Yet there had been an educational revolution in Britain since the 1820s—the reform and expansion of the public schools which produced the British gov… - Correlli Barnett

British policy was therefore the child of their insemination of the politicians – politicians like Baldwin and MacDonald, the Chamberlains, Simon and Henderson, Halifax, Eden. It was as if the encumbents of quiet early-nineteenth-century rectories and nonconformist minister's houses had been miraculously transported into the great offices of State of a hundred years later. Instead of the suspicious minds of pre-Victorian statesmen, there was trustfulness; instead of a worldly scepticism, a childlike innocence and optimism. And instead of a toughness, even a ruthlessness, in the pursuit of English interests, there was a yielding readiness to appease the wrath of other nations. For the very bedrock of the national character had been crumbled since the eighteenth century. Whereas the pre-Victorian Englishman had been renowned for his quarrelsome temper and his willingness to back his argument with his fists – or his feet – now the modern British, like the elderly, shrank from conflict or unpleasantness of any kind. In Lord Vansittart's words: "Right or Left, everybody was for a quiet life."

The deal between the French and the Israelis was struck in Paris on 1 October 1956. An eighteenth-century British cabinet would not have hesitated to join in... In contrast, Eden's cabinet was riven by moral squeamishness; so too were the house prefects of the Foreign Office.
The irony lay in that the political and psychological shackles which the morally squeamish now found so uncomfortable had been forged by themselves. It was they and their predecessors who since 1918 had brought about the prevailing climate of opinion in which a state's naked pursuit of self-interest, if necessary by armed diplomacy, if necessary by war, was deemed a sin, even a crime. In furtherance of their romantic vision that a "world community" ruled by law could, and would, replace the existing world arena of group struggle, they and their predecessors had first created the League of Nations and its futile Covenant, and then, after the Second World War, the United Nations Organisation and its Charter. Since this document outlawed war except in clear cases of self-defence, it now supplied an peculiarly uncomfortable shackle for Britain, for here she was, a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council and yet secretly plotting to revert to realpolitik.

Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large.