717. The Suez Crisis: Anarchy in the Middle East (Part 1)

This episode is brought to you by Revolut. Standing still leaves no legacy. History is written by progress, by revolution. Fighting for independence, dismantling those broken systems, defying injustice. Every revolution begins with the refusal to accept the norm, a demand for more. And Revolut is founded on the same principle. Originally established to push back the frontiers of traditional banking, it puts the power back into your hands. You can manage all of your money in one app. Plus, you can earn while you spend with the RevPoints reward system. As a fully authorised UK bank, your money is FSCS protected. Sign up to Revolut today at Revolut.com forward slash T-R-I-H. That's all lowercase. And you'll get £20 after the first time that you spend. 18 plus. End date and promotion Ts and Cs apply. And RevPoints Ts and Cs apply. This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disaster. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria. For thousands of years, humanity was defenceless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation. Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org slash mosquito to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Autotrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at Autotrader makes it way easier. Really. So you can shop loads and loads of cars online at Autotrader.com. And you can buy your car online at Autotrader.com. And you can buy loads and loads of cars online. You can compare prices. You can check the financing and trade in options. And of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you. So there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help. So buy your car online on Autotrader. Really. Citizens, we shall not let imperialists or exploiters dominate us. We shall not let history repeat itself. The Suez Canal Company was a state within a state, relying on imperialism and its stooges. The canal was built for the sake and the benefit of Egypt, but it was a source of exploitation and the draining of wealth. Today, citizens, our rights have been restored to their owners. Today, we achieve true sovereignty, true dignity and true pride. Today, when we regain our rights, I say in name of people of Egypt, that we shall defend these rights, and we shall hold fast. We shall sacrifice our lives and our blood in defending them. And when we build edifice of our dignity, freedom and pride, we will eradicate domination, humiliation and submission. The canal constituted an edifice of humiliation. But today, citizens, the Suez Canal Company has been nationalized. Today, citizens, our wealth has been restored to us. So, that was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, and he was speaking to an estimated 250,000 people in Alexandria, a port on the north coast of Egypt, on the 26th of July, 1956. And listeners may have been wondering, did Nasser speak with a Yorkshire accent? Well, in one sense, no. But in another sense, perhaps, because he was the son of a humble post office clerk. And as I've said, he's a native of Alexandria, which lies in the north of Egypt. Kind of quite upwardly mobile, but always proud of his roots. And so, in a sense, Dominic, would you not say, in British terms, perhaps, he's like a kind of a Yorkshire grammar school boy made good. Is he Harold Wilson? A slight hint of Harold Wilson, perhaps. Don't you think? Wow. I like that. Yeah. So, he's a man of the people, isn't he? He's from northern Egypt, and he's very internationalizing things. So, I think that, you know, there are kind of echoes there. And this is a seismic speech. It was carried live, not just across Egypt, but across North Africa and the whole of the Middle East by the Cairo radio station, the voice of the Arabs. And to say that it has massive political consequences, well, that would be an understatement, wouldn't it? It would be an understatement. I wondered if you were trying to do Andy Burnham there for a second. And this was. It was the sort of nationalization was the theme that had given you your way into NASA's character. No, no, no, no. My thoughts are kind of more, what would the vibe be in the 1950s? Fair. Yeah, very good. So, yes, you're right. This is actually a massively important speech. It's the speech that kicks off the Suez Crisis of 1956. So, for people who don't know, this was the attempt by Britain and France, in collusion with Israel, to invade Egypt, to recapture the Suez Canal from the to overthrow NASA and to restore their kind of imperial dominance of the Middle East. And a lot of listeners will know, as you will know, Tom, that thanks to the American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it ended in total disaster and humiliation. And it's always seen as this sort of landmark in the decline of the British Empire and the decline of British power more generally. So, you know, we're a patriotic podcast, aren't we? Are you going to find this a difficult recording, do you think? Well, I'm looking forward to our next series, which is going to be on the Crimean War, where, again, Britain and France head east. And although there are certain disasters in the course of that, ultimately, we win that. That's something to look forward to. Anyway, Suez is a brilliant window into post-war Britain, into the politics of the Middle East, into the Cold War, and, of course, the decline of the European empires. But it's also part of this bigger drama. There are some years in the 20th century where everything seems to be happening at once. And 1956 is one of them. So at the very moment, I mean, literally at the very moment when Red Army tanks are fighting their way into the Hungarian capital Budapest to crush the Hungarian revolution, Britain and France are preparing their attack on Egypt. And these two dramas happen side by side. So there's a great book on this by my friend Simon Hall about 1956, which basically does it kind of month by month. And I think there's a real sense of the sort of narrative momentum that in the newspapers at the end of October, beginning of November, these two stories, Suez and Hungary, I mean, they're on the same front pages. It's extraordinary. They're both about imperial bullies, right? Trying to, you know, crush upstart rebellions. Exactly. So what we're going to do is this week we'll do Suez. Next week we'll do Hungary. And a lot of club members will say, well, is there something for us here? And the good news is there is, because there is a special bonus series uniting Hungary. And it's about the sporting ramifications of these great events of the 1950s. And we're recording this series with the brilliant football writer, Jonathan Wilson, and the two great citadels of sport and indeed culture in the mid-1950s. So Budapest and Wolverhampton. So that's something for everyone to look forward to. I'm a massive Anthony Eden fan. Shall I tell you why? Go on. Is it to do with Wiltshire and the Salisbury area? And he had, he was the only person in the village who had a swimming pool. It was ice cold, but we would go in occasionally. The same doctor who inspected your tonsils had previously been grappling with Anthony Eden's. Yes, exactly so. Wow. What a brush with greatness. So in a sense, you know, this is my brush with the history of these convulsive events. Well, that's poignant. And maybe you'll be able to offer some interesting app-su as the story continues. I mean, I never met him, but I felt that I knew him. Yeah, you didn't need to, did you? Not really. Dr. Brown told me everything. and a big shout out to dr brown he was a wonderful great to get him on the show anyway eden is the paradigmatic example of how you go from hero to zero he starts as you know he's churchill's lieutenant in the second world war and he ends up basically being the 20th century's liz truss all the sort of surveys of british academics and whatnot rank him bottom of british modern british prime ministers i mean liz truss was always hopeless right yes whereas anthony eden was seen as the great star of i mean kind of heroic suave dashing opposed to hitler all of that this is exactly the thing you're totally right so eden is a great character he's a he's a brilliant character and when people moan about modern politicians being boring i mean anthony eden is not boring at all he's genuinely really interesting guy so he was born in county durham to a landed family in 1897 his father sir william eden was a local politician and he was born in the city of durham in 1897 and he was born in the city of durham and he was a local magistrate and he was everyone said william eden was an incredibly egotistical man and he was sort of had these violent rages like incredibly unstable i mean please assure me that his mother was very stable his mother sybil gray so the gray family you know another aristocratic be aristocratic northern family i think related to your friend sir edward gray your great hero yeah from falardon so she was a massive she was profligate she was flighty she was incredibly promiscuous so flighty and given to rages did eden inherit this he did so his um sort of deputy rab butler in the 1950s described eden as half mad baronet half beautiful woman which actually does capture his character quite well so it will astound people to know that eden went to ethan and then he volunteered not really with a feather he volunteered for the army he served as a second lieutenant on the song when he was 19 and he was incredibly brave so his sergeant said afterwards everybody liked him he was popularly known as the boy because he was only 19. and this sergeant was injured in no man's land and eden went and single-handedly rescued him and eden won a military cross for this and he hated talking about it afterwards he didn't even mention his military cross you know in sort of his cv because he thought it was vulgar and he thought it was demagogic to mention it i really respect that yeah completely so he went back to england you will definitely respect this i would imagine he went to christchurch oxford and he studied unusual very unusually and he was a very good man and he was a very good man and he was a very good man oriental languages in which he got a first so he learned arabic and persian he became an absolute devotee of persian literature that was what he did for work for fun he read balazac flaubert standard zola in the original french and he collected this fantastic library of french and persian particularly persian literature and poetry and he also loved shakespeare didn't he was always quoting shakespeare massive shakespeare buff so he he always he always loved shakespeare he used to say he never left the house he had a different shakespeare play in his pocket so at any given moment he would whip it out and read some shakespeare so it's a massive theater buff he collects art he's just this unbelievably urbane and cultured man and also the best dressed man in britain incredibly suave he's famous for this anyway in 1923 when he was 26 he became the tory mp for warwick and lemington and his two favorite politicians were great friends of the rest is history and he was a great politician and he was a great politician and he was a great politician and and bode very well for his future career they were herbert henry asquith masterful war leader in the first world war and everybody's favorite prime minister stanley baldwin who was of course prime minister at the time but baldwin is subsequently condemned for having appeased hitler whereas eden makes his name doesn't he as someone who sides with churchill in this debate and is against appeasement eventually so eden is kind of making his way up the ladder in the 1930s in particular so because he's so handsome and he's so elegant and articulate he's a sort of future england captain and by 1931 he's a junior foreign office minister so appeasement is kind of his thing for for the first part of the sort of 30s by 1935 at the age of just 38 he's foreign secretary but you're right in 1938 he makes his reputation not just in britain actually but internationally by walking out of neville chamberlain's government because he says you're appeasing basically giving muscly too much given too many chances enough and so he first becomes an international star by opposing a military dictator exactly a moment that lodges in his you know in his kind of consciousness his mighty brain his mighty brain is a huge part of his self-image and why wouldn't it be i mean fair enough so he's elegant he's fashionable but he's also a man of principle and this brings him into alliance with churchill when churchill becomes prime minister in 1940 eden becomes his foreign secretary again and leader of the house of commons he's a political star he's incredibly famous um worldwide he's clearly going to be the next tory prime minister when churchill retires churchill loses in 45 and comes back in 1951 eden becomes deputy prime minister and foreign secretary again he's basically waiting now for churchill to pack it in churchill keeps having strokes and has become a sort of shadow of his former self but refuses to leave four years go by eden is chafing butter on the nipples i gather oh my god we i mean where's dr brown when you need him so um april 1955 churchill retires and eden is prime minister now it's there are very few prime ministers in british history who have taken over with their star so much in the ascendant and so that is the difference with list trust that's a definite difference with this trust so when eden becomes prime minister there are warm tributes not just from the tory benches but from the labor benches as well people say you know what a tremendous fellow he is we don't necessarily agree with him but obviously he's the man for the hour his public approval rating is 73 percent which you know politicians would give anything for something like that today i mean everyone says of him you know he's suave he speaks foreign languages he's met everybody now he's met stalin he's met you know every world leader including eisenhower because he'd worked with eisenhower through the second world war exactly the yorkshire post you and i mean we've had a bit lucky that there exists to see succeed sir winston a leader who's a world statesman in his own right and a brilliant fact my favorite anthony in fact there was a french english dictionary published in 1955 and it advised french uh french speakers that the way to translate the phrase he's very distinguished was he's a regular anthony eden that's a tremendous was that in your book yeah i think so i mean i must have got it from somewhere i didn't make it up that's a great detail do you think that reflects french admiration for him because he he'd been de gaulle's great supporter throughout the war years he'd kind of consistently backed him but also he's the kind of man who's always taking the boat train to paris dressed in absolutely terrific suits milord yeah very baggy trousers but a massively brilliant suit and a lot of tweed i imagine and he just looks great he's got a lovely mustache so that's all good he calls an immediate election he boosts the tory majority by 20 seats he's got a then i think a record 49.7 percent of the vote so basically what could possibly go wrong well there are actually a few shadows already a few clues to eden's downfall so first of all he's actually had quite a tragic life so one of his brothers was killed at eep another of his brothers was killed at the battle of jutland his first marriage was a disaster so he and his wife were both unhappy and they had loads of affairs they had three sons one of them died after a few weeks another his eldest son simon was killed in a plane crash in burma during the war 1945 sweden got divorced very unusual to have a divorcee as prime minister in fact i think he may be the first divorcee to be prime minister he married churchill's niece clarissa who was 23 years his junior but they had a very successful marriage despite all the elegance and the tremendous suits he's actually quite a sort of he's quite a shy lonely man a tense man you know he appears debonair and insouciant but actually he's eaten up by anxiety he's not a good mixer he doesn't hang out with other mps he's a workaholic he has these massive tantrums inherited clearly from his father and sort of meltdowns and people would always say of him everyone who worked with him said the thing that drove them mad about eden was eden would he was addicted to the telephone so he would ring them up at all hours he would start at six o'clock in the morning he'd be ringing people up there's very goalhanger presenter behavior i have to say um i'm thinking of some goalhanger presenters in particular well i mean i have often been described as half mad baronet half beautiful woman so have you uh all the time anyway uh your health is you're robust but his health is very precarious well thank god he's got a good doctor on hand yeah well exactly we'll finally sorted him out so before the war he'd been plagued by all kinds of things like gallstones migraines what ever and in april 1953 he went under the knife for a routine gallbladder operation and this operation went hideously wrong basically he started losing loads of blood i think amazingly right part of the reason it went wrong was that churchill insisted on instructing this surgeon personally using the acumen that he'd brought to the operation at gallipoli churchill put loads of pressure on the surgeon who was shaking because he was under such pressure from Churchill. The surgeon slipped. He accidentally cut Eden's bile. duct. Eden started losing loads of blood, and they only just saved his life. He needed a second operation to fix the damage from the first operation. This second operation also went unbelievably wrong. He lost loads more blood, and he came close to death. And finally, he was given a third operation in Boston, and they said to him, you know, it's about 50-50 if you make it after this operation, but you need it. This is your last chance. And it took eight hours, and he did make it, but he was never the same man again. So this very suave, very dapper, sensitive, and very sickly man is taking office in 1955, and he's taking office at a really tricky time to be a British Prime Minister. It's 10 years after the Second World War, and the British Empire is coming under intolerable pressure. So in some ways, it's already started to break up. So India, of course, has gone. Pakistan has gone. What was then called Ceylon, Sri Lanka, has gone. And the problems are piling up. So to put it very, I mean, I'm trying to do the decline of the British Empire in 30 seconds. Here we go. So for various reasons, from the impact of the Second World War, to the fact that they have tried to modernize their colonies economically, because they're desperate for money, all of this has provoked this upsurge of anti-colonial protest, of nationalism, everywhere from the Gold Coast in West Africa to Malaya in Asia. So on every front, the British colonial authorities are sort of fighting fires. On top of that, the international climate is not sympathetic to European empires. So the two big superpowers, the two big winners of the 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union, are both overtly unsympathetic to other people's empires, even though, of course, they're both informal empires themselves. The Soviet Union and China are promoting these communist and nationalist insurgencies, obviously, because they want the European empires to break up so they can profit. The United States thinks that European imperialism is a bad look. They want the British and French to disengage in an orderly way so that they can basically replace these formal empires with informal American hegemony. And on top of all that, Britain just can't afford it. So Britain can't afford to fight these police actions and whatnot. Britain's been bankrupted by two world wars. Its defense budget is putting a massive strain on the national economy. Sterling is kind of flooding out of the country. So they're not going to be able to fight these police actions. We're spending so much money abroad. So that puts pressure on the balance of payments and therefore on the value of the pound. So, you know, all of this is very stressful for any British government. And there's basically not really much point in fighting it that the ship has sailed. And it's a reminder that the British empire was always basically a drag on the British economy. Yeah, that it's a massive drag. And once it all starts to kick off, you're not going to be able to fight all these fires at once. In fact, you're not really gonna be able to fight any of them. What's the point? And also people at home don't really care. So just get rid of it. Now, the pace of change is much faster than the British would like. But by the time Eden takes over spring 55, the direction of travel is very clear. So there's a colonial office report at the beginning of the year. This process cannot now be halted or reversed. And it is only to a limited extent that its pace can be controlled. So whenever people say in that sort of blithe, airy way they do, oh, these people in the 50s with their massive mustaches were like dyed in the wool imperialists. They didn't realize the writing was on the wall. That's just rubbish. They absolutely they're not idiots. They know more about it than we do that. They absolutely know the writing is on the wall. Now, all of this brings us to one place in particular, which is Egypt. Egypt was never a formal colony. But obviously, because of its location, it's so important strategically to British power in the Mediterranean and to India, right? I mean, that's the key thing for most of the British Empire's existence. The reason it matters for India is, of course, because of the Suez Canal. So if people think of the map, the Suez Canal, 120 miles long, the waterway cut through the desert. It goes from Port Said on the Mediterranean coast all the way south to Suez, which is basically the gateway to the Red Sea. And what this means, you start from the top of the canal, you go down to the bottom. It means that you can basically go straight through to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. You don't have to go all the way around Africa. And that basically cuts 5,000 miles off the journey from Europe to India. And the backstory of the canal, the canal is actually French. So the canal, was designed by a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1858, and it was opened 11 years later. And it was owned and run by the Suez Canal Company, which was half French, half Egyptian, basically a concession. But the Egyptians got into a terrible economic mess, financial mess in the 1870s. And Benjamin Disraeli saw the opportunity to buy it up. So he got Queen Victoria to borrow 4 million pounds from Rothschilds. And she bought, effectively, for the British taxpayer, a 44% stake in the Suez Canal Company. So Britain is the largest single shareholder in the Suez Canal Company. The rest of the shareholders tend to be French investors. And after that point, protecting the canal becomes one of Britain's great strategic priorities. So in 1882, there were riots in Alexandria, and Britain used the opportunity to send troops into Egypt. And from then on, Egypt was a. Colony in all but name. So you've got thousands of British soldiers guarding the canal, even after, in the 1920s, Egypt becomes independent, under Tom. King Fawad I. Now, how do you know all about him? You've been inspecting his relics or something? No. I was having cocktails in the British Embassy in Cairo, as one does, a couple of weeks ago. And they had a gallery of photographs illustrating Anglo-Egyptian history. So, King Fawad was there. King Farouk, the ultimately very obese playboy, who gets kicked out, doesn't he, and goes off to the fleshpots of Monte Carlo. He's basically like that bloke in Naples when Nelson was there. He's like King Ferdinand, or whatever his name was. No, I think he's fatter, isn't he? He's very, very fat and very fond of the ladies and a card game. Anyway, they've got great photographs. They've got Howard Carter, they've got Churchill, looking at a baby so that it's very hard to tell them apart. They've got, who is it? It's Lord Allenby with his pet stork in the gardens of the embassy. And they have a photograph of Anthony Eden with Colonel Nasser. And I'm sure we will be coming to that meeting in due course. But it's all there. It's wonderful. Yeah. Well, this is a great lesson, by the way, to aspiring podcasters, because what this is telling you is that even when Tom was having drinks at the British Embassy in Cairo, you were still effectively working. Yeah, of course. You were doing research, which is great. I'm never off-duty, Dominic. No, good. Very good. So let's get into the early 50s. Egypt is still seen as vitally important to Britain's national interests. So a foreign office paper in 1951, envisaging what would happen if there were a third world war, Egypt would be the essential central point from which to defend the Middle East. As it had been in the second, right? I mean, that's the whole thing, El Alamein and stuff. Exactly. And of course, oil is so important now. So oil from the Middle East provides 70% of Europe's oil. And of that oil, two thirds of it passes through the Suez Canal to Europe. So this will be familiar to listeners, won't it? The idea of throttle points on the global oil trade. What kind of fool would kick off a military adventure over a crucial strait that controls oil supplies? Well, we'll find out. So the canal is still being operated by the Suez Canal Company, and it is being protected by British troops. And these troops are based on what's called the Canal Zone. The Canal Zone, stretches for 120 miles along the canal. It's this kind of wasteland of airfields and ports and barracks and warehouses and ammunition depots and all this kind of thing. It's the biggest military base in the world, and it's guarded by about 40,000 British troops. But just to ask, it's not like Gibraltar or those air bases in Cyprus. It's not British sovereign territory. It's owned by the company. And so the British are basically, I mean, what, are they employed by the company? Or, I mean, what's there? There's basically a concession that they can establish bases there. The Egyptian government have agreed to it. But the Egyptian government could technically kick them out, as we'll discover. In fact, the Egyptians hate the Canal Zone. They loathe it. They see it as a standing affront, a massive insult to their national pride. They always complain the British behave very badly, that they are bullying, that they're condescending, they're racist, their troops get drunk and interfere with local women, all of this kind of thing. And in October 1951, King Farouk's prime minister, who's a sort of moderate nationalist, says, enough is enough. Get out. You've got to go. Winston Churchill, who was prime minister at the time, responded to this with precisely the tact and sensitivity that one would expect. Do you want to give us a little taste of your Churchill? Tell them if we have any more of their cheek, we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged. So that's Churchill's reply. He says that to Eden, doesn't he? I don't know whether Eden relayed the message quite as expressed. Anyway, the Egyptians cut off water and food supplies to the Canal Zone. They started to launch kind of guerrilla attacks on the Canal Zone to try to get the British to leave. The British fought back. In January 1952, British troops end up killing 50 Egyptian policemen who have been kind of acting as kind of informal guerrillas. This kicks off huge riots in Cairo. People burn down the banks and hotels, the cinemas, the kind of the gentlemen's clubs and whatnot, the department stores, and they kill 26 people these riots half of whom are british so you know big story in britain and this kicks off months of tension and stability in egypt itself and all of this culminates in a military coup against king farouk in july 1952 and this is led by a group of military officers who call themselves the free officers and chief among them is a young man called gamal abdel nasa so nasa as you said he was born in alexandria in 1918 and his father did indeed run a post office so he's not from the very bottom of society but it's kind of lower middle class and nasa was sent away to school he became involved in nationalist student politics he actually is a massive reader and he loved churchill's book my early life so all the stuff about churchill escaping from the burrs and all of that churchill harrow what a strange thing to read in alexandria in the uh in the 1920s and 30s anyway nasa thought this was brilliant he joined the military academy he was a rising star at the military academy and he becomes this sort of key figure in the free officers movement and the free officers they sit around they're not obviously not drinking alcohol they're drinking coffee and smoking endless egyptian cigarettes and they're talking you know they're quite idealistic they're saying you know how can we reconcile socialism and islam how can we kick out the british how can we make egypt great again all of this is a sort of key figure in the free officers movement and the free officers movement all this stuff and nasa the funny thing is you know i have a soft spot for anthony eden with his nice mustache and his dress sense and nasa is kind of the same nasa is very tall he's very handsome he's got a tremendous mustache he's got a massive grin you know the kind of grin lights up the screen he's very charismatic he loves the limelight for two years because he's only a colonel he operates behind the scenes there's a guy called general negweeb but by 1954 he feels confident enough to push this general aside and take power himself as the boss of egypt and there are some parallels i think with another um 1950s sort of strong man juan perron you know the sort of nationalist colonel who rises to the top and no one is quite sure where he stands politically you know he's a bit of this and a bit of that uh but he's a modernizer like perron so he's committed to public works and to welfare and stuff i mean to be fair say with the fair so it's not that modern well i mean nasa would enjoy the comparison with the pharaohs because he's a very committed egyptian nationalist and he's what he's trying to do is he's trying to reconcile lots of different things so he's a socialist he's very pragmatic he's an egyptian nationalist but he's also a pan-arabist so he believes in arab unity he is a devout muslim but he's absolutely not an islamist he really cracks down on the muslim brotherhood and this is a very effective formula in the 1950s it makes him hugely popular across the middle east and north africa he is the great champion nasa of arab identity and arab pride one egyptian writer said he made us feel that there existed in the whole arab world only one intelligence one power one personality and that of course is nasa and a big part of this formula is standing up to the british after years of being second fiddle so right from the start kicking the british out of the canal zone is a huge priority for nasa he said you know we can't feel free and sovereign until they go i mean fair enough yeah i mean i you can't really argue you can't really argue with that because i mean the truth of the matter i mean just as a massive spoiler the egyptians take over the canal and they run it perfectly well so the idea that the british are essential to the running of the canal is just not correct now the good news for nasa is the british are actually getting sick of this themselves to fend in the canal is costing britain about 50 million pounds a year and i did some calculations at measuringworth.com and that i reckon is about 8 billion pounds today and the point is the egyptians are never going to stop attacking them and get trying to get them to go and also people are starting to say well if there is a war it'll be a nuclear war like why do you need a base in egypt like the days of you know trudging across the desert are gone so in october 1954 they make a deal the british say we'll take all our troops home in the next 20 months so by june 1956 we'll be gone and it'll be yours again the canal zone we're talking about not the canal itself we're talking about the base with this deal in london people say to themselves well maybe we can now get back on a better footing with egypt maybe we can get nasa on side do a deal with him maybe here's a man we can do business with and so in february 1955 anthony eden who's only weeks away from becoming prime minister goes off to cairo to see nasa at where else the british embassy where you were doing that important research so that's where the photo was and do you know something else that i learned in my uh intensive research in the british embassy in cairo was that i think maybe a week before the nasa had forcibly purchased the bottom stretch of the british embassy garden which ran down to the nile because he wanted to build a corniche along it he did he did build a corniche yeah why do people go on about suez canal not about this this is absolutely disgraceful i think this is the real flash point yeah unbelievable well eden turns up so you've got two men two of the most elegant mustachioed men in all the world in the 1950s and both of whom speak arabic both of whom speak arabic so eden arrives and he's on his most charming form he greets nasa in arabic they sit down together on the sofa and they chat about the quran and eden of course read the quran oxford in arabic and they exchange their favorite arabic proverbs he who steals the canal yeah exactly shall never come to a good fate a man in possession of a mustache is right whatever anyway eden says to nasa listen i'd like to interest you in a latest wheeze and this is a thing called the baghdad pact the baghdad pact is a kind of nato for the middle east so it'll be britain and it will be iraq iran turkey and pakistan people can perhaps already see why this didn't become a tremendously successful lasting alliance they will be together in a military alliance to contain the soviet union and nasa says i don't like the sound of this this sounds very much like you're trying to bring back the british in a disguised form but actually the meeting isn't that bad nasa was quite impressed by eden he's got a little bit of the kind of cultural cringe he says to his aide muhammad haikal afterwards what elegance it was made to look like a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a as if we were beggars and they were princes but they part on fairly decent terms and nasa actually says to eden you know i'd actually quite like to come to britain never been to britain like to come in a state visit maybe in the autumn but this visit never happens because after this things start to go wrong so first of all four days after their meeting britain signs this baghdad pact and nasa doesn't like this at all he denounces it and he gets the voice of the arabs radio station which is broadcast across the middle east denounces the british are very upset by this and so they back away from a deal to sell nasa some arms nasa has been desperate for weapons to build up egypt's army on their borders with israel to whom of course they'd lost a war at the end of the 1940s and the british say no we're not going to sell you these arms actually because you won't join the baghdad pact so at this point nasa sends some feelers to moscow and the kremlin are only too happy to organize some arms sales so in september 1955 nasa announces to his great glee that he's signed an arms deal with czechoslovakia they're going to send him loads of tanks and planes and rocket launchers and all this and in the west this is perceived as a very worrying development in the cold war and actually eden thinks to himself is nasa a communist and he writes to president eisenhower i suspect nasa's relations with the soviet union are a good deal closer than he admits so actually he's in a complete muddle about whether nasa is a communist or not and he's in a complete muddle about whether nasa is a communist or not he's just a bad man he's a evil dictator it's probably a bit of both now for eden the final straw comes the following spring and i'm sorry to say the arabs behave very poorly to a product of our great british boarding schools so one of britain's closest allies in the middle east is jordan so we're very close to jordan because we kind of installed the hashemite dynasty on the throne of jordan our army is called the arab legion and it's commanded by sir john bagot club who was a product of cheltenham and he was called glub pasha so everyone knows glub pasha you know he runs the jordan jordanian army he's basically the sort of boss of jordan behind the scenes jordan has a new king in king hussein who's only 20 and king hussein is coming under pressure from arab nationalists himself and he decides i don't want people to think of me as a british puppet so on the 1st of march 1956 he sacks glub pasha and all the senior british officers in his army and in london this is a shock and everybody says god this is dreadful this is the end of our influence in the middle east this must be nasa's doing it's actually not nasa's doing at all but they kind of he makes a scapegoat for it and eden by this point he's taking all this really personally so for him nasa has become the personification of what clearly is this inevitable process which is britain's retreat from its overseas empire and eden for obvious reasons which we've already discussed he sees this through the lens of his own experiences so he is a he is a really good example of somebody who's a prisoner of his past he sees everything through the lens of the 1930s appeasement mussolini hitler spain abyssinia all of this so as early as march 56 he's telling president eisenhower our policy of appeasement will bring us nothing in egypt we must do our utmost to contain egyptian policy so basically what's got stuck in eden's head is the idea that nasa is the new mussolini and he must be contained and resisted and not appeased so there's that and then i think there's another element to all this which is that eden is also running into trouble domestically so things haven't gone brilliantly since he became prime minister prices are rising too high the pound is under pressure he's got tense relations with his tory ministers so in particular these two guys rad butler and harold mcmillan who we'll talk about a bit later they've both got ambitions of their own there's a sort of sense i think that eden is a bit you asked his best that he's one of these people who waits for ages to become prime minister and then when he gets the job he's not quite as good as everybody thought he would be a bit shop soiled a bit shop so i'd say harold mcmillan is a great man for a witty aphorism said well the trouble with anthony was that he was trained to win the derby in 1938 but unfortunately he wasn't let out of the starting stalls until 1955 fabulous because he's not clubbable he doesn't hang out with the backbenchers he's not good at shaking hands and he's not good at playing with the fans in the house of commons i think a lot of people think that he's basically too elegant and cultured he's a bit too smooth i actually think there's a sort of this is a bit like what i don't know people on the right of the tory party used to think about david cameron you know it's all a bit too effortless and a little bit too smooth and shiny effortless superiority which always goes down well with state agents in essex right so the telegraph ran an editorial about eden in in 1956 which ended up sort of creating a phrase um they said that eden had a gesture that what he would do is when he was making a speech he would punch his fist into his other palm the emphasis but he never quite followed through so you never heard the blow you never heard the smack they want a smack they want the firm smack of government readers of the telegraph love getting a smack they do the telegraph wanted a smack and they weren't getting one so eden is very sensitive and he finds all this enraging and he's like i don't know what to do with this i don't know what to do with this and he's even more enraged that he's being frustrated by this jumped up egyptian colonel who's you know even probably thinks that nasa's arabic is not as good as his and on the 12th of march a famous incident for people who read about the sewers crisis he gets a memo from a junior foreign office minister protégé of his called anthony nutting nutting nutting yeah unbelievable nutting says i feel that we can we should we can isolate we can isolate um egypt by building bridges with other middle eastern countries and nothing that we can isolate we can isolate um egypt by building bridges with other middle eastern countries and nothing that we can isolate we can isolate that evening is having dinner at the savoy of course when he's summoned to the phone telephone call for you sir the prime minister and eden is on the phone and eden shouts at him down the phone he says what's all this nonsense about isolating nasa or neutralizing him as you call it i want him destroyed can't you understand and nutting tries to calm him down and says look you know i don't think we should be destroying nasa i think we should you know we should try to find an alternative the only result of removing nasa would be anarchy in egypt and eden just shouts at him down the phone i don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in egypt and then he slams down the phone so as nutting said from that point onwards eden completely lost his touch driven by the impulses of pride and prestige and nagged by mounting sickness he began to behave like an enraged elephant charging senselessly at invisible and imaginary enemies the international jungle now nasa is not behaving like an element he's he's behaving like a panther so on the 13th the last british troops as per the deal leave port said they leave the canals home and nasa declares a three-day public holiday he says this is brilliant egypt is no longer under the domination of the imperialists we're entering a bright new era all of this 10 days later they hold presidential elections in egypt nasa i have to say does incredibly well i mean he really does do well he wins 99 of the votes are there any other any other candidates there are no other so the question which surely we're passing everybody what happened to the other one percent i think that's just spoiled ballots or something who knows people have let themselves down so nasa has promised the egyptian people this great new age of national renewal public works modernization welfare education all this and what's gonna lie behind all this is this great new project the aswan high dam oh terrible for archaeology they moved like what did they move they moved the statue of rameses ii yeah abu symbol abu symbol exactly but it it just looked brilliant by the nile it doesn't look as good now but i'm aware that you know obviously the electrification of egypt is possibly more important yeah so this was at the time the most ambitious engineering project in the world they were going to build this three mile wide dam 365 feet high it's 17 times taller than the great pyramid of giza nice fact for you it will create a dam which will store all this water they will be able to regulate the nile they will reclaim millions of acres for irrigation and for farming they will produce colossal quantities of electricity you know this dam is going to transform egypt economically but it's incredibly expensive and nasa is going to pay for it with a loan that he's got he's got loans basically from the usa from britain and from the world bank for a total of 270 million dollars anyway a month after his election nasa gets a terrible shock the american secretary of state john foster dallas on the 19th of july calls in the egyptian ambassador and says the deal is off american public opinion has turned against you you know maybe you are a communist and actually this is the most insulting thing and it's actually wrong we don't think the egyptian people are capable of this but you know you're just egyptians you're never going to be able to build this dam i mean an american saying that to the people who built the pyramids yeah mad the very next day britain pulls the plug as well and then the world bank and it's obvious to nasa this is a concerted effort to cut him down to size now he was on a visit to another splendid post-war dictatorial character he's been on a trip to see tito in yugoslavia so they've been like swimming eating kebabs and stuff and nasa's flying back so the brilliant time with tito and he hears the news he's not going to get his money and he said what stung me was not the loss of the money attitude with which the refusal was declared and he thinks right i'm going to get my own back on the british in particular and i have the perfect way to do it i will strike a blow that will bring the british empire to its knees and will confirm my reputation as the supreme champion of the arab world wow what is his move going to be only one way to find out join us after the break you this episode is brought to you by wild horse nine the thrilling and darkly funny new film from martin mcdonough the director behind the award-winning films in bruges three billboards and the banshees of in the shirin two old cia partners played by john malkovich and sam rockwell are sent to the fantastically remote easter island right on the eve of the 1973 coup in chile it's a a riveting black comedy but also a really interesting time period because this is just before the coup that brought down salvador allende in chile and brought general augusto pinochet to power with very violent consequences so 1973 is a year it's a brilliant year to set a film in it's the year of watergate unraveling the vietnam war is kind of winding down the cold war is at its height so a brilliant sort of cia setting and i absolutely love the film it's a great film and it's a great absolutely love the film i have to say wild horse nine in cinemas wednesday november the fourth book your tickets now this episode is brought to you by tiktok we obviously love history here it's always a treat to make a new discovery especially in unexpected ways which is exactly what happens on tiktok like you know coffee you make it add milk drink it nothing more except except when you hop on tiktok you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino you can also discover videos about how in the 1700s people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it and suddenly you're imagining how people lived drank socialized makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us and that's the joy of tiktok you look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different your next discovery is waiting on tiktok visit tiktok.com forward slash discover more this episode is brought to you by zip recruiter tom as you know i spent all my time working and in a dream world i would clone a sort of tom holland who would do all the work for me but sadly technology has not advanced to that point if it did i wish there was a recruiting company that i could use to hire that clone for me well dominic you are in luck because if you are hiring then Zip Recruiter is the great time saver. You can try it free at ziprecruiter.com slash history. It shows you qualified candidates almost instantly. So save time with Zip Recruiter. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash history. That's ziprecruiter.com slash history. Meet your match on Zip Recruiter. It obviously brought the free officers to power in Egypt and specifically Colonel Nasser. And Nasser is due to give a speech in Alexandria and there are all these kind of rumours that he's planning something special. And so this is the speech with which we opened this episode, right? And we said 250,000 people perhaps have gathered in to Liberation Square in Alexandria to hear him. And Dominic, what does he reveal? Well, he speaks for three hours, so he reveals quite a lot. And as you said at the beginning, his voice is carried on. The voice. So the Arabs across North Africa and the Middle East. And a lot of it is devoted to sort of a little Vladimir Putin-style history lesson. He says, you know, we're the heroic. I'm tempted to keep up with the New Yorkshire accent. Yeah, go for it. We're the heroic people of Egypt striving and fighting to cast off foreign imperialism. Never again will we feel the British boot on our throat. They thought they could undermine us. Oh, well, there's Aswan Dam business, but they were wrong. And then he sort of lambasts the British and then he turns. He turns to the Suez Canal and he says, I remember how I used to read about the year 1854. That was the year that Ferdinand de Lesseps arrived in Egypt to dig his canal. It was dug with our skulls, bones and blood. But then he goes on to say, we didn't make any money from it. We made only $3 million a year, but the Suez Canal Company gets $100 million a year. Well, this is actually untrue. The Suez Canal Company gets about $35 million a year. Anyway. Yeah, but still, I mean, point made. Yeah, point made. And Nasser keeps coming back to Ferdinand de Lesseps and he mentions his name 14 more times, which is quite a lot. And then suddenly he says, but good news, the days of foreign exploitation are over. Earlier today, I signed a decree to nationalize Suez Canal Company. And even as we speak, my troops are taking it over. And they are. And the signal for the operation were the words Ferdinand de Lesseps. That's why he said it. He was worried that people would miss it. So he just kept mentioning Ferdinand de Lesseps. Anyway, at the first mention, Egyptian troops started pouring into the offices and installations of the Suez Canal, which of course now do not have British troops guarding. They've just got officials and stuff doing all the work. And by the time Nasser gets to the end of this enormous speech, the operation is done. They're in. They've taken it over. The Suez Canal has been nationalized and is in Egyptian hands. And in Egypt, people go absolutely berserk. They're so excited. There are these huge crowds on the streets and they're chanting, Long live Nasser, Lord and Savior of the Arabs. And the next morning, Nasser gets the train from Alexandria to Cairo. The train stops at every single station. There are huge crowds. When he gets to Cairo, there are supposedly 100,000 people on the streets who are throwing flowers at him and stuff. There are crowds in Amman, in Jordan. There are crowds in East Jerusalem. In Libya, in Tunisia, in Morocco, all of these places. Everyone says, this is one of the great victories in Arab history against the colonial oppressors. A Moroccan newspaper said, today, colonialism is drawing its last breath. Tomorrow, it will be dead. So, in the Arab world, you know, Nasser is the absolute star of the hour. The reaction couldn't be better. The colonialists have not taken it quite as well. So, news of Nasser's speech reached London about 10 o'clock on the night of the 26th of July. And Eden was at number 10, and he was hosting a dinner for King Faisal of Iraq and Faisal's prime minister, Nouri al-Said, who was very pro-British. And they're having this dinner. A quarter past 10, Eden gets a little note from the duty secretary, which says, you know, can you come to the phone or whatever? There's news. And Eden, when he comes back, and he sits down with Nouri al-Said, who hates Nasser, and Nouri says, well, I think what you should do is, the Egyptians will charge you to use the canal. That's how it makes money. You have to pay a sort of tariff, a toll. You should refuse to pay. And then, Nasser will probably close the canal to punish you. And you can use that as a pretext for war. And Nouri says, hit him hard and hit him soon. Otherwise, it will be too late. Important advice, which Eden does not heed. Actually, preparing this episode, I was thinking so much about the Austrians in 1914, you know, who dither and are so slow. You know, act straight away or don't act at all. Well, as it turns out, that Eden does neither. Now, because of the state dinner for the Iraqis, almost all the big political names in Britain are in Downing Street, including the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell. And Eden takes Gaitskell aside. And Gaitskell says, this is what's happened, you know. I'm sharing this with you because it's national security. And Gaitskell appears to agree with Nouri. He says later, he said later, I said that I thought they ought to act quickly, whatever they did, and that as far as Great Britain was concerned, public opinion would almost certainly be behind them, which I think is right. The dinner breaks up and Eden convenes an emergency meeting in the cabinet room with his senior ministers. He's called his military chiefs in and also the French ambassador. And Eden is, you know, commanding presence. He's very much in charge. He says, this is unacceptable. The Suez Canal is vital to our national interests. We're going to have to fight. We're going to have to get rid of Nasser. We cannot allow him to have his hand on our windpipe. But his military chiefs are much more cautious. So it reminds me a little bit of the meeting that Margaret Thatcher had with her military chiefs when she realised that the Argentines were about to capture the Falklands in 1982. That then, the military chiefs were all for it, but they said it will take a very long time to get the task force. This time, the military chiefs are a bit more circumspect, but they also say it's going to take ages to organise. So the first sea lord is Lord Mountbatten, the former Viceroy of India. And the Queen's, what is it? The Queen's uncle, cousin, something like that. Some relation. It's Prince Philip, isn't it? Gets blown up by the IRA. Mountbatten says, look, our fleet can sail within hours from Malta, where we have a base, and we could land Royal Marine Command, but they will not be able to capture the entire canal without more support. So actually, Dominic, to be fair to Eden, I mean, he couldn't just do a smash and grab. No, he couldn't actually. You know, he's coming up against the practicalities of the issue. Mountbatten says it will take us six weeks, realistically, to get a full landing force with air and sea support to capture the whole canal zone. And in fact, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Gerald Templer, who's speaking for the army, says six weeks. You know, ideally, we in the army would like two months. We'd like to get everything ready and get our people prepared. Eden is gutted by this, but he is clearly all in on the principle of using the opportunity to strike at NASA. And since this is the point at which I think he goes catastrophically wrong, it's actually worth pausing the narrative for a second to ask why he's so bothered about this. Because some listeners may be surprised to hear NASA is not doing anything illegal. He's not doing anything wrong, as it were. What he's actually going to do, and what he does do, is to compensate the shareholders based on the closing price of their shares that day on the Paris Stock Exchange. So this is no different from, you know, Andy Burnham nationalizing a railway company or a water company. It's completely legal. It's what governments often do. It's kind of fine. So in other words, Eden doing this is a political choice, it's not a kind of moral, or legal one, if that makes sense. It makes his decision much less defensible in international opinion, I guess. Because if NASA hasn't done anything illegal, what's the fuss about? Exactly. So the question is, why is he bothering? Why make such a fuss? And I think there are two reasons. One of them is personal. As we said, you know, Eden has been getting grief from the sort of telegraph and whatnot about being a 1950s David Cameron. He's been in Churchill's shadow. And he thinks, well, this is the chance to emerge from Churchill's shadow. I will show myself as strong and decisive. I will topple NASA. I will stand up for Britain. You know, I will save my premiership. But I think there's also a political, obviously, there's obviously a broader political impulse, which is Britain has been on the back foot, really, since 1945, arguably since 1940. You know, you could even go back further. And this is a chance for the empire to strike back. And Eden is thinking, And he says multiple times to his aides, if we don't do this, if we just let acetate the canal we will look so weak in the eyes of the rest of the arab world we'll lose all our influence there but also our colonies are rushing to break away how pathetic and impotent will we look to them and that would just encourage them they wouldn't tell everyone britain is finished but does it matter well in the long run yeah i would agree with you i don't think it does matter and i think he should have taken it on the chin but he doesn't he doesn't see it that way for him it's about personal pride and britain's national interests and he thinks if we don't fight now it's game over we might as well not be in the game at all so the whole thing that nasa is mussolini and that he's fighting an evil dictator is is that something he genuinely feels or is that just uh cladding i think he mentions it so often he definitely does believe it i also think we're going to come on to this a little bit later in britain to say that and indeed france to describe nasa as a mussolini or indeed a hitler is so common that i think it's not just a contrivance i think people genuinely think it they are you know they are the prisoners of their recent past they see everything through the lens of the late 30s and he's not the last politician to be led into making a catastrophic mistake out of a desire to avoid a munich dead right the sort of sinister power of the historical analogy well the desire to avoid munich you might say has underlain almost every catastrophic foreign policy error made by western powers since the war ironically i totally agree with you people have learned the wrong lessons from the 1930s now actually just on eden his biographer dr thorpe his official biographer makes a really fair point about this this could easily have happened under a different prime minister i mean eden's only been prime minister for a year um it could have happened under his predecessor churchill or it could have happened under clement atley let's say who was the labor leader you know in the late the prime minister in the late 40s up to 1951 what if it had churchill who loved the empire who hated the empire who hated the empire who hated the empire who hated anti-colonial kind of nationalists who loved mad military adventures and amphibious landings and escapades in the mediterranean would churchill have done something mad at suez unquestionably he would i mean there's no way churchill's walking away from this even atley though i mean atley who of course fought at gallipoli atley is very patriotic he always puts britain's interests first he went into the korean war wherever possible atley tried to maintain the british empire i mean he couldn't in india but by and large he's an he's an imperialist would they have done anything different i think they would have probably done the same actually so this isn't just on eden and his errors it's almost an inevitability of britain's foreign policy i think they're going to do something misguided here and it's telling that almost all of eden's cabinet agree with him so the next day they have a cabinet meeting they agree that they're absolutely clear there's no legal basis to challenge nasa's decision but they say it's absolute our essential interests in this area must if necessary by be safeguarded by military action and the necessary preparations must be made failure to hold the suez canal would inevitably lead to the loss one by one of all our interests and assets in the middle east but it is interesting that this is all being framed in terms of foreign policy and realpolitik there is no appeal to a kind of moral dimension this is not about standing up to the world it's about standing up to the world and it's about standing up to the fascism or communism or whatever ism they want to stand they think pretend they're standing up to well that later when they they sell the operation they will sell it to standing up to fascism yeah but what i'm asking is is this genuine because or is it something you know is it a disguise is it something that they're putting up to justify what they want to do out of raw dictates of power can't it be both to make the analogy with the parallel that you implicitly invoked you know a few minutes ago the invasion of iraq in 2003 did tony blair go along with that because he thought it was in britain's interests to be close to america and so on and so forth or because he thought saddam hussein was a you know the new adolf hitler or something yeah it's both but but when blair made the case he was always talking about the moral case there seems to be a complete lack of that in the early stages of the suez operation i'm they're less moralistic they're less given to moralistic stuff behind the scenes i don't know they're world war ii veterans they're a bit more weird world weary and it's not their their style i guess i guess i just thought that the the mussolini analogy was so important to eden but it does seem to be completely lacking so far in anything that's been said in private i guess although he did he he's writing it to eisenhower all the time and i think he believes it anyway important to say they are definitely in tune with the the sort of political class in britain and the british public so i think to most people in britain when they hear this news they say what this tin pot egyptian colonel seizing the suez canal that's absolutely unthinkable the suez canal is british and this is absolutely disgraceful and when you look at the now the munich analogy you look at the press the times said this was a hinge of history it's like hitler's march into the rhineland the telegraph it's as if we're back in hitler's and mussolini's day and this is the labor papers are just the same the daily herald no more adolf hitler's there is no room for appeasement and the mirror at this point was the single best-selling daily newspaper in the world and the mirror issued this madly blood-curdling threat to nasa it's what we say to colonel nasa remember mussolini mussolini ended up hanging upside down by his feet in a square in milan remember adolf hitler he ended up burning in a petrol-soaked blanket outside his bunker in the heart of devastated berlin so i mean they're really leaning in to the sort of hitler and mussolini parallels hugh gateskill the labor leader in the house of commons a few days later second of august we are locked in a struggle for the master of the middle east he says nasa's tactics are exactly the same that we encountered from mussolini and hitler in the years before the war exactly the same they're literally the same and there's one thing that does say however which is telling and perhaps a clue to what's going to happen next gateskill says you know we can't rule out the use of force however we must not allow ourselves to get into a position where we might be denounced in the united nations security council as aggressors or where the majority of the assembly were against us and the thing is 2026 i don't think people care that much about the united nations in 1956 people care a lot about the united nations they're absolutely obsessed with the united nations and so the legality or otherwise of what you're doing and a vote in the government is seen as massively important well because the british have helped set it up help set it up exactly so you've got to behave well so this question of allies is crucial so right from the start eden's cabinet say well look if we're going to do anything we're going to do it with two people in particular the french and the americans now why the french the french built the canal the company's based in paris the directors of the company are french but apart from britain most of the other shareholders are french private investors and they're not going to do anything and actually the french right from the start are on the same page the french foreign minister christian pino he says this is totally intolerable from nasa we're going to stand up to this france will always defend its rights and its interests well the french also have a kind of stake in north africa don't they because they're busy fighting to keep algeria as part i mean not part of the empire but but literally as part of france as we discussed in the first half you're always working you don't relax even when you're relaxing you're working and so for relaxation you went to see a film about de gaulle in order to inform yourself about this important issue am i wrong no so i love to go what can i say yeah to go in leclerc my very first piece of research i ever did was on french colonial algeria my my undergraduate thesis you're all over it i'm all over it the french have for two years have been fighting this war in algeria and again some listeners may be surprised to hear that at this point algeria was an integral part of france it wasn't a colony it was actually part of the french republic so in the film they're always saying to de gaulle when he leaves london on a plane for high-level meetings in algeria you will soon be setting foot on french soil yeah so there are 10 million people in algeria a million of them are european 9 million of them are arabs and berbers this has turned by 1956 into this horrendous kind of guerrilla struggle there are massacres in villages there are massacres in villages there are massacres in villages there are attacks on french patrols there are bombs going off in the center of algiers these scenes that you see in the great film the battle of algiers the french have now poured in hundreds of thousands of troops they're carrying out very brutal reprisals they are torturing algerian sort of terrorist suspects and whatnot incredibly dirty war which they are not winning and the french have come to believe that nasa is behind all this that nasa as a sort of blofeld style agent's work with the soviet union is controlling the whole thing i mean it's interesting isn't it that that the western powers seem to have bought into the the myth of nasa's greatness at least as much as the arab powers completely yeah and the bad thing is that nasa's only been i mean he's only been a factor in egyptian politics for four years but they're attributing it to him sort of the powers of a great criminal mastermind or something i suppose because they have just come out of a war in which Titanic world leaders played you know an oversized part i mean i suppose also we've been talking about you know the the inexorable collapse of the european empires which if you're growing up must have seemed so solid and secure and now they're just melting away and you think there must you need to put a human face perhaps to what is a much broader kind of impersonal process of change i think that's dead right i think you personalize it and therefore you explain it it's almost like so it's almost like the equivalent of reaching for a conspiracy theory to explain some great economic change that you don't understand so to be fair to the french nasa is a big supporter of the fln which is the algerian kind of nationalist group um nasa hosts their government in exile in cairo he hosts a radio station for them in cairo and he is supplying them via libya with uh weapons and with money and the french have got it into their heads that if they destroy nasa they can win this war so pino the foreign minister at one point told the americans with one you know one successful battle in egypt would be worth 10 in algeria which is which is rubbish and shows how they're misunderstanding the situation in algeria but we'll come back to the french let's turn now to the americans because i mentioned he was talking to the americans so the bloke in the white house we've mentioned him a bit already just in passing he is the former allied military supremo dwight d eisenhower who's 65 years old and he's a republican and eisenhower cultivates this image of a kind of lovable old uncle this kind of bumbling golfer but in reality you know as anyone who worked with him in the second world war knows eisenhower's very shrewd he's methodical he's actually a pretty ruthless political operator he's going to be running for re-election in november and he wants to go to the american people and say you've got your massive cars and fridges you've got your massive cars and fridges you've got your massive cars and fridges you know you've never been happier i've bought you stability no international drama i ended the korean war which is what he promised to do he entered it straight away i haven't dragged you into any more wars the last thing eisenhower wants to do is to drag the american people to find himself dragged into a new war in the middle east especially on the side of the imperial powers you know they want to maybe supply the imperial powers but they don't want to be completely identified with them as early as the 31st of july he got a report from a state department representative in london who said we believe the british government has decided to drive nasa out of egypt eisenhower was horrified by that the cia told him if the british and french attack nasa it would drive the arab world into the arms of the soviet union and so from the very beginning eisenhower sending signals to london please don't do anything reckless you know take this calmly think about this and in fact he sends his secretary of state john foster dallas to london to talk to eden personally dallas people may know the airport in washington dc it's a fairly useless airport uh dallas was a republican lawyer he was like a washington insider he was a very very austere man the son of a presbyterian minister he's a cold war hawk he's very intense he's kind of very puritanical he's not a great laugh dallas arrives in london on the 1st of august and he gives eden a letter from eisenhower dallas arrives in london on the 1st of august and he gives eden a letter from eisenhower and eisenhower says you know dear anthony listen i completely recognize the transcendent worth of the canal to the free world but please do not take military action until every other you know peaceful form of negotiation has been exhausted this is not what anthony wants to hear he replies four days later he says no no no our long-term aim is not just to get nasa to disgorge his spoils but to replace him with a regime less hostile to the west and here we have the very familiar analogy again nasa has embarked on a course which is unpleasantly familiar says eden his ambitions stretch from morocco to the persian gulf the parallel with mussolini is close neither of us can forget the lives and treasure he cost us before he was finally dealt with and then eden goes on to say the british people are grimly determined that nasa shall not get away with it this time because they're convinced that if he does their existence will be at his mercy so am i i mean that's ridiculous of course it's ridiculous it's absolutely insane it's completely ridiculous aside from anything else hitler was in command of the most intimidating war machine in europe nasa really isn't i mean the egyptian forces are rubbish right exactly the egyptian army is pretty rubbish uh egypt is not an economic superpower also nasa is a sort of nationalist officer who's very got kind of matinee idol looks who's who likes slagging off the british and does have ambitions to kind of meddle in the politics of the arab world he's a pan-arabist all of that there was absolutely no way that nasa is going to try and build an empire that stretches from morocco to iran do you think there's some some mustache envy going on there must be and actually talking with stashes i mean it does remind me so much of the people where the people talked about saddam hussein in 2003 saddam hussein if not stopped will take over the world and he's going to take over the whole middle east this is the same the same sort of babble so three days after this so the 8th of august eden decides he needs to rally public opinion he goes on british tv to speak to the nation now remember in 1956 this is a very unusual thing to do most people have only just bought a tv so the prime minister addressing you on tv is like a big deal and you know eden plays all his cards we know this is how fascist governments behave we remember only too well what the cost can be of giving into fascism if colonel nasa's action was to succeed each one of us was to be at the mercy of one man for the supplies on which we live blah blah blah but the thing is because eden made his name as a critic of the dictators as a sort of enemy of the dictators a critic of appeasement this sounds very powerful coming from him you know if you're somebody in britain you don't really follow politics you're like well eden was right before why wouldn't he be? right now you know there was one villain with a mustache 20 years ago and we know what bad man he turned out to be here's another so he's given his broadcast he's written back to eisenhower and he's been quietly making his military preparations so since the beginning of august the government has been calling up military reserves they've been requisitioning merchant ships as troop transports they've been moving fighter planes and bombers to cyprus and malta and they have a plan the plan is called operation musketeer and basically they're going to land royal marines to take port said on the north and then an airborne assault by paratroopers to take back the canal zone and some of eden's ministers make a very good point if we do this we'll just be back where we were two years ago when we had the canal zone base we'll be you know we'll be back with the canal surrounded by people who hate us and they say instead of saying the obvious thing which is maybe not do it at all they say they say we're going to say let's think bigger let's go for a full regime change so the chancellor harold mcmillan will talk about him a bit more in the next episode says to the cabinet on the 7th of august our goal should be to bring about the fall of nasa and create a government in egypt which will work satisfactorily with ourselves and with the other great powers so they changed the plan the plan is now becoming something like the plan of a board game i think or a computer game or something they say we'll start off with a massive air assault on egypt we'll land 80 000 troops at alexandria we'll seize alexandria and then we'll march on cairo cairo yeah i mean i think when you're marching on cairo i mean this is napoleon behavior and it ended disastrously for napoleon there's no reason for them to believe that they're going to do any better than napoleon but i suppose they've been the imperial power in egypt for basically decades and decades and the habit of that is hard to shed i guess it's the plus the thing that people always tell themselves the egyptian people will rise up and join us they chafe under the jackboot of the dictator i mean we'll see how that turns out um and then they change the plan again actually yeah landing alexandria and trying to capture cairo is mad we'll keep the air attack we'll smash nasa's air force we'll break egypt's economy and then we'll recapture the canal and then we'll just see where we are you know maybe nasa will fall by some strange means you know who knows now all the time they're waiting for nasa to give them a pretext they really need a pretext because what nasa's done is not illegal the great problem the egyptians actually really good at running the canal there's absolutely no problem at all the canal doesn't close i mean how hard can it be to run a canal frankly you know just keep it open so the traffic continues as normal this is a big problem for eden because the longer this goes on the more likely people are to to lose interest and in fact the polls show the british public are losing interest and in america eisenhower budging they're just not really interested in going in at all so what eden is doing is while his chiefs are drawing up the plan he's keeping up this he's hoping something's going to turn up and he's keeping up a pretense of wanting a negotiated settlement so he hosts two conferences in london about the future of the canal nasa refuses to turn up so eventually the british decide what they're going to do is they're going to send the australian prime minister sir robert menzies to cairo to speak to nasa directly and this is a very strange visit from sir robert menzies when he arrives in cairo he tries to charm nasa by doing impressions of churchill to him maybe he knew that nasa had read churchill's book so he does that and that's he that's the sort of you know him being his most charming australian charm and then he administers the stick he says um come on mate you know that you're only egyptian you're not going to be able to work run the canal without western help you need a western person to run the canal for you can't do it yourselves nasa is outraged by this not unreasonably nasa says afterwards when when menzies has left nasa says it was i'm absolutely disgusted the british have sent this australian mule to threaten me and he also complained which i found very entertaining he said he couldn't stand sir robert menzies because he had a very sharp voice which is the way that people often react to australian visitors he ends up warding at the sink ports doesn't he he does he was massively pro-british wasn't he sir robert menzies i think um anyway he's yeah that hasn't gone well anyway the talks get you nowhere by the end of september britain and france refer the sewers dispute to the un security council now it's important to say this is a massive sham the french foreign minister pino he said to the britain's ambassador in paris yeah we're going to get the security council to discuss this and it is window dressing these are his words because my government is determined we're going to get rid of nasa anyway the british are still going along with this on the 1st of october eden's foreign secretary selwyn lloyd who is the president of the british government is going to get rid of who will talk more about next time he flies to new york for talks at the um lloyd is actually deep down hoping that the talks will work and we can avoid military actually it's not a hawk at all and after 12 days it seems like they've got somewhere the egyptians agree they promise that people they'll keep the canal open to ships of all countries whatever their politics and lloyd is delighted he reports to london and he says great news we've got what we wanted i think this could be the end of the crisis actually and eden says oh brilliant two days later 14th of october eden says selwyn i'd like you to organize some more talks maybe we can meet in geneva we can hammer out all the details of this and then it's a done deal but eden is not being honest with his own foreign secretary because that very afternoon at his country house checkers he has a visit from two frenchmen who arrive in total secrecy one of them is the french labor minister who's a man called albert gazier and the other is the french minister who's a man called albert gazier and the other is the deputy chief of the french general staff who is general maurice shall and they are shown in to see anthony eden anthony eden is with his junior foreign office minister anthony notting and his private secretary who's called guy millard and when the frenchman come in eden says quite casually there's no need to take any notes of this guy and at that moment this bloke notting thinks oh this is not this is not good so in the next few hours the french unveil their plan they've got an offer for eden and the french say look we are absolutely determined now to get rid of nasa we have been tracking this gigantic mind-sweeping ship called the athos which left alexandria a few days ago and it's been loaded with 70 tons of military equipment mortars machine guns automatic rifles and arsenal for three thousand men and these are destined for the guerrillas in algeria we know that they were bought with egyptian money and they were loaded aboard by uniformed egyptian soldiers and so we have made up our minds nasa's got to go we are set on regime change and you know what we have been talking to our friends the israelis because france and israel are very close allies at this point the french are in fact israel's chief arms suppliers now the israelis can't stand nasa they've already fought and won one war against egypt 1948 49 egypt's fleet is blockading the israeli port of ilat and uh they blame nasa for encouraging attacks by palestinian guerrillas from gaza on israel and nasa in fact has been very explicit about his desire to wipe israel off the map he told a crowd in august 1955 my ambition is to cleanse the land of palestine we demand vengeance and vengeance is israel's death the israelis are also very worried about uh nasa's czech arms deal of course so their military chief moshe diane said afterwards there was no doubt in our minds that egypt's purpose was to wipe us out he's the guy with the eyepatch he's the guy with the eyepatch exactly big figure in sort of 1950s 60s newspapers so between them the french and the israelis have come up with a plan the french will provide israel with a massive new injection of arms they'll send them 100 tanks and 200 armored personnel carriers israel will launch an attack on israel with a massive new a massive attack across the sinai desert striking towards the canal and meanwhile on the pretext of safeguarding the international passage through the canal french paratroopers will land west of the canal they will take it over and then they will head west towards cairo to deal with nasa it's a massive gamble but you know the french have tremendous confidence in their uh in their military prowess they reckon they can pull it off and they say to eden listen if you join us this will be a piece of cake and they say to him this is our chance we can win back the canal we can bring down nasa and we can stand up for the great empires of britain and france against these insolent arab and north african pygmies so sir anthony are you in goodness what a choice and what a cliffhanger um and we will find out eden's answer yes sure it'll come as a complete surprise to you and we'll find out what's going on and we'll find out what's going on next time and discover what the consequences are for for britain for america for france for the middle east and restless history club members of course can hear that right now um and if you're not a member of the rest of history club then go to the rest of history.com and you can sign up there and when you do you'll be able to hear um two episodes on the hungarian revolution as well as the final episode in this series and you will get a bonus series recorded on location in budapest and wolverhampton so the great cultural centers of 1950s life about what all of this meant for the greatest football team of the 1950s the mighty magias oh dominic your little face i'm not just the mighty magias wolverhampton wanderers as well of course the team that invented europe i mean we'll like literally and you only find out what that means if you're not a member of the rest of history club members of course and we'll find out if you get the bonus series so the the champions of the world tom i think in the 1950s wolverhampton this is basically i mean the whole reason that you've been doing the podcast is just so that you can do um an episode on the rest of history about it so listen guys make dominic happy sign up and listen to his episode on wolves bye-bye bye-bye ulcerative colitis and crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter that's why understanding your treatment options matters discover what's possible with trimphia guselka map trimphia is a prescription medicine used to treat 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from the creators of zootopia and frozen comes disney's hexed welcome to hex and enter the world of witches where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic disney's hexed arrives in theaters this thanksgiving