Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit

by Philip Stephens

Overview

A magisterial and profoundly perceptive survey of Britain’s post-war role on the global stage, from Suez to Brexit.

In 1962 the American statesman Dean Acheson famously charged that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a new role. Nearly sixty years later the rebuke rings true again. Britain’s postwar search for its place in the world has vexed prime ministers and government since the nation's great victory in 1945: the cost of winning the war was giving up the empire.

After the humiliation of Anthony Eden’s Suez expedition, Britain seemed for a time to have found an answer. Clinging to its self-image as a great island nation, it would serve as America’s best friend while acknowledging its geography by signing up to membership of the European Union. Never a comfortable balancing act, for forty years it appeared to work. In 2016 David Cameron called the Brexit referendum and blew it up.

Award-winning journalist Philip Stephens paints a fascinating portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile its waning power with past glory. Drawing on decades of personal contact and interviews with senior politicians and diplomats in Britain, the United States and across the capitals of Europe, Britain Alone is a vivid account of a proud nation struggling to admit it is no longer a great power. It is an indispensable guide to how we arrived at the state we are in.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571341771
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Philip Stephens is an award-winning journalist and chief political commentator at the Financial Times. He was previously director of the FT’s editorial board. Throughout his career, he has had unique access to foreign policymakers in Britain and around the world. Stephens won the David Watt Prize for Outstanding Political Journalism; the UK Political Studies Association’s Political Journalist of the Year; and Political Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards. He is the author of Politics and the Pound and Tony Blair.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Prologue 1

1 Broken Dreams 17

2 Greeks and Romans 43

3 A Thousand Years of History 71

4 A Very British Bomb 104

5 Power and the Pound 135

6 Missed Chances 165

7 Cold Warrior 193

8 The Road to Bruges 234

9 The Bastards 259

10 Back to the Desert 284

11 Fog in the Channel 333

12 Alone 377

Afterword: The Search Resumes 411

Select Bibliography 419

Notes 427

Index 441

Editorial Reviews

08/09/2021

A diminished U.K. has been too standoffish toward Europe and too subservient to the U.S., argues this probing study of post-WWII British foreign policy. Financial Times journalist Stephens (Politics and the Pound) explores Britain’s uneasy, decades-long adjustment to the loss of its empire and global power, exemplified by the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, during which the British military, along with French and Israeli forces, tried to reoccupy the canal after Egypt nationalized it; the Brits retreated when a disapproving President Eisenhower cut off financing and oil. In response, Britain shored up its “special relationship” with the U.S., which led to Margaret Thatcher’s cooperation with Ronald Reagan’s anti-communist policies and Tony Blair’s ill-advised participation in the Iraq War, while also seeking to re-energize the country’s economy and geopolitical clout by joining the European Union, a project that was undermined by nationalist and imperial nostalgia. Delivering a caustic brief against Brexit, Stephens argues that the vote was rooted in “insecurity” and “dog-whistle racism” and will leave Britain economically weaker and “marooned.” Buttressed by Stephens’s firm grasp of parliamentary politics and elegant prose, this erudite yet accessible history uncovers the agonizing trade-offs that flow from simplistic economic and political nostrums. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Tony Blair

"Stephens ... has written easily the best - as well as the best informed - modern summary of Britain's still brilliant but now increasingly beleaguered prime minister." —  Washington Post on Tony Blair

"If anybody asks me, now, which is the best place to start reading on the kaleidoscope figure of Blair, I shall simply reply "Stephens"." — Peter Hennessy, Financial Times on Tony Blair "Today Tony Blair enjoys a great lustre in America than in his own country. And yet readers may end this well-informed and sympathetic book wondering how long it can be before the bloom fades." —  New York Times on Tony Blair

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