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un on the pound had developed. Britain’s gold and dollar reserves fell by 15 per cent
that month, and the Americans, when appealed to for help, bluntly told the British that
none would be forthcoming without a ceasefire. Isolated in Cabinet and in Parliament,
Eden accepted the principle of a UN-brokered ceasefire. The Suez operation had become
a fiasco. Even those in favour of it were disgusted by this apparently abject surrender
with no objective achieved (beyond the destruction of the Egyptian air force). ‘By
stopping when they did,’ Eden’s biographer wrote, ‘the British incurred the maximum of
odium and the minimum of advantage.’
Eden was finished, physically and politically. He had been suffering since October
from recurrent fevers, the legacy of the bungled bile duct operation. On 19 November
his doctors advised a complete rest, preferably in a warm climate. Ian and Ann Fleming
offered the Edens their Jamaica house, Goldeneye; on 23 November the exhausted Prime
Minister and his wife flew out there to general astonishment and dismay. He returned in
December to a notably cool reception from his party and the country. It was a sad end
for a great career in Parliament and at the Foreign Office. On 20 December Eden, who
had always dominated the House of Commons, was forced on the defensive over the
issue of collusion with Israel over Suez and lied: ‘there were no plans to get together to
attack Egypt… there was no foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt’. His final
defiant declaration, ‘I would be compelled… if I had the same very disagreeable
decisions to take again, to repeat them’, offended everybody, both those who had
supported the Suez operation but had disliked the bungling and the forced retreat and
those who had opposed it. They were his last words in the House of Commons, where
the mood was described not so much as hostile but, more fatally, as dismissive. Early in
January his doctors told him that if he continued in office he was unlikely to survive; he
decided to resign – in his wife’s words, ‘he wanted to stay alive’. On 8 January he drove
down to Sandringham with his wife to see Elizabeth; they dined and spent the night
there. Elizabeth expressed her personal sadness and offered him an earldom; it was
agreed that he would come to Buckingham Palace the next day formally to hand over his
seals of office and at 6 p.m. on 9 January he did so.
Eden’s conversations with the Queen on 8 January at Sandringham have remained
secret although he made a memorandum of them at the time and subsequently wrote
two others. He was always extremely sensitive on the question of whether or not
Elizabeth approved of the Suez operation. When Robert Lacey published an article in the
Sunday Times implying that the Queen had been strongly opposed to the Suez operation
but had been unable to prevent it, Lord Avon (as Eden had by then become) in January
1976 was ‘dealing somewhat angrily with Martin Charteris’ over it, and told Lacey in
April 1976 that the Queen ‘understood what we were doing very well’. He was most
emphatic that she did not disapprove of the operation, although he was honest enough
to admit that ‘nor would I claim that she was pro-Suez’, according to his biographer. He
remembered her as being absolutely constitutional and impartial and, as Lacey
conceded, it would have been quite improper for him to discuss or disclose any more
than that. Lacey’s subsequent biography of the Queen recounted the suspicion of ‘at