nancy Astor and a Mayfair counterpart. ‘They convey to foreign envoys that policy is decided in their own drawing rooms … They wine and dine our younger politicians, and they create an atmosphere of authority and responsibility and grandeur, whereas the whole thing is a mere flatulence of the spirit’.10
In 1942, while Bill Astor was serving in the Middle East, his father took two decisions which snubbed him. Lord Astor’s friend, Lord Lothian, had instigated in 1938 a change in the law which enabled the National Trust to accept ownership of country houses as well as landscape (he bequeathed his own house, Blickling, to the Trust in 1940), and thus inaugurated a new phase in that charity’s protection of rural England. Two years later Lord Astor gave the house at Cliveden, together with 250 acres of gardens and woods, to the National Trust as a way of mitigating death duties. The same year he dismissed the intransigent, elderly editor of the Observer, installed a temporary replacement, gave forty-nine per cent of the shares to his second son, David, and indicated that David (then aged thirty) would become postwar editor. Bill, brought up as the heir to Cliveden and expecting to inherit the Observer, reeled under this double rebuff.
Bill Astor was thought a superlatively lucky man by those who did not know him well. He lost his Fulham seat in the general election of 1945, failed by a few hundred votes to win High Wycombe in 1950, but was returned to the Commons at the next election in 1951, despite being one of the few Conservative candidates who made clear that (based on his prewar experience as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary) he supported the abolition of capital punishment and opposed birching. His views were influenced by reading Arthur Koestler’s death-cell book, Darkness at Noon. Unlike many in his party, he believed that ‘the de-brutalisation of punishment’ resulted in a falling crime rate. His father’s death in 1952 sent him to the Lords, and put an end to his ambitions for political office. In the Lords he advocated ‘civilised’ values: ‘arguments based on the emotions of revenge, of righteous indignation and of fear’ made bad law, he told peers when speaking against the death penalty in 1956. Homosexuality should not be criminalised, he argued, because ‘those of us who are lucky enough to be normal should have nothing but pity for people in that situation’.11
With women Bill was fidgety and luckless. In the 1930s he was in love with a married American woman five years his senior who had no wish to wed him. While serving in the war-torn Middle East he had a romance that petered out. Returning to England, he married in June 1945 only a month after the end of fighting in Europe – hastily, as many (including his brother David) did at that time. His bride, Sarah Norton, was recovering from the recent death of a much-loved mother and from a broken engagement to Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy Hartington, who had married someone else and been killed in action in quick succession. (Sarah Norton’s father, Lord Grantley, was a monocled clubman who worked in the film business with Valerie Hobson’s first husband; Sarah Norton’s mother had been Lord Beaverbrook’s favourite mistress.)
The newly married Astors suffered the heartbreak of three miscarriages before the birth in 1951 of their only child, William. Sarah Astor subsequently endured serious post-natal depression (a condition not then recognised or understood by physicians). In the thrall of this, during 1952, she left her husband for an Oxford undergraduate who was seven years her junior. There were long, miserable consultations with lawyers and bystanders. One mutual friend spent eight hours with her, urging reconciliation, and then had another long talk with Bill. ‘He gave it to her straight from the shoulder, giving home truths about the disastrous effect on a child of a broken home, of the cruelty of her action on me, of the deteriorating effect of this on her own character & her letting the side down generally,’ Bill reported that autumn. ‘My intention is to sit & do nothing; do nothing to create ill-will or make it harder for her to return … What hell this all is. But William is wonderful, healthy, happy, gregarious, noisy.’12 The Astors were divorced in 1953, but remained good friends and ensured that their son had an untroubled childhood.
Soon after his first marriage, wishing to provide his wife with her own country house and to plant himself in the Bicester hunting country, Bill Astor had bought Bletchingdon Park, a Palladian house in Oxfordshire, from a penurious bachelor (Lord Valentia) whose heirs were distant and obscure. Bletchingdon was still Bill’s legal residence at the time of his divorce in 1953, but was sold immediately after the judicial decree was secured, when he returned to Cliveden. It had lain in desuetude for several years, and he hoped to revive the great days when his mother had drawn smart Society, political lions and literary panthers to the house. While serving in the Middle East he had been nostalgic for the Cliveden parties that were held during Ascot Week: ‘tennis and riding in the morning: and all the girls in their best dresses and men in grey top hats fixing on buttonholes and sprays of flowers in the hall at twelve and the cars all lined up and the Royal Procession and Father’s colours on the course and polo in the evening and swimming and all the rhododendrons out and for once my parents forgetting politics and giving themselves over to social joy! I hope so much I won’t find a new order when I get back: I enjoyed the old order so much.’13
The 1950s were an envious decade. Envy was most intense among those who had lately risen in the world, as Geoffrey Gorer noted in 1951. ‘Some of the formerly prosperous classes, especially the women, are quite venomous about the advantages the working classes enjoy today, compared with before the war. But they are not as venomous as the working-class and middle-class men who are making good money and getting higher positions. Many of these people are filled with hatred for those they call “the idle rich”.’ Bill Astor encountered such resentment when he was parliamentary candidate at High Wycombe. If his wife attended a meeting in a fur coat, people seethed: ‘Look at her, flaunting her riches!’ If she left it at Bletchingdon, they hissed: ‘She’s dressing down to us! We all know she’s got a mink at home!’14
Bill Astor’s Cliveden regime did not conciliate haters of the idle rich. His belief (broadcast on BBC Radio in 1956) that the management of French stud farms was superior to their English rivals made him further enemies. Yet ‘Bill was quite snobbish in an English way’, recalled his friend Pamela Cooper. Her son Grey Gowrie thought Bill ‘lacked self-belief’, despite some remarkable qualities. ‘He worried too much about what people thought of him. He was conventional to the degree of not escaping the conventions of upper-class society, but they certainly didn’t fit him like a glove.’ Some of his guests were the smart end of rag, tag and bobtail. A luncheon guest at Cliveden noted: ‘Lord Astor had some anonymous lords and ladies (their personalities and names did not impinge on one).’15
This same guest, the writer and connoisseur Maurice Collis, in 1955 watched Astor driving in his Bentley ‘accompanied by one of those well-born but colourless chits of girls who are often to be met with at Cliveden’.16 The girl was twenty-four-year-old Philippa Hunloke, the stage-manager daughter of Dorothy Macmillan’s sister Lady Anne Holland-Martin and Harold Macmillan’s goddaughter. A fortnight later she married Bill. The couple had a discontented honeymoon in the South of France and at the Astor stud in Ireland, from which they returned estranged, but with the bride pregnant. There was an intimidating collection of guests at the new Lady Astor’s first big Cliveden dinner: King Gustav of Sweden, the Dowager Duchess of Rutland, Nancy Astor, the octogenarian pro-consul Lord Hailey, the former head of the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan, Maurice Collis, an air marshal called Lord Bandon, Isaiah Berlin, and an old courtier called Lady Worsley, all exuding stale, elderly aplomb. Philippa Astor faced her duties as chatelaine of Cliveden with flurried dread.
Moreover, Nancy Astor was captious and undermining to the women in her family circle. She resented her daughters-in-law for supplanting her in her sons’ lives, went careening through the family, and grew more destructive with age. Her four Astor sons married a total of eleven times: there is no doubt that her brutal, intrusive rudeness upset her sons’ domesticity. Bill’s wives, installed in his mother’s place at Cliveden, suffered worst of all. ‘The most detestable woman in England; boring, rude and guilty of interference in British politics which has brought nothing but disaster,’ Isaiah Berlin judged of Nancy in 1954; but said that Bill, who often entertained him at Cliveden, was ‘one of the kindest, most public-spirited, human beings’. By the autumn of 1956, Bill Astor’s second marriage was so stressful, and soaring his blood pressure to dangerous levels, that he left for New York, and asked Philippa Astor to leave Cliveden before his return (their divorce, however, was not finalised until 1960).17
This marital breakdown coincided with the Suez crisis. Bill and his brothers David and Jakie (a Tory backbencher) put themselves at loggerheads with their adopted class by opposing Eden’s bungling. They showed themselves as Anglo-Americans, supporters of the Atlantic Alliance, who saw the dangers posed to the English-speaking hegemony by Anglo-French collusion in the Israeli attack without consulting the US government. Bill raised the die-hards’ ire by criticising the Suez adventure in the Lords debate on 1 November 1956. The debate had given the impression, he said, ‘that it is Colonel Nasser who has mounted a massive invasion into the territory of Israel and whom we are condemning as the aggressor and the invader, rather than the other way around’. It was unclear, he continued, whether Eden’s government aimed to displace Nasser from power in Egypt or safeguard shipping through the canal – which, despite dire predictions, had never been disrupted since nationalisation.
