Anthony Eden

Anthony Eden was born in County Durham in 1897, served as an officer in the First World War and studied at Oxford. He entered Parliament in 1923 and became Foreign Secretary in 1935. He resigned in February 1938 in protest at Neville Chamberlain's attempts to reach terms with Fascist Italy, and returned as Foreign Secretary under Winston Churchill during the Second World War and again from 1951. He succeeded Churchill in April 1955 and increased the Conservative majority at the general election weeks later. After Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, he joined France and Israel in a military operation that was halted under American and international pressure. He resigned in January 1957, citing ill health, was made Earl of Avon in 1961 and died in 1977.

Admirers remember Eden as a skilled diplomat who opposed appeasement, helped manage the wartime alliance and in 1954 helped settle the future of West Germany within NATO. Critics focus on Suez, which drew condemnation from the United Nations, the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth, and ended under the threat of American financial sanctions. His concealment of the collusion with France and Israel, including misleading Parliament, is widely regarded as the low point of his career. Historians often treat Suez as a turning point that showed the limits of British power, while his official biographer has argued that it came to dominate assessments of a much longer record.