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incident) ‘thought that Nasser was playing a cat and mouse game with him and that

Bahrein was the final act of the cat attacking the mouse’. 527

In Shuckburgh’s diary entry of 3 March he claimed to have been approached

by Eden who asked him to contemplate earnestly the idea of reoccupying Suez as a

move to respond to Glubb Pasha’s sacking. As the issue was being discussed news

arrived of Lloyd’s stoning in Bahrain. Shuckburgh felt that everything was in a state

of a mess, ‘and the Arabs [were] hating us more and more’. Eden’s excitement at

recent developments later prompted him to ask Shuckburgh to arrange a ‘weekend

[of] meetings at Chequers’ on the situation in Bahrain and a tour d’horizon of the

overall defence of the Gulf region. Shuckburgh thought that the weekend meetings

were most unnecessary. 528 Nutting described Eden at that time as behaving ‘like an

enraged elephant charging senselessly at invisible and imaginary enemies in the

international jungle’. 529

Conservative MP Julian Amery voiced his opinion on recent developments in

Bahrain and the Middle East. Amery was joint leader with Captain Charles

Waterhouse of the Suez Group informal body consisting of about fifty MPs aimed to

counter policies of appeasement towards Nasser and reversing what they saw as

diminishing British influence in the region. 530 Amery’s letter to The Times on 5

March viewed the dismissal of Glubb and stoning of Lloyd’s car in Bahrain as signs

of ‘the bankruptcy of the policy of appeasement in the Middle East’. He linked these

527 Heikal, Nasser: The Cairo Documents, 84-85.
528 Descent to Suez, 3 March 1956, 345.
529 Nutting, No End of a Lesson, 32.
530 Lucas, Britain and Suez: the Lion’s Last Roar, 59; V. Rothwell, Anthony Eden: A Political Biography
1931-57 (Manchester: 1992), 209; and Carlton, Britain and the Suez Crisis, 13.

© Hamad E. Abdulla 167