Anthony Nutting

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
In office 31 October 1951 – 18 October 1954
Prime Minister	Winston Churchill
Preceded by	The Lord Henderson and Robin Turton
Member of Parliament for Melton
In office 5 July 1945 – 19 December 1956
Preceded by	Lindsay Everard
Succeeded by	Mervyn Pike
Personal details
Born	Harold Anthony Nutting (1920-01-11)11 January 1920 Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
Died	23 February 1999(1999-02-23) (aged 79) London, England
Political party	Conservative
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Military service
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Branch/service	British Army
Unit	Leicestershire Yeomanry

Sir Harold Anthony Nutting, 3rd Baronet (11 January 1920 – 23 February 1999) was a British diplomat and

Nutting was the son of Sir Harold Stanmore Nutting, 2nd Baronet, member of a wealthy family who owned estates in England, Scotland, and Ireland.^[1] He was born in Shropshire at the private Shrewsbury Nursing Institution at Quarry House, Shrewsbury,^[2] and was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge^[1] where he studied agriculture.^{[citation needed]}

Before the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Leicestershire Yeomanry as a trooper but was invalided out early in 1940 because of asthma^[1] after a steeplechase accident.^{[citation needed]}

Next he entered the

At the 1945 general election, at 25, Nutting was elected as the MP for Melton in Leicestershire, an area involved in hunting and it was said of it that "most of the voters are foxes". He served as chairman of the Young Conservatives (1946–47) and he was the youngest member of Winston Churchill's Government in the 1950s.

He was made a

Nutting supported the idea of moving Iraqi troops into Jordan in response to aggressive Israeli military raids in the West Bank that were carried out in response to attacks, by the Palestinian fedayeen, on Israel. Such a deployment could have provoked war with Israel, as Britain had a defence treaty with Jordan at the time, and Jordan could appeal for British military assistance if there was any Israeli action to stop it. However, when Nutting telephoned Prime Minister Anthony Eden to press the case, Eden angrily told Nutting, "I will not allow you to plunge this country into war merely to satisfy the anti-Jewish spleen of you people in the Foreign Office".^[4]

Later life

He kept his silence over the Suez Crisis until 1967. Then, his book, No End of a Lesson, explained that backing the Suez action would have put him in the position of lying to the House of Commons and the United Nations.

"Either I had to tell the whole story as I saw it, or say nothing at all," he wrote. "And as long as any of the chief protagonists of the Suez war still held high office in Britain it would clearly have been a grave disservice to the nation, which they still led and represented in the councils of the world, to have told the whole story." The crisis had caused so much bitterness that even eleven years after his resignation, he came under pressure from the Cabinet Secretary not to proceed and there was even a threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

He stood one more time, unsuccessfully, in Oldham East in 1964. In his later years, still a political outcast, he divided his time between writing biographies and histories in London, fox hunting in Shropshire and farming at Achentoul, Scotland.

In 1969, Nutting was banned from entering Israel because of a speech to students in Beirut in which he reportedly said that the Palestine question had to be resolved by force, and it was up to Palestinian guerillas to impose a solution.^[5]

Nutting was a long-standing member of the board of Christopher Mayhew’s Middle East International, the London based bimonthly journal on Middle East events.^[6]

He died at the Royal Brompton Hospital, London of heart failure on 23 February 1999, aged 79, and was cremated on 4 March at the West London Crematorium.^[1]

Arms

References