Ed Miliband should learn the lesson of Suez

I’ll never forget as a very small boy my uncle arriving from Scotland at our semi in North London in full battle-dress. He was doing his National Service and had been called up in case he might be needed to invade Egypt.

The then Tory Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was a victim of an early version of Trump derangement syndrome. He denounced the nationalist leader of Egypt, an army colonel called Nasser, using similar language to Donald Trump as representing a throat-cutting threat to British and broader western interests.

In 1956 Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, then far more important than the Straits of Hormuz today in moving oil and other essential commodities from the global south to Britain and the rest of Europe. The socialist PM Guy Mollet was a French version of a 1950s Trump, using even more extravagant language than Eden to denounce Nasser.

He organised a secret meeting near Paris with Eden and the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to sign an unpublished treaty — in effect an illegal conspiracy – to invade Egypt and place the Suez Canal under Anglo-French-Israeli military occupation.

Labour organised massive opposition to this illegal war. Aneurin Bevan, then shadow Foreign Secretary, addressed a giant meeting in Trafalgar Square. He invested a single word (“Stupid”) with oratorical force as he denounced Tory foreign policy.

Nasser had a powerful if unexpected ally in the then US president, Dwight D Eisenhower, who called up his old friend from the WW2 North African campaigns, Anthony Eden, the wartime Foreign Secretary, and said to him “Anthony,  are you mad?” Eisenhower threatened to cut off all financial support for the British government unless they  got out of Suez fast.

So luckily my Uncle Neil never got as far as Egypt and the Tory government dumped Eden. The French moved two years later to put their wartime leader, General de Gaulle, into power in 1958. His first task was to end the pointless colonial war in Algeria and seek good relations with Arab powers.

Paris decided that Britain, still under the rule of Empire nostalgic Tories, could not be an intelligent partner in that process and that a US president would never help France.

So France turned to building up Europe in alliance with continental economic powers, including the former wartime Axis nations Germany and Italy, on the basis of economic partnership.

Airbus, which Britain joined as a partner, is now the world’s best-selling airliner. But Labour under Europhobes like Michael Foot, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle as well as most trade union leaders saw European partnership as a threat to the then Labour vision of building socialism in one country.

This suited the controllers of foreign policy in London who were only interested in shoring up the old imperial power of the City of London, culminating in the Thatcher years when financial engineering replaced manufacturing or chemical, other engineering. This ideological construct  is finally now being challenged by Labour under its new non-London leader, Andy Burnham.

France decided a stronger European network of partnership states would be the best answer to having influence over world problems. Whitehall drew the opposite conclusion. In eight years as a Labour PPS and Minister in Tony Blair’s Foreign Office I never heard an official breath a word of criticism of Washington.

The anti-Americanism of the stupid left was never an answer, but in my Foreign Office diaries I am currently editing I am surprised how often the word “poodle” appears.

The US mid-term elections will tell us what Americans think of Trump’s failed intervention in alliance with Netanyahu against Iran, an updated version of Eden’s stupidity at Suez. Trump’s folly (initially backed by Kemi Bedenoch and Nigel Farage), has only increased costs for everyone in America, the UK, the rest of Europe and the world.

Ed Miliband as the new UK Foreign Secretary should tone down the Foreign Office blind obeisance to each and every stupidity by Washington. As in1956 Britain is again cut out from the rest of Europe. Rain Newton-Smith, the head of the CBI, told the Financial Times recently that there was no question of having a new look at Brexit despite every opinion poll showing a majority of Brits now think that it was a mistake.

It took 17 years from Suez to Britain joining the European Economic Community. As the longtime London-based German foreign correspondent, Annette Dittert, writes in a new bestseller on Brexit out in Germany, told the BBC there is no easy return path for a UK. There is continuing hostility to European partnership from the Tories, some trade unions, the CBI leadership, most of the press, and the rising far-right of Reform, Restore and Tommy Robinson movements.

But Ed Miliband who was bold and brave on climate change — a policy vindicated with every passing day — should not fear to tell the truth about the failed Trump ideological experiments and counter-productive foreign policy initiatives.  Instead he might encourage forward looking MPs of all parties to reach out and explore renewing partnership with the UK’s many friends across the Channel.

Denis MacShane was the UK Minister for Europe under Tony Blair.

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