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Trouble Behind. Such hedging left many a Tory deeply uneasy. Brilliant young (33) Sir Edward Boyle, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, resigned from the government. Boyle was widely respected, and his resignation was far more of a blow than the earlier departure of mercurial Minister of State Anthony Nutting. Two Tory backbenchers resigned. A revolt was visibly in the making.
Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd hurried to a meeting of Tory backbenchers. Threatening open defection, they demanded the unconditional withdrawal of British forces, and acceptance of a U.N. police force without insistence on a British com ponent. Reluctantly Lloyd acquiesced.
Lloyd's concession repaired what might have been a serious breach. At division time, on a motion to censure the government, a handful of younger Tories still remained stubbornly in their places. Chief Government Whip Ted Heath bent over them, arguing earnestly like a schoolmaster with wayward children. At the last minute, two of them got up and headed for the Tory lobby, to side with the government.
The revolt had subsided.
For the moment, Eden seemed to have weathered the worst. The impatient were glad that Eden had done something at last; the embarrassed were glad that he had stopped doing it. Most Britons were at least delighted to see Nasser taken down a peg. Attending the Lord Mayor's banquet in the Guildhall at week's end, Eden was applauded by crowds on the sidewalk, applauded again when the waiting dignitaries broke precedent to cheer him and Lady Eden as they entered on a flourish of trumpets. In pubs and farms, the reaction of many a normally loyal Labor voter was: "Thank heaven Eden had the guts to take firm action." Though Labor M.P.s harangued crowds from Newcastle-on-Tyne to Southampton on the theme of "law not war," their impact seemed to be diminishing. A worried Tory campaign manager thought that Eden seemed to have most people with him "but this thing could change any moment." Though the Archbishop of Canterbury had condemned the government, the Archbishop of York found that the "policy of the government, no less than the policy of the opposition, can be supported by Christian convictions." Some 240 of Cambridge's most distinguished scholars wrote a letter to the Times protesting Eden's intervention. More than 350 dons at Oxford filed a similar protest, but a rival group of 30, led by 90-year-old Greek Classicist Gilbert Murray, supported Eden.
Several influential journals—the Manchester Guardian, the Economist, the Observer— called bluntly for Eden's resignation. Already people were calling it "Eden's war."
Waiting Man. Because of this division in the country, Eden will undergo in the next few weeks a searching re-examination of a sort to which few other men have ever been subjected outside a court of law. But his deeds are more easily judged than the man, who has always remained curiously elusive. A classical product of a classical British education (Eton, Oxford and the Somme), Eden was an aristocrat by birth, the third son of irascible Sir William Eden, an unlovable country eccentric whose baronetcy dates back to the 17th century.