The ghost of Suez haunts President Sisi’s visit to London

Word is that the Egyptians were not happy about the evacuation from Sharm el-Sheikh, and it is not hard to understand why

David Cameron and Egyptian president al-Sisi appear at a joint press conference in Downing Street (PA)

The Suez crisis may be almost 60 years behind us, but it still gnaws at relations between the UK and Egypt. It is as though the UK can never quite forgive Egypt for asserting itself successfully against a once-imperial power, while Egypt can never quite forgive the UK for trying. Through no fault of anyone’s, such undercurrents were all too evident this week.

Within a few hours of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s arrival in London, the Foreign Office announced that it was suspending all flights to and from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in the light of intelligence suggesting that a bomb could have caused the Russian Airbus to crash in Sinai. The decision implicitly cast aspersions on Egyptian airport safety and its care of foreign visitors, and could prove damaging, if not actually fatal, to the country’s remaining tourism, which is on the threshold of the all-important winter season.

Nor did the UK’s pre-emptive measures stop there. British planes, it appears, will be flown in, with their own security equipment and staff, to transport 20,000 or so Britons back home in something akin to a colonial-style airlift. Such an operation would be humiliating for any country at any time. For Egypt, however, coming on the eve of the talks between Sisi and the UK government – talks that were always going to be controversial – the stream of announcements was bound to set a particular tone. The word is that the Egyptians were not happy, and it is not hard to understand why.

But it was not only the unfortunate coincidence of General Sisi’s visit and the moratorium on flights that the Egyptians might have found hard to take. There was also a question. On what evidence had the UK decided to ground its tourists – and why were the British and Americans taking the lead in responding this way?

The answer may well have many layers. One would be the evidence that suddenly made the bomb theory more plausible than any other. In the absence of any indication from the Egyptian investigation or from the Russian experts who are also on the ground, it appears that this came from intelligence, and specifically US intelligence. Unconfirmed reports suggest that US surveillance detected a flash immediately before the Russian plane disappeared from the radar, and this gives substance to the theory of a bomb.

If this intelligence detail is considered so plausible, why is it that other countries, such as France and Germany, took almost 24 hours to follow suit and indeed left the decision to their airlines. The Russians, for their part, expressed indignation that they were not informed of the US intelligence before it appears to have become common knowledge.

The British applied a similar hyper-precautionary principle following the beach attack on tourists in Tunisia, again on the basis of “intelligence”. Of course, it was right for the tour companies whose nationals who were afflicted (and they were mostly British) to organise an evacuation and suspend operations. But for the Foreign Office to decree Tunisia off-limits to Britons? No other government reacted in this way.

What explains the differences between the British government’s response, and that of others? Is it that we have privileged access to US intelligence thanks to the “special relationship” – and if it is, do we not have an obligation to share life-and-death information more widely? Is it that UK governments are more inclined to believe US intelligence? It is worth recalling that France, Israel and Russia specifically rejected the intelligence that Tony Blair relied upon to join the Iraq war.

Or could it be that 9/11, followed by the 7/7 London bombings, brought home to UK governments more vividly than to their Continental counterparts the risks to which their citizens could be exposed from murderous jihadism? Do they feel a particular responsibility of care – a duty that, say, French and Spanish governments, for some reason feel less keenly, even though they have also suffered extremist attacks on their soil?

Or is it perhaps that, in the view of successive governments, British foreign policy – our involvement in anti-Isis air strikes today, our intervention in Libya yesterday, and our part in the Iraq war before that, UK citizens are more likely to be targeted by jihadi terrorism than nationals of other countries, so the authorities need to act more protectively? Finally, there might be the memory of flight BA149, which landed in Kuwait after the 1990 Iraqi invasion had begun, with passengers taken hostage and a sequel of expensive lawsuits.

Perhaps all these elements, one way or another, came into play when the UK government decided to award thousands of British holidaymakers an enforced extension to their Red Sea holiday. A regrettable quirk of timing it may have been, but the sour note the move injected into talks with Egypt’s President makes it likely that any new start the British government might have hoped for with Egypt, any ambition for an upsurge in trade, and – more immediately – any leverage the UK might have hoped to exercise in the incipient international diplomacy over Syria is likely to be diminished. And underlying all this it is hard not to see the multifarious strands of UK foreign policy, present and past, with its post-colonial attachment to the Middle East, its fawning Atlanticism, and its insensitivity to how others see us.

The aftermath of the Suez crisis provided the dominant political theme of my youth. My later years will be spent in the shadow of the Iraq war, which has blighted the UK’s capacity to act abroad for at least a generation; the catastrophe of Iraq hangs over everything. Work began last week on the UK’s first permanent military base in Bahrain since the chaotic retreat from Aden nearly 50 years ago. It does not seem the wisest investment for a mid-range power perched on the western edge of Europe.