‘Grocer meets Butcher’: Marcello Caetano's London visit of 1973 and the last days of Portugal's Estado Novo

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The visit of the Portuguese premier Marcelo Caetano to London in July 1973 failed to boost Portugal's international respectability. Instead, despite the qualified sympathy of the British Conservative government, the visit highlighted Lisbon's isolation from the realities of the cold war and détente. Public protests punctuated the visit, and the gulf between the attitudes of the main British political parties to Portugal and its African policies was exposed. Labour's subsequent return to power in 1974 coincided with the overthrow of the Caetano regime and the new London government helped mediate the outwardly alarming ‘revolutionary process’ in Portugal to a nervous western alliance.