From George III to Liz Truss, we’ve made catastrophic mistakes - David Horspool
It was the worst humiliation since Suez but, somehow, Suez remains the gold standard for fiascoes.
Liz Truss completed her premiership in record time, like a gatecrasher who, after stumbling around drunkenly smashing things for a few minutes, is quietly ushered out by a group of halfway sober guests. Michael Howard popped up on the radio to affirm that Suez had been ‘far worse’, which was oddly comforting.
In chaotic times, it is good to have some certainties to cling to – and Suez as our postwar nadir is one. Anthony Eden’s bungled attempt in 1956 to re-establish imperial clout – comprehensively reverse-
ferreted after the Americans told him to stop being silly – has lasted surprisingly well.
There have been any amount of cock-ups, from Profumo to the Iraq War, from the ERM to the end of the Afghan ‘intervention’ last year. But none of them has, yet, displaced Suez as the shining example of British hubris.
What about before Suez? Did the British have a convenient shorthand for getting it spectacularly wrong, or did the myth and occasional reality of a glorious past preclude that?
At the time of Suez, they did look back for a comparison. Suez was ‘Britain’s Waterloo’, according to Julian Amery, the Conservative MP. That was an odd choice, considering that Waterloo went rather well for the British.
Amery’s father, Leo Amery, was the Conservative MP who quoted Cromwell in his call for Neville Chamberlain’s departure: ‘In the name of God, go!’ David Davis MP repeated the line in January, calling for Boris Johnson’s resignation as PM.
As a wartime nadir, Leo Amery might have suggested the Norway campaign of 1940, when the British and Allies failed dismally to put a dent in the Nazi war machine.
Despite the change of leadership, that wasn’t the last of Britain’s wartime embarrassments. Churchill called the fall of Singapore in 1942 ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’. Britain may have ended up on the winning side, but the air of imperial invincibility was lost for ever.
One massive error of economic judgement did for Liz Truss; Churchill played a leading part in two British catastrophes and still bounced back. While Singapore was his responsibility as prime minister, but not exactly his fault, the bloody disaster in the First World War that was the Dardanelles campaign was mostly Churchill’s own idea.
Historians have argued that Churchill’s original plan, calling for greater naval participation, might have worked. He took the blame anyway, without resorting to ‘mistakes were made’ nonsense. His ‘wilderness years’ followed.
Before the First World War, when Britain was reaching its apogee of imperial might, you might have thought our history was rather less of a roll of self-inflicted shame.
Not so. As far as the various peoples conquered, assimilated, co-opted or extinguished by the British Empire were concerned, it was probably all pretty disastrous. Even on its own terms, the British imperial experience was what management types characterise as a steep learning curve with many opportunities for growth – in other words, lots of blunders.
Highlights? The Indian Mutiny (other names are available) of 1857 is one. The British, who relied on the collaboration of thousands of Indian soldiers, Hindu and Muslim, managed to offend both groups by introducing a cartridge grease that contravened their religious laws. The fact that the grease was in fact probably compliant made this in reality a different sort of cock-up – a communications failure, but no less deadly for that.
Or there’s the Battle of Chillianwala in the Anglo-Sikh wars (1849), which Sir John Hobhouse compared unfavourably to the Kabul massacre. Ah, yes – the retreat from Kabul (1842). This was the 19th-century Suez, a touchstone for tail-between-the-legs slinking away from an exposed and indefensible position.
First, the British political appointee, Sir William McNaghten, was killed in a scuffle as he tried to negotiate a withdrawal. Then, guarantees of safe passage proved useless. The forces who retook Kabul had no authority over the Ghilzai tribesmen who attacked, relentlessly, a column of around 17,000. Of that number (fewer than 700 of
whom were British soldiers), only a handful survived.
The roll-call goes back through the centuries. Pollilur and Yorktown happened a year apart, in 1780 and 1781. We recall the prelude to the British loss of America, but have mostly forgotten the triumph of the Mysore sultanate over an East India Company force a year before.
A century before, the humiliation was much closer to home. We have airbrushed away the greatest defeat of the Royal Navy, when the Dutch sank 13 ships and captured two more in the raid on the Medway in 1667. Pepys caught the mood of national panic: ‘The truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone.’
Is there a lesson here? The usual good historian’s answer is ‘No’. But we can agree that Suez isn’t the half of it. We’ve been mucking up and carrying on regardless for centuries.
