Anthony Eden (12 July 1897 – 14 January 1977) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 6 April 1955 to 10 January 1957, succeeding Winston Churchill and preceding Harold Macmillan. He was a member of the Conservative Party, and he was Churchill's trusted right-hand man for several years. Eden was forced to resign as the result of the Suez Crisis, in which Britain was humiliated due to its loss of superpower status.
Biography[]
Anthony Eden was born in Windlestone, County Durham, England in 1897. After finishing at Eton, he served on the Western Front in World War I and was awarded the Military Cross. After the war, he resumed his education at Oxford, and became the Conservative Party MP for Warwick and Leamington in 1923. From 1926 to 1929, he served as Parliamentary Private secretary to Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain. He became an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1931, and in 1935 entered the Cabinet as Minister for League of Nations Affairs. Later that year, he replaced Samuel Hoare as Foreign Secretary. Initially, Eden supported the policies of appeasement pursued by the government, but when Neville Chamberlain replaced Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1937, Eden found that his department was being increasingly interfered with.
Eden had the good fortune to resign in February 1938, just before the signing of the Munich Agreement, so that his career was untainted by the episode. Unlike Winston Churchill, he was not a principled opponent of appeasement, his resgination being triggered more by dislike and distrust of Benito Mussolini than of Adolf Hitler. Officially, he stepped down over the government's recognition of Italy's conquest of Abyssinia, while the underlying casue was his struggle with Chamberlain over control of policy. Subsequently, he was critical of the government's foreign policies, and did not regain office until World War II broke out, when he became Dominions Secretary.
Rise to power[]
Eden in 1952
Eden was made Foreign Secretary by Churchill in 1940, and he emerged as the second-in-command within the Conservative Party. After defeat in the 1945 elections, he became increasingly impatient with Churchill's refusal to resign, especially as Churchill left the running of day-to-day politics to him, basking in his glory as a war hero. Again Foreign Secretary from 1951, his appeal to Churchill to resign became ever more pressing, though he was unable to succeed him until 1955, a year in which he led the party to a clear election victory. However, the fiasco of the Suez Crisis made his early resignation inevitable. Though not a military disaster, it was his complete failure to foresee and then acknowledge international outrage at Britain's actions which resulted in a resounding diplomatic and national humiliation. In this sense, his long and successful involvement in foreign policy for three decades proved more of a liability than an asset, leading him not to understand that Britain was no longer the world power it had been when he first took office. He died in 1977.