Betting big, winning small

David Runciman on our risk-averse, high-stakes prime minister

Is Iraq Tony Blair’s Suez? The parallels are certainly hard to avoid, and Blair’s critics have not been slow to point them out. First, there is a strong suspicion that, like Suez, the whole Iraq escapade was the result of a private deal cooked up between the belligerents. The decision to send British and French troops to Egypt in 1956 was sealed during a secret meeting at Sèvres in France, where British, French and Israeli representatives agreed on a plan that would allow the Israelis to attack the Egyptians, and the British and French to intervene in order to separate them, reclaiming the canal in the process. The decision to send British and American troops to Iraq appears to have been sealed at a meeting between Blair and Bush at Crawford in Texas in April 2002. We cannot know for sure what was said, but it seems likely that an understanding was reached whereby Bush made it clear that he was going to disarm Saddam by force come what may, and Blair made it clear that, come what may, he would help him.

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Vol. 26 No. 10 · 20 May 2004 » David Runciman » Betting big, winning small (print version)
Pages 6-8 | 4971 words

Letters

From Richard Clogg

David Runciman is wide of the mark in adducing Tony Blair's experiences at Fettes to throw light on his attitude to risk (LRB, 20 May). Runciman claims that when Blair, 13 years old and 'still a Tory', arrived at Fettes in 1966, he would have imbibed the attitude to risk of the British political establishment and learned the price to be paid for political recklessness through folk memories of an event that had occurred at the height of the Suez crisis ten years previously. This was the burning in effigy on 5 November 1956, not of Guy Fawkes, but of Hugh Gaitskell for his opposition as leader of the Labour Party to Eden's disastrous Egyptian venture. Runciman claims that the school was a place where the humiliations of Suez would have been particularly keenly felt because Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary at the time, was an old boy. He goes on to paint a bizarre picture, worthy of Lindsay Anderson's If …, of the school being turned out to witness the ritual burning of Gaitskell as a reminder to the boys of the meaning of treachery.

It makes a good story, but the reality was altogether more banal. I was at Fettes, in my upper sixth year, during the Suez crisis. There was no campaign of unquestioning support for Eden (and Selwyn Lloyd) and execration of the 'Wykehamist' (as if this had anything to do with it) Gaitskell. Indeed, I remember taking part, from a position of almost total ignorance, in a debate on the rights and wrongs of the Suez campaign. Moreover, I have no recollection at all of the burning of the Gaitskell effigy and neither do a number of my contemporaries.

What seems to have happened is this. A relatively junior master, who always struck me as a posturing buffoon, apparently burned an effigy of Gaitskell on a fire (bonfire night as such was never celebrated in the five years I was at the school: this was Scotland, after all) in front of a small group of the most junior boys. That this childish incident should have so traumatised the school that memories of it continued to reverberate ten years later, giving Blair his initiation into the world of Realpolitik and impressing on him the lesson that imperialist adventures should not be attempted save in conjunction with the Americans, makes no sense at all.

However, this particular hare will now have entered the historical record, joining other myths about Blair's time at Fettes, the most egregious of which, put about by Blair himself, is that he was so fearful of having to return to the 'ultra-establishment' (Runciman's expression) nightmare that was Fettes that he smuggled himself on board a plane from Newcastle to the West Indies. There had never been a flight from Newcastle to the Caribbean at this time, but this was not allowed to stand in the way of a good, and politically convenient story.

Richard Clogg
St Antony’s College, Oxford

From Patrick Renshaw

In his comparison of the Suez adventure and the Iraq war David Runciman writes: 'The Suez conflict was fought over a canal, but when it was lost, and British ships carried on using the canal anyway, it became a war about something else – the wider threat of Soviet domination.' This makes it sound as if the canal remained open; in fact it was blocked for seven months during 1956-57 with serious economic consequences. Among other things, petrol was rationed for six months and cars limited to 200 miles a month. The wider threat of Soviet domination had been demonstrated, in the same week the canal was blocked, by the suppression of the Hungarian uprising.

Patrick Renshaw
Sheffield

From Graham Hall

Richard Clogg suggests that Guy Fawkes night wasn't celebrated in Scotland (Letters, 24 June). I lived in Glasgow during the period of which he writes and can testify that the city was ablaze every 5 November.

Graham Hall
Wantage, Oxfordshire