Selwyn Lloyd, Foreign Secretary during the time of the Suez Crisis wrote the passage below in response to some of the criticisms that have been levelled at the Eden government. Whether or not what he says can be regarded as correct depends on your opinions on the actions they took.
"Those who contend that Suez was a watershed in our national history often maintain that Eden's Government still regarded Britain as capable of independent action on a global scale. It needed Suez, they say, to convince us that we were no longer a Great Power. This is very wide of the mark. We knew the facts only too well... The Second World War had turned us from the world's greatest creditor to the world's greatest debtor. We could not undertake any more external commitments. Our gold and dollar reserves only covered three months' imports. All this made the safeguarding of our supplies of oil from the Middle East the more important. What we did not foresee were the actions that would be taken against us by the United States Government. Perhaps we were all personally on too good terms, influenced too much by our previous close and friendly relations with Eisenhower... Not having the Americans on the same side, or at least benevolently neutral, was unthinkable."
Selwyn Lloyd, Suez 1956 (Jonathan Cape: London, 1978) p. 42
