Geoffrey Smith

For more than a quarter of a century, at least since the failure of the Suez Canal venture in 1956, Britain has been preoccupied with a sense of its national decline. To some extent the country's demise as a world power was inevitable. Britain was bound to (divest itself of its empire; to have attempted to hang on against all the forces of history would have been a far worse course. Nor could Britain possibly have maintained the almost equal partnership with the United States that it thought it enjoyed when the two countries found themselves fighting side by side in the Second World War.