33

Middle Eastern Scrambles, 1919–1922

THE NATURE AND conduct of foreign affairs have never changed more drastically than in the aftermath of the First World War. In any age George Curzon would have laboured at their problems until far into the night, writing to ambassadors, ploughing through his boxes, correcting the drafts of officials. But in 1919 even a fourteen-hour day was insufficient to deal more than cursorily with dozens of different problems. A quarter of a century earlier, when representing the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, he had had the leisure to work on several schemes for the abolition of slavery in Zanzibar. Now he barely had time even to consider matters of much greater urgency.

Post-war diplomacy was not merely a case of making peace treaties with the defeated powers. Most borders of Europe and many in Asia and Africa had to be redrawn; the disintegration of four great empires had to be overseen; and in the new nations the principle of self-determination was supposed, as far as possible, to be upheld. In the Middle East Britain had to try to reconcile competing promises to the French, the Arabs and the Zionists; in the old Tsarist domains it had to decide its position on the Bolshevik regime and the new independent republics of the Caucasus. Yet other issues could not be ignored while these matters were debated because, as Curzon pointed out, ‘every place is a storm-centre, and our representative there a pivot’.1 Old methods of business, suitable for a more confident imperial age, were no longer adequate for a crisis. Britain’s rebuff to a delegation of Egyptian nationalists, who did not seem to be a priority in the weeks after the end of the war, led immediately to a political crisis in Cairo, rioting in the rest of Egypt, and the murder of several British soldiers. Accustomed by training and temperament to making decisions after exhaustive deliberation, Curzon hated having to improvise policies for situations that changed daily. Brought up under the patient and unostentatious regime of Lord Salisbury, he also deprecated the parade of showy conferences at which Lloyd George and other European leaders liked to exhibit themselves.

The divisions of labour, geographical and otherwise, between a Foreign Secretary with great Asian experience and a Prime Minister who had achieved the status of international statesman were not as unsatisfactory as is often supposed. In the post-war years there were too many issues for any Foreign Secretary to handle, even if he ignored vast areas of the planet such as South America, whose countries Curzon found ‘undistinguished and undistinguishable, even in their vices’.2 Furthermore, the major foreign problems of 1919 and 1920 could not be solved simply by diplomatic negotiation; they were the crucial issues of the time and required the close involvement of national leaders. It was logical that a Prime Minister who had waged the greatest war in history should also make the peace. In the first half of 1919, before Curzon became Foreign Secretary, Lloyd George had negotiated the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed various conditions of territorial surrender and financial reparation on a defeated Germany. Afterwards Europe remained naturally in the Prime Minister’s orbit, as indeed did Russia, for the Government’s policy towards the Bolshevik regime was not a mere question for the Foreign Office. Had he restricted his interests to these areas and allowed Curzon to deal with the rest, Lloyd George might have established a better working relationship with his Foreign Secretary. But although he let him pursue his own policies in parts of the Near and Middle East, the Prime Minister insisted on retaining control of the region’s most crucial issue, the peace settlement with Turkey. It was a mistake which ultimately cost him his office.

The war so upset patterns of diplomatic thinking that at its end British ministers found themselves in hopeless disagreement over areas where it had never been thought necessary to have a policy before. One such region was the Caucasus, visited by Curzon in 1888 and 1889 but of limited interest to his colleagues. Russia’s defeat had resulted in the creation of three republics there – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – all of them vulnerable to the eastern ambitions of both Turkey and Germany. In the summer of 1918 Britain sent a small force to Baku on the Caspian to train its inhabitants to resist outside threats, but their unwillingness to defend themselves soon led to its withdrawal. The defeat of Turkey and Germany subsequently created a vacuum which Curzon was eager to fill with British troops. Arguing in October 1918 that they should be sent to protect the republics, he was surprised and disgusted to find that none of the Cabinet ‘cared a damn’ about the Caucasus; Lloyd George in particular, he later complained, seemed to have a ‘peculiar grudge’ against the area.3 Curzon was exasperated by the Cabinet’s failure to perceive what to him seemed obvious – that it was in British Indian interests to help build a buffer of friendly states before Russia, in whatever form, revived.

Some of his colleagues regarded Curzon’s Caucasian interest as a product of his vanity, an excuse to demonstrate his knowledge of the area and to show them how to pronounce its names. More seriously, Balfour argued that ‘the gateways of India’ were always ‘getting further and further from India’ and that Britain should not take on fresh responsibilities in so distant a region. Dismissing Curzon’s view that a Great Power should give the Caucasians ‘a chance of standing on their own feet’, he suggested they should be allowed to misgovern themselves and, if they wished, to cut each other’s throats.4 Although some troops did return at the end of the war to hold the Baku-Batoum railway from the Caspian to the Black Sea, almost every minister except Curzon wanted them withdrawn as soon as possible.

Curzon’s most powerful opponent over the Caucasus was Churchill, who took charge of the War Office in January 1919. The new Secretary of State set out to reduce Britain’s military expenditure everywhere except Russia, where he was prepared to spend whatever might be necessary to destroy the Bolshevik regime. If troops and money were available, he believed they should be used not to protect Persia or the Caucasus but to oppose ‘the most horrible tyranny and brutality the world had ever seen’.5 Curzon disagreed. His hatred for the Bolsheviks was almost as great as Churchill’s, but his affection for the White Russians was very much less. He was not eager to spend millions to help General Anton Denikin overthrow the Bolsheviks when he suspected that, if triumphant, Denikin would simply return south, gobble up the Caucasian republics and renew the perennial Russian threat against the Indian empire. In June 1919, however, he was overruled by a Cabinet decision to withdraw the troops from the Caucasus and to increase aid to Denikin.

Curzon’s Caucasian views were an adjunct of his policy on Persia, where Britain was now spending some £30 million annually to prevent the disintegration of a country over which motley forces from Turkey, Russia, Britain and Germany had recently been fighting. At the end of the war only the British remained, divided between two small units in the north and north-east, a few garrisons of Indian troops in the Gulf, and a native force under British officers called the South Persia Rifles. In these conditions Curzon saw the chance of making an Anglo-Persian treaty which would lead to the regeneration, under British tutelage, of a country he had long regarded as one of his special preserves. An Anglophile Prime Minister, Vossugh-ed-Dowleh,fn1 governed in Tehran, where Sir Percy Cox, the former Viceroy’s protégé from Muscat, was now head of the Legation. Curzon was confident that negotiations between the two of them, directed by himself from London, would lead to a diplomatic triumph so long as the Cabinet did not interfere and British troops remained in position.

The goodwill of the young Persian ruler, Ahmad Shah, had been bought the year before with a monthly subsidy of 15,000 tomans,fn2 conditional on the appointment of Vossugh and subsequent support for him. His backing for an agreement, Cox reported in April 1919, would be only slightly more expensive. But it was a costlier operation to secure the services of the three key ministers, Vossugh himself and two Qajar princes, Firouz Mirza and Akbar Mirza. This group, known to the British as ‘the triumvirate’, demanded the immense sum of 500,000 tomans ‘paid down and no questions asked’ so they could ‘square’ the rest of the Cabinet, the newspapers and the Persian national assembly, the Majliss.6 They also insisted on guarantees of asylum and assurances that they would not suffer financially if events turned out badly and forced them into exile. Curzon, who had offered the triumvirate £20,000 from Secret Service funds, thought the demands not ‘merely exorbitant’ but ‘corrupt’. Yet he was so eager for an agreement that, in spite of his ‘intense dislike for this phase of the transaction’, he told Cox to secure a deal. Eventually the ministers accepted 400,000 tomans, a figure which Curzon stressed should be regarded as an advance on the official £2 million loan to be offered to the Government in Tehran.7

In the Anglo-Persian Agreement, signed on 9 August 1919, Britain undertook to respect the integrity and independence of Persia, and to supply, apart from the loan, military equipment, assistance in railway construction, and advisers for the Government and the armed forces. The Agreement, Curzon told his colleagues, was in the interests of both countries. Persia had not been left ‘to rot into picturesque decay’ because Britain could not permit, on her Indian frontiers, the existence of a ‘hotbed of misrule, enemy intrigue, financial chaos and political disorder’; such a situation would have led inevitably to Bolshevik intervention and a threat to the oil fields on which the Royal Navy depended. As for Persia, she had been freed from ‘the reign of foreign intrigue’ and, ‘if she plays the game’, had her best chance of recuperation for a century.8

The foreign press, particularly in France, protested that Persia’s independence was now merely nominal; and even the Manchester Guardian admitted that, had the treaty been made by any other power, the paper would have said it ‘amounted to a veiled protectorate’.9 Curzon denied that it amounted to anything of the kind: Persia, he insisted, would lose no liberties, and Britain would gain no obligations. The Aga Khan, he told a sceptical Grey, regarded the Agreement as ‘a model of what such a treaty should be, and as marking a definite stage in the resuscitation of Moslem influence in Central Asia’.10 To Grace he crowed that it was ‘a great triumph’ which he had achieved ‘all alone’. The newspapers, he added, had given the treaty ‘a very good reception’, but none, unfortunately, had mentioned his name or seemed to have ‘the dimmest perception’ that without him at the FO, it would never have been made.11

Believing that British policy was almost invariably beneficial to ‘backward’ peoples, Curzon was astonished whenever the British turned out to be unpopular. He did not understand that the advisers might be resented by Persian nationalists or that the British could conceivably be regarded as more of a threat than the Bolsheviks. The Persians may be the most credulous of conspiracy theorists, but Britain – then and since – has provided them with much evidence for their beliefs. An agreement negotiated secretly with three pro-British ministers was bound to be unpopular, especially when it was rumoured, widely and correctly, that they had received ‘baksheesh’ through the British-run Imperial Bank of Persia.fn3 Exaggerated though it was, the view that Britain was trying to colonize Persia ‘under the guise of magnanimity’ was not entirely unreasonable.13

Curzon did not understand how Persia had changed in the thirty years since he had ridden round the country, and he failed to sense the strong currents of nationalism. But he did realize that the Persians were unlikely to back a treaty if they could see Britain withdrawing her forces from the region. The Agreement had been negotiated at a time when British troops were still in the Caucasus and northern Persia, when a British flotilla patrolled the Caspian, and when Denikin seemed about to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. But the situation in central Asia was transformed by Denikin’s collapse at the end of 1919. Unlike Churchill, Curzon did not believe that this development destroyed Britain’s position in the area and in May of the following year he persuaded the Cabinet to delay withdrawal from Batoum in the Caucasus and from the Persian port of Enzeli on the Caspian. It was an unfortunate decision; two weeks later a Bolshevik force surprised the small British garrison at Enzeli and captured it.

In spite of this setback, Curzon continued to urge the retention of British forces in northern Persia. But the Cabinet now sided with Churchill who, disgusted that he had not received sufficient support for his pro-Denikin policy, had little sympathy with the failure of Curzon’s schemes for the Caucasus and Persia. On 21 May the Cabinet decided to withdraw British troops from both Batoum and northern Persia, a decision which, according to Sir Percy Loraine, Minister in Tehran from 1921, ‘shattered the Persians’ belief in the will and the power of England to protect’ them.14 Curzon anticipated the disastrous effect this move would have on his Agreement and blamed Lloyd George and Churchill for being ‘utterly indifferent to Persia’ and for ‘destroying the work of a century’. British troops were successively withdrawn from Tabriz, Khorasan and areas further south, until only ‘a few necessary sepoys’ were left at Bushire. ‘No policy’, he told Loraine, ‘could have withstood the shock of such continuous withdrawals.’15

Apart from reproaching his colleagues, Curzon also blamed Herman Norman, who took over from Cox in June 1920 and spent sixteen unhappy months in charge of the Legation. Unable to perceive the change of mood in Tehran, Curzon could not see why a pro-British Government did not summon the Majliss to ratify the Agreement. Although Norman warned that Britain, Vossugh and the Agreement were all equally unpopular, he tried to persuade successive ministries, the composition of which he himself largely determined, to proceed with ratification. Early in 1921 he gave up, telling Curzon that even Britain’s friends were unanimous in urging the repudiation of the Agreement; a large group of well-disposed deputies, he added, now opposed it in order to rebut allegations that their original support had been bought.

Curzon refused to co-operate. Believing that Norman had managed ‘utterly to misconceive the whole position’, he decided to write him ‘a much franker and more explicit’ reply than the one suggested by his officials. His Majesty’s Government, he declared, had not ‘the slightest intention of denouncing the agreement and of accepting thereby the responsibility for a proceeding the blame for which must rest exclusively upon Persian shoulders’. If Persia rejected the means of her ‘salvation’, it must be her deed not Britain’s, and she must extricate herself in her own way. Personally, he added in a bitter minute the following day, he would ‘never propose another agreement with the Persians. Not unless they came on their knees would I consider any application from them, and probably not then.’ In future Britain would look after her own interests in Persia, not those of the natives.16

A coup d’état in Tehran, carried out in February 1921 by an army officer, Reza Khan, brought to power a Government which quickly denounced the Agreement. Although the coup was carried out with the approval of British officers in Persia, and although the new Prime Minister was himself pro-British, Curzon rejected Norman’s appeals for assistance to the new regime. ‘I have not the slightest feeling’, he said, ‘for a Government which simultaneously denounces and fawns.’17 Britain’s position in Persia, he later wrote, was ‘one of peculiar humiliation’. But he felt the humiliation more for himself than for his country. He had, he colourfully claimed, ‘devoted more years of labour in the last 35 years to the cause of Persian integrity and freedom than most other people have devoted days or hours’. And the sole result of his labour was the ‘complete collapse of British prestige and influence’ in Persia.18

In May 1922, laid out by his bad back at Hackwood, Curzon wrote to Loraine about his defeat in Persia. Laboriously he catalogued the reasons, the incompetence of Norman, the indifference of the British Cabinet, the influence of Bolshevik propaganda. One can picture him in bed, scribbling away with increasing anger as he lists the failings of the Persians, the hostility of the Majliss, ‘the desperate and colossal incapacity of the Shah’, the ‘incomparable, incurable and inconceivable rottenness of Persian politicians’.19 There may have been truth in these charges, yet the list remains incomplete. Persian nationalism, for example, is omitted because he did not understand a phenomenon he had not come across in the bazaars of Isfahan or the pages of Hajji Baba. But the crucial point was his miscalculation of British strength. The Russian and Turkish empires might have gone, but Britain had neither the power nor the wealth to dominate all the areas they had left. Caucasian escapades were all very well for Greenmantle and those obscure heroes of the Great Game, but they were not a realistic policy for an island whose new imperial responsibilities were already too great for its resources.

Curzon’s personal and almost unfettered diplomacy was confined to Persia. In the rest of the Middle East Britain’s post-war policy was shaped by several people, including Lloyd George and Balfour at the Paris Conference, Montagu at the India Office (which was responsible for Mesopotamia) and Churchill at the War Office, which controlled large numbers of British troops occupying former areas of the Ottoman Empire. It would have been difficult under any conditions to formulate a coherent policy from such diverse sources; it became impossible when the contradictions of Britain’s wartime pledges had to be faced at the same time.

Curzon, who had opposed the giving of all pledges, was particularly scornful of the Sykes-Picot Agreement intended to divide the Arab territories north of Arabia into extensive spheres of French and British influence and smaller zones of direct imperial control. At the Eastern Committee in December 1918 he described it as ‘a sort of fancy sketch to suit a situation that had not then arisen’: that, he assumed, must be ‘the principal explanation of the gross ignorance’ with which the boundaries had been drawn, divisions so ‘fantastic and incredible’ that they would lead to incessant friction between the French, the British and the Arabs. Balfour replied that the Agreement was a signed commitment which could not be broken, a view in tune with a secret deal made a few days earlier between Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Far from wishing to scrap it, the British premier was keen to extend the Sykes-Picot Agreement by adding to the areas allotted to Britain: in particular he wanted Mosul, which had been placed in the French sphere of influence, and Palestine, most of which had been designated as an international zone. In exchange he told his Paris counterpart that Britain would not oppose a French administration either along the Syrian littoral or in the interior, an area which the McMahon letters had reserved for an Arab state.20

The schemes of Lloyd George and Clemenceau were threatened by President Wilson’s plan to send out an international commission to consult the inhabitants before their territories were distributed between the two powers. Curzon was one of the few European statesmen who saw any merit in the plan, for he thought a commission might extricate Britain from Palestine where its position, he believed, would soon become untenable. But he knew the proposal would be unacceptable because France was so unpopular (except in Mount Lebanon) that no commission could recommend a French mandate over Syria without ignoring all evidence presented to it.21 In the event an American commission went out by itself, found that the feeling of the Arabs was ‘particularly strong against the French’ and recommended that the unity of Greater Syria should be preserved: sectarian differences would be intensified, it correctly predicted, by the creation of separate states in Palestine and Lebanon.22 To the relief of the Governments of Britain and France, the commission’s report was not made public for three years.

In the course of 1919 Britain’s leaders realized they would have to take sides over Syria. Against Curzon’s advice, Lloyd George and Balfour preferred to quarrel with the Arabs rather than with France, and they did not insist that the Emir Feisal, Britain’s candidate selected by T.E. Lawrence, should be King of an independent Syria. Withdrawing its troops in November 1919, the Government left the contestants to sort it out, and in the conflict between French colonialism and Arab nationalism the conciliatory Feisal was an inevitable loser. The British were deeply embarrassed by his fate, especially Balfour, who felt personally responsible,23 but they did find some means of compensation. In 1921 Feisal was offered the throne of Iraq (Mesopotamia), a country which, after a rebellion in 1920, turned out to be one of Britain’s more successful Middle Eastern ventures.

Disheartened by events in Syria, Curzon was even more dismayed by developments in Palestine, which since General Allenby’s conquest in 1918 had been under British military administration. Encouraged by the Balfour Declaration, Zionist leaders were now calling for a ‘Jewish commonwealth’, an ambition Curzon felt sure would lead to clashes with the Arabs. In January 1919 he communicated these anxieties to Balfour, who replied that Weizmann had never asked for a ‘Jewish Government in Palestine’ and that he himself would regard such a claim as ‘inadmissible’. Turning to his dictionaries, Curzon decided that the then Foreign Secretary was quibbling over the difference between ‘commonwealth’ and ‘government’.

I feel tolerably sure … that while Weizmann may say one thing to you, or while you may mean one thing by a national home, he is out for something quite different. He contemplates a Jewish state, a Jewish nation, a subordinate population of Arabs etc. ruled by Jews; the Jews in possession of the fat of the land, and directing the Administration.

He is trying to effect this behind the screen and under the shelter of British trusteeship.24

While Curzon was aware that Weizmann said one thing to his friends but sang to ‘a different tune in public’, he did not know that the Foreign Secretary was pursuing a similar tactic with himself. Although Balfour told him then that a Jewish government was inadmissible, he had confessed to a Zionist sympathizer the year before that he hoped for a Jewish state and, at a meeting with Churchill and Weizmann in 1922, he and Lloyd George admitted that the Balfour Declaration ‘had always meant a Jewish State’.25 Convinced by long acquaintance that Balfour did not really care about anything, Curzon never appreciated the strength of his attachment to Zionism. He believed that the driving force behind this particular policy was the Prime Minister who, he thought, ‘clings to Palestine for its sentimental and traditional value, and talks about Jerusalem with almost the same enthusiasm as about his native hills’.26

The future of the Middle East was ordained at the San Remo Conference in April 1920. Until a few days beforehand Curzon was laid out with back aches, but he recovered in time to be present at the opening. An Italian diplomat, Daniele Varè, went to pick him up at the station, but he insisted on walking to the hotel, ‘proceeding at a snail’s pace in the middle of the road’, attracting a large crowd and causing much perturbation among the police, who had not expected to supervise what seemed like a procession of the Corpus Domini.27 Curzon was depressed by the conference and by the town, which he compared to ‘a second class English watering place’. He was also exasperated by Grace, who from England showed no interest in what he was doing except to suspect him of having an affair with Lady Beatty, whom he saw once in a crowded dining-room.28 But the newspaper proprietor Lord Riddell thought he was in good form and found him ‘a most complicated and interesting personality – vain but witty, amusing and extremely well-informed’. Curzon was working so hard, he observed, that he had ‘nearly killed his secretaries by robbing them of their sleep’.29

The French delegation, Curzon told his uninterested wife, were gloomy and sulky and took little part, while the Italians contributed nothing except ‘smiles and amiable but often ignorant generalisations’. The conference was dominated by Lloyd George, whose ‘fits of impetuosity’ took him alternately in right and wrong directions; he was at times ‘conciliatory and genial’ and at others ‘excited, windy [and] ignorant’. The most trying occasions were the official dinners where everyone talked French except Lloyd George, who spoke through an interpreter. At least one participant wished Curzon had also stuck to English. The trilingual Varè could translate from French into English or vice versa, but he found it difficult to translate Curzon’s French into French.30

Several matters were discussed at San Remo, including the question of German reparations. But the crucial questions decided were the settlement with Turkey (which will be discussed in the next chapter) and the future of the liberated Arab territories. After scenes described by President Wilson as ‘the whole disgusting scramble’ for the Middle East,31 France and Britain awarded themselves – through the agency of the new League of Nations – the mandates of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia. It was not an edifying moment in the history of either imperial power. In discussing populations under a foreign mandate, the Covenant of the League of Nations had declared that ‘the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust for civilization’. But the fact that the most advanced peoples of the region were placed under foreign domination while the primitive tribal areas of Arabia were given independence exposes the pretence that the mandates were designed to benefit the inhabitants rather than the powers that administered them. Greed was the predominant impulse and, if altruism was another motive, it did not attenuate the disastrous consequences. Britain’s mandate in Palestine led, as Curzon predicted, to Arab-Jewish conflict, while France, in seeking to establish a Christian, pro-French state by separating Lebanon from Syria, created the essential condition for one of the longest and most brutal civil wars of all time.

As Foreign Secretary, Curzon told Allenby, he intended to carry out the Government’s policy on Palestine in line with ‘the narrower and more prudent rather than the wider interpretation’ of the Balfour Declaration.32 He continued to worry about the rights of the Palestinian Arabs and complained when they, who formed the overwhelming majority of the population, were described in the draft Mandate as a ‘non-Jewish community’. He also objected to attempts to go beyond the aspirations of the Declaration in the wording of the Mandate by referring to ‘the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the claim which this gives them to reconstitute Palestine as their National Home’. Although he managed to substitute a much blander phrase about the Jews ‘reconstituting their National Home in that country’, Curzon remained distrustful of Zionist ambitions and pessimistic about the future of Palestine. He always regarded the Balfour Declaration as ‘the worst’ of Britain’s Middle East commitments and ‘a striking contradiction of our publicly declared principles’.33

In the immediate aftermath of the war Egypt looked set to become the site of Britain’s greatest Middle East disaster. Although Cromer and later Kitchener had been the effective rulers of the country, Egypt was never technically a part of the empire: in theory her Khedive had been the hereditary viceroy of the Ottoman Sultan until December 1914 when a protectorate was declared and he was given the title of Sultan. Yet in the following years Egypt had proved herself a vital element of the imperial system, a country which controlled the lifeline to India and from which Middle Eastern operations could be conducted. No one who believed in the future of the empire wished to abandon control.

Nationalist feeling, demonstrated by the riots of March 1919, was enjoying a powerful revival in Egypt. As the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, explained to Curzon, its ‘dormant embers’ had been fanned by the war and by the much discussed idea of self-determination.34 Wingate recommended conciliation and, for being too perceptive too soon, duly forfeited his post and was replaced by Allenby. But although Curzon was slow to understand the strength of Egyptian nationalism, he was quicker than most of his colleagues. The Egyptians, he later observed, considered themselves in ‘the very front files of civilization’ and were naturally unwilling to remain under the Protectorate when their ‘more backward brothers’ in Arabia were achieving self-government.35

At the end of 1919 Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary, led a mission of enquiry to Egypt and in a subsequent report recommended that the Protectorate should be abolished and replaced by a bilateral treaty between Britain and Egypt. During negotiations in London the following summer, he came to an agreement with Zaghlul Pasha, the leading nationalist politician, which conceded most of the Egyptian case: while Britain’s ‘special interests’ would be safeguarded, notably by a force to protect ‘imperial communications’, the Protectorate would be scrapped and Egypt recognized as an independent constitutional monarchy. This private agreement went well beyond Milner’s instructions, but Curzon did not think it could be repudiated, especially as its terms had already appeared in the Egyptian press. His advice to accept it, however, was rejected by a Cabinet persuaded by Churchill that the Government was not bound by the recommendations of Milner’s report.

The Cabinet’s decision came in the middle of a lengthy dispute between Curzon and Churchill over control of Britain’s Middle East policy. In Curzon’s view the area should have had its own department with a secretary of state and an administrative service of its own. But if this solution was ruled out on grounds of expense, he thought it preferable to run the Middle East from the Foreign Office rather than, as Churchill suggested, from a department in the Colonial Office. The War Secretary, he told the Cabinet in June 1920, ‘must be very imperfectly acquainted’ with the views and interests of the area if he thought his proposal would be popular. ‘A lethal blow would be dealt at the pride of Egypt’ if the transfer took place, while ‘the mandated territories would utter a cry of rage’ at the thought of being treated like British colonies. Besides, it would be impossible to formulate coherent policies when adjoining countries (Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan) would be under the respective control of the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and a combination of the India Office and the FO.36

Curzon was backed by the foreign affairs heavyweights, Milner, Chamberlain and Montagu, who deplored any step that might look like the annexation of mandated territory. But they were outvoted in the Cabinet, and at the beginning of 1921 Palestine and Mesopotamia (but not Egypt) were transferred to the Colonial Office, just in time to be administered by the new Secretary of State – W.S. Churchill. Glad to be relieved of the responsibility for implementing the Balfour Declaration, Curzon was nevertheless anxious about the future. Churchill was ‘a most dangerous man’, he thought, who wanted to grab everything for his new department and become ‘a sort of Asiatic foreign secretary’.37

In February 1921 Milner urged Curzon to make a settlement with the moderate Egyptian nationalists on the basis of his report. The Foreign Secretary brought the matter up at the Cabinet shortly afterwards and, with the support of Montagu, managed to persuade Lloyd George and his other colleagues to accept in principle the abolition of the Protectorate and a treaty between the two countries. Throughout the year, however, Churchill fought against concessions and irritated Curzon by insisting on holding a Middle East conference in Cairo and by ‘stepping boldly’ on Foreign Office ground during an indiscreet interview with the Egyptian Sultan. Personal relations improved after the Churchills stayed at Hackwood for the Whitsun recess. Asking afterwards if they could revert to the suspended superscriptions of ‘My dear George’ and ‘My dear Winston’, Churchill wrote that the visit ‘recalled to my mind memories of the pre-war and even pre-Joe epochs’.38 But although the private cordiality continued, particularly during the last illness and death of Churchill’s mother, their political animosity deepened. At a meeting on Egypt in the autumn, Curzon told Grace, Churchill had been ‘difficult and insolent’ and was heard muttering that the Foreign Secretary’s policy was always wrong.39

In June Curzon tackled the Colonial Secretary on his constant unauthorized pronouncements on foreign affairs. Singling out a reference to Egypt, he told Churchill he had caused great annoyance to the nationalists by implying that Egypt was an incorporated part of the British empire. But claiming the right to speak on Egypt in accordance with the Cabinet’s views of the previous year, Churchill replied that he was not prepared to sit mutely watching ‘the loss of this great and splendid monument of British administrative skill and energy’. Lloyd George thought Curzon was ‘undoubtedly right’ and told him it was ‘most improper and dangerous’ for a minister to make pronouncements on questions of foreign policy without consulting the Foreign Secretary. Sending a copy of this letter to Churchill, Curzon added that he could not make an exception in the case of Egypt simply because his correspondent held strong views on the subject. But the Colonial Secretary refused to give in and asked his colleague to remember how ‘formidably’ affairs in the rest of the Middle East would be affected by the belief that ‘we are going to let ourselves be turned out of Egypt’.40

At the Imperial Conference in London the following month, Churchill again sounded off on foreign policy, this time denouncing a renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Curzon appealed by note to the Prime Minister, who sympathized and said he had done his best ‘to stopper his fizzing’. Chamberlain agreed with the Foreign Secretary, telling him he was right to show his resentment at Churchill’s ‘constant and persistent interference’; it went far beyond anything he had ever experienced in a Cabinet. Curzon then sent the miscreant a note asking what he would say if the Foreign Secretary suddenly made a speech on a colonial question. The irrepressible Churchill replied that there was no comparison between vital matters affecting the whole future of the world and the mere departmental topics with which the Colonial Office was concerned. ‘In these great matters’, he added, ‘we must be allowed to have opinions.’41

A few days later Curzon embarked on lengthy talks with Adly Pasha, a moderate Egyptian nationalist who was in the uncomfortable position of being Prime Minister under a High Commissioner administering martial law. The problem, as Curzon soon realized, was that Adly could not make concessions without being denounced by the extreme Zaghlul, while he himself could not go far to meet him without upsetting the Cabinet. He was ‘trying hard to patch up something with Adly and Co,’ he told Hardinge in late October. ‘But the Jingoes in the Cabinet, of whom the strongest are the PM and Winston, want to concede nothing and to stamp out rebellion in Egypt by fire and sword.’42 On the same day he predicted to Grace that the negotiations would lead to nothing. ‘The Cabinet are much stiffer than I am in the matter and I am sure we will have an absolute rupture – with another Ireland in Egypt.’43 Compelled to make conditions which he knew Adly could not accept, Curzon was not surprised that the negotiations merely led to the Egyptian’s resignation when he returned home in November.

On an issue where two Tory imperialists, Curzon and Milner, took more liberal positions than the most prominent Liberals, Lloyd George and Churchill, the former proconsuls received the crucial support of Lord Allenby. Convinced that the Milner report offered the only logical solution, the High Commissioner decided to force the issue. While deporting Zaghlul and his associates for inciting further violence, he urged the British Government to give a new ministry a chance of survival by unilaterally declaring the Protectorate at an end and recognizing Egypt as an independent sovereign state. Lloyd George and his Cabinet majority held out until Allenby returned to London and threatened to resign. Then they gave in, the declaration was made – with some reservations about British interests – and in March 1922 Egypt was recognized as an independent monarchy under her Sultan, henceforth known as King Fuad I. The process was watched bitterly by Churchill, who blamed Curzon. ‘It leaves me absolutely baffled’, he told the Foreign Secretary, ‘to comprehend why you should be on this side, or why you should have insisted on keeping Egyptian affairs in your hands only to lead to this melancholy conclusion.’44

Curzon knew that it was not a final settlement. Matters concerning the Sudan, the defence of Egypt, the protection of foreign interests and the security of imperial communications – all needed in due course to be solved, and took several decades in the solving. But it did at least unravel one of the most difficult of British entanglements. After misjudging nationalist strength in the spring of 1919, Curzon had soon realized what was and was not possible in Egypt. Had he had his own way, he would have made a settlement based on Milner’s report in 1920. But he seldom did get his own way with Lloyd George. In the end this weakness was merely unfortunate for the Egyptians, but for the Greeks it proved disastrous.