‘Collusion’ and the Suez Crisis of 1956

Abstract

PLO of the most frequent objections levelled at contemporary historians when they attempt to illuminate the recent past are that they do not possess sufficient perspective and that, in many cases, the archives are not yet open for research. The first implies that some necessary interval has to elapse between an event and the historian's attempt to discuss it, but proponents of this view rarely enlighten us as to the length of the interval in question. Are we now able, for example, to see the First World War in proper perspective? Or the French Revolution? To ask these questions is to expose the falsity of the problem, for our perspective is of course continually changing. The second objectionpresupposes that we do not have enough information to reconstruct what happened with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but that if we wait until that day-thirty, fifty or one hundred years after the event-when the historian is allowed into the archives, all will be revealed. Neither of these presuppositions is in my view correct. As far as the first is concerned, the reader is simply invited to contrast what is already available in the form of first-hand testimony on the subject of this article-the Suez crisis of 1956-with the sources available for the study of, say, the British Isles in the fifth century AD. Historians of that period would give a great deal to have the equivalent of even the most partial of the Suez memoirs, but its absence quite rightly does not prevent them from producing a great deal of valuable history. The second presupposition-that the truth is only to be found in the archives-displays an excessive faith in the integrity and procedures of the politicians and officials responsible for producing the documents which eventually find their way there. Confining ourselves to British policy, we would do well to bear in mind Lord Tedder's strictures upon the integrity of official records. These ' are not perhaps the ideal, and certainly not the whole, source on which to have to rely ', he wrote in the preface to his war memoirs. ' I expect that most of us have seen, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with anger, reports and orders obviously worded with an eye to the future historian, or, as we used to call them, for the record . The wording of signals and orders for the record is a very fine art and well calculated to fox the historian.' There are doubtless many documents on the Suez crisis which were written ' for the record '; indeed, we shall have occasion to refer to one in due course.