Introduction

The conditions imposed by the First World War denied Sir Henry McMahon contact with the politicians for whom nationalist activity had been the raison d’être before 1914. So much of his time was spent in trying to control his staff that British supremacy was eroded. Even though Sir Reginald Wingate and Sultan Husayn Kamil claimed a long-standing intimacy, the relations between them suffered. Turmoil, which had been endemic since Cromer, continued among the leading British figures and made it necessary for Wingate to devote disproportionate concentration to combating it. With the ending of the war, the politicians – now unleashed and anxious to make visible progress towards the independence they believed with some justification had been held out to them as a perhaps distant postwar prospect – were no longer debarred from attempting to resume contact with British officials. In the upshot, Wingate, Lord Allenby and Lord Lloyd (also referred to as ‘The Lord’ and in Cromer’s class as an autocrat) were all unable to meet the challenge. They fell short through their inadequate handling (in the Whitehall view) of the claims of Egypt, which martial law and its role as a military jumpingoff point for the Allies had temporarily stifled and careless wartime British pronouncements and President Wilson had encouraged.