Suez Group (political faction)

The Suez Group was a predominantly right-wing backbench group of Conservative Members of the British Parliament that coalesced in 1953–54 around opposition to the evacuation of British forces from the Suez Canal base in Egypt. Leading figures included Julian Amery, Captain Charles Waterhouse and Billy McLean, with Angus Maude and Viscount Hinchingbrooke also being associated with those who refused the Conservative Whip over Suez.

The group was formed by opponents of Anglo-Egyptian negotiations under Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, whom had in a 1954 agreement consented to a British withdrawal from the Canal Zone. Conservative backbench dismay had grown for several years prior after a number of imperial retreats in the Middle East, including the collapse of Palestine in 1947–48 and the Abadan Crisis in 1951, while Major Henry Legge-Bourke later told the House of Commons that the “seed” of the group had been sown in late 1952 and that, during the winter recess of 1952–53, a meeting at the residence of former cabinet minister Leo Amery, father of Julian Amery, whose house became the gathering “from which was born the Suez Group”.

Origins and membership

The first public statement of the tendency that became the Suez Group came in the Commons on 17 December 1953, when Waterhouse moved a motion urging the government to suspend negotiations on revising the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty and to retain “sufficient armed forces” in the Canal Zone. Waterhouse framed withdrawal as another stage in imperial retreat; the motion itself crystallised a recognisable Conservative backbench opposition to Eden's Egyptian policy before the 1954 agreement was signed.

The Suez Group's casus belli was found in the Sudan settlement, in which the United Kingdom and Egypt agreed to bring an end to the condominium which had existed in the Sudan since 1899, and subsequent Suez negotiations, both of which hardened the caucus's determination to resist what it called Eden's appeasement of Cairo, and that during the next seventeen months it mounted a sustained campaign against withdrawal.

Political aims and ideology

Amery, speaking against the 1954 settlement, argued that evacuation amounted to “virtually unconditional” withdrawal; he treated the Canal and Britain's wider Middle Eastern position as parts of an international and Commonwealth communications system that should not be surrendered to Egyptian nationalism.

The ideological leaning of the group was not entirely cloistered within the Conservative right. Some members stressed great-power strategy and Commonwealth communications; others highlighted the Canal as an international waterway; others, especially in 1956, concentrated on the danger posed by Nasser to the whole Western position in the Middle East.