I. Forced Normality

My earliest semi-adult memories go back to the long, drawn-out struggle to persuade Sir Winston Churchill to retire as prime minister in the mid-1950s. Superficially the argument was whether he was still up to the job when he reputedly could not recognise members of his own government. (This may have shown good taste). But there was a subtext. Hawkish members of the US state department and the British foreign office feared that he was going soft on communism because of his repeated call for a “summit” with Soviet leaders. They could not have been more wrong. What Churchill probably had in mind was a last-ditch call to Russian leaders to call off subversion in the west in return for a recognition of their de facto role in eastern European countries.

These ideas were never tested before the shortlived Eden administration, which ran for an ill-fated two years until early 1957. I still recall Conservative party posters with a photograph of Anthony Eden saying “Working for peace”. In fact his government is remembered mainly for the disastrous Suez expedition in 1956. This was sparked by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s leader, “Colonel” Gamel Abdel Nasser. The cry was that Egypt could not run the canal and that his action was therefore a threat to world trade. But before this had been decisively disproved another Israeli-Egyptian war had broken out; the ostensible purpose of the canal now was to separate the two sides.