It was hard to disagree. At 72, Clement Attlee had been Labour leader for 20 years, with 1955 his fifth general election. His own analysis of the defeat implicitly agreed with the Mirror. “The old folk did not let us down,” he reflected. The Conservatives had no time for such nostalgia. They were led by the dashing Sir Anthony Eden, who, at 57, was positively youthful compared to his exhausted socialist rival — even as the Tories swept to power on the enthusiasm of the young. And if that’s one hint at how much Britain has changed since 1955, there are many other examples too, from a fractured electoral map to the slow death of social engagement.

In 1955, Labour fought the battles of the past, clear enough in which voters the party managed to retain. While workers in the industrial heartlands, recalling the traumatic Twenties and the hungry Thirties, stayed loyal, most of the country had little wish to look back. The times were changing. Identity cards and rationing had been abolished, and the talk was of prosperity not austerity.

This, after all, was the year that the young designer Mary Quant opened her first boutique in Chelsea, before going on to revolutionize international fashion, and the year that rock ’n’ roll arrived in the shape of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. While the politicians were out on the campaign trail, an actor named John Osborne was sat on Morecambe Pier, writing Look Back in Anger, the play that would introduce the public to a generation of Angry Young Men.

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Most obviously, there was the imminent arrival of ITV to break the BBC’s monopoly on television. The legislation had been passed, and broadcasting was due to start later in 1955, with a promise to give viewers what they wanted, not just what was considered good for them. Attlee disapproved of the whole thing. “They will have to reduce their programs to the lowest common denominator so they become cheaper and more and more vulgar,” he said, and Labour went into the election committed to cancelling ITV if they won. But they didn’t, and the upstart service proved so wildly popular that the Tories boasted about it in the next election campaign. “BBC or ITV?” read a poster in 1959. “You’ve a choice — thanks to the Conservatives, because Conservatives believe in opportunity.”

Attlee finally stepped down after the 1955 defeat, replaced by 49-year-old Hugh Gaitskell, the youngest leader of a major party for 60 years and the first born in the 20th century. He struck a very different note. “We are glad to see people better-off,” he admitted, “and have no patience with those who are comfortably-off themselves yet seem to resent the prosperity of others.”

But as the party’s 60-seat majority in 1955 so vividly implies, the Conservatives had already made this generational break. The election came after the octogenarian Winston Churchill finally returned to the back benches, making way for his nephew-by-marriage Eden. An unmistakably modern man, the polyglot ex-Foreign Secretary was as elegant as a film star. He had recently been named “the best dressed politician in the world” by Tailor & Cutter, and was, said the Sunday Pictorial, “admired” by millions of women (“or is that too weak a word?”).

More important than Sir Anthony himself, though, was the party organization outside Parliament. For these were the days of mass parties, where one in nine people on the electoral register was a member of one of the two big parties. Membership figures are notoriously untrustworthy, but in the mid-Fifties Labour claimed a million members. Remarkably, the Conservatives could boast some three million, making the organization as much a social group as a political party. Members weren’t expected to debate policy, and unlike Labour the annual conference was not a place for activists to argue over the party’s program. Instead they put on dances and whist drives, garden parties and coffee mornings, part of the fabric of community life.

Within that, a key role was played by the Young Conservatives, numbering around half a million. There were weekend conferences, and meetings addressed by MPs, but mostly the local branches were again less interested in ideological pursuits than in staging barbecues and beauty pageants. In 1955, the reigning Miss Young Conservative in Leeds was 19-year-old Jacqueline Pishorn, judged at an annual ball attended by 500 people to have “the best dress sense and the greatest poise, charm and personality”. For those under 18, not yet old enough to join the YCs, there was another group, the Young Britons, and there were 8,000 of them. (Their slogan: “Learning to serve.”)

At the time, the apolitical nature of the YCs was the subject of gentle ridicule. Consider a 1961 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. Here, the sitcom’s eponymous star hoped to do “something for the benefit of the country as a whole” — and is torn between becoming a blood donor or joining the Young Conservatives. He decides on the former, because “I’m not looking for a wife and I can’t play table tennis”. (Also, he was 37 at the time, and the cut-off point was 30.) Despite the mockery, it was an appealing image, drawing in not just the established middle-class, but those with social aspirations. And beneath the fun, it did much to entrench the basic tenets of Toryism: nation, church, monarchy. Other parties looked on in envy; in 1955 even the Young Communist League admitted that they could learn from the “colorful and attractive methods of the Young Conservatives”.

Much of this was down to Lord Woolton, appointed Tory chairman in 1946 and tasked with rebuilding a demoralized party after Labour’s shock landslide the previous year. Uncle Fred, as he was known in YC circles, sought an infusion of new blood, recruiting particularly in universities, and designated 1955 as “youth year”, targeting the nine million voters under the age of 30. The campaign worked. The number of under 30s who voted Conservative reached a post-war peak, with first-time voters reported to be breaking three-to-two in favor of the Tories — a reversal of where young people had been a decade earlier.

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All this, of course, has long since passed into history. At last year’s election, according to YouGov’s survey, only 8% of under-30s voted Tory, less than a fifth of those supporting Labour. The universities have been comprehensively lost, so that the Conservatives now do better among those with the lowest educational qualifications: securing the support of 31% of those with no more than GCSEs, but just 18% of university graduates. Party memberships have collapsed too. In the last Tory leadership election, when Kemi Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick, 95,000 members cast a vote out of a total of 130,000.

The Labour Party has held up a little better. ​​When Keir Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, nearly half a million votes were cast, even as political activists still knock on doors. Yet taken together, 1955 looks like a lost world, especially now that vast hinterland of social interaction with everyday apolitical life has vanished. In retrospect, the turning-point was likely that controversial introduction of ITV, which turned television into the country’s dominant cultural pursuit, all while squeezing out other forms of recreation. Cinema admissions fell from 1,400 million a year in 1950 to 500 million by the end of the decade, and that was just with two channels.

Since then, the story has been of an increasingly atomized, homebound society. The desire for shared experience, for active engagement, remains — but has proved no match for the ever-growing power of technology. These cultural changes have inevitably influenced politics, with falling membership rolls reshaping the electoral map more broadly. Between them, Tories and Labour got 96% of the vote in 1955. Last year, they managed 57%. Turnout was also considerably higher back then: the government of Anthony Eden attracted the support of 38% of registered voters, as opposed to the 20% that voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour. As for the Tories in 2024, just one in seven of those who could have voted for them did so. It was only the old folk who didn’t let them down: a third of those in their 60s, and nearly half of over-70s, voted Conservative. Now that’s an old man’s party.

When Parliament then refused to pass the deal the following spring, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser and ambassador to Paris, claimed that May’s last-ditch appeal to Brussels for more time was “perhaps the greatest humiliation for a British prime minister since the Suez crisis… When can a British Prime Minister have cut such a lamentable figure at an international meeting?” Good question.

While a few Brexiteers have also made the link (Boris Johnson once said that if May’s deal went through, it would be “the greatest national humiliation since Suez”), the parallel has mainly attracted Remainers. It’s not hard to see why. While some are old enough for it to have been the defining moment of their youth, for others, it is simply a sophisticated way to state their prejudice that Leavers ignorantly voted for some sort of splendid imperial isolation — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Robert Saunders.

That has not stopped the FT journalist Philip Stephens from arguing (in his recent book, Britain Alone) that “Brexit, like Suez, was an attempt to chart the future by reaching back into the halcyon days of history,” the triumph of “an appeal to nostalgia over reason”. And David Lammy, who has accused “hard Brexiteers” of:

“still mourning Suez, Britain’s last fling of the colonial dice. Back then, Anthony Eden failed to recognise that Britain was no longer capable of launching a solo imperial adventure. Let us not fall for the same hubris today.”

But contrary to this stereotype, the Suez Crisis was not a lonely, self-inflicted error brought on by nostalgia. The reality is more complex and far more interesting.

The Suez crisis began, perhaps, at the UN’s General Assembly of 1955, when the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, extolled “the immense benefit the British Empire had been and was” in a conversation at the UN with the British foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan. The two men were bemoaning the recent decision by Egypt’s Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to buy weapons off Russia, after balking at the conditions the United States would attach to such a sale. The Americans had supported Nasser’s coup, but as their client turned against them, Dulles asked Macmillan “if we had enough troops to reoccupy Egypt”. Macmillan thought Britain had.

Once, it would have seemed impertinent to ask such a question. But Britain had emerged from the war deeply in debt; since the sterling crisis six years earlier, the nation had been in dire financial straits, because of an unsustainable balance of payments. After the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Macmillan had privately compared the cabinet to the “directors of a rapidly deteriorating concern. They dare not tell the shareholders the facts”.

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A few months before Dulles and Macmillan spoke, Churchill — winged by a stroke in 1953 — had finally shuffled off into retirement. He was succeeded by his impatient understudy, Anthony Eden, who was also in no great shape: due to a bodged gastric operation, he was plagued by chronic pain. Macmillan’s report of Dulles’s sly enquiry as to whether Britain might intervene triggered a splenetic prime ministerial rant. “The big interest in the Middle East is ours, not America’s,” he said, annoyed by what he saw as the consequences of a cack-handed American intervention. “We are dependent on Middle East oil.”

The dependence was not just economic but financial: Eden was referring to the fact that the oil produced by Iraq and Kuwait was priced in sterling — a legacy of the fact that both countries, though never British colonies, had formed part of Britain’s informal empire. The Bank of England could always print currency to afford it, while sales to other countries provided a welcome boost to Britain’s holdings of foreign currency. The comparison of Suez and Brexit breaks down because in 1956 nostalgia played no part in British calculations. They were guided by fear of losing an ongoing advantage.

That fear had an important consequence. Based on another claim of Eden’s, that the “US has almost always been wrong about the Middle East”, the minutes of the meeting record an important decision: “We should not, therefore, allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support.” In mid-October, the British government made a crucial move. Without warning the Americans, it authorised military action to remove a Saudi force from a remote oasis, where it was preventing British oil exploration in Oman. The US had significant financial and strategic interests in Saudi Arabia, but the British found Dulles’s reaction, when he was belatedly told about the fait accompli, encouraging. He “did not like the news”, recalled one diplomat, “but he was not unpleasant about it.”

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The “Buraimi incident,” as this altercation was known, seemed so obscure as to be laughable at the time (it was the subject of a Goon Show sketch), but it set a precedent. Buoyed up by the ease with which they had routed the Saudis, the British now sought to press home their advantage by encouraging Saudi’s northern neighbour, Jordan, to join a regional military alliance with Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact. The heavy-handed British approach backfired and, barraged by incessant Egyptian radio propaganda, in March 1956 the king of Jordan sacked the British head of his armed forces, John Glubb, following rioting. Eden believed Nasser had engineered this coup. If Suez is a formative influence on today’s Remainers, then Eden had been scarred by Munich. Fearing the consequences of failure to deal with the Egyptian leader before he became too powerful, he told a close adviser: “It is him or us, don’t forget that”.

It was not just the British attitude to Nasser that was hardening: so was the United States’. In the spring of 1956, Dulles began talking of “ditching” Nasser; like FDR before him, and Donald Trump more recently, President Eisenhower was keen to swing his country’s support behind the Saudis, who had started to see the Egyptian’s republican ideas as a threat. The previous year the United States had promised to lend Nasser millions of dollars to enable him to build a new dam at Aswan. On 21 July, Dulles announced that the United States was pulling the loan. Nasser responded days later by announcing that he was nationalising the Suez Canal.

Eden felt his convictions about Nasser had been vindicated. The idea that he was alone in this — that Britain was isolated in its approach — is groundless. When news of Nasser’s move reached London, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Said, happened to be in Downing Street at a dinner and worried that Nasser would only be emboldened by the takeover. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit him hard and hit him now. … If he is left alone, he will finish all of us.” So worried was Nuri by the news of the canal’s takeover that he even suggested encouraging the Israelis to invade Egypt.

Since being forced out of Palestine by a Jewish insurgency eight years earlier, however, the British had only the most perfunctory relationship with Israel. It took an old rival, and old ally, of Britain to bring the crisis to a head. Not that anyone, in drawing parallels with Brexit, would admit that France had anything to do with Suez.

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Unlike the British, the French had a strong relationship with Israel, and a direct imperial interest, since Nasser was supporting the insurgency in French Algeria. They opened secret talks with the Israelis that autumn. In mid-October, French representatives presented their idea to Eden: Israel would invade Egypt, giving Britain and France grounds to go in and order both sides to retreat from the canal. Precisely because he was unwilling to go it alone, Eden leapt at the French proposal. To allay old Israeli suspicions of Britain, the secret protocol summarising the arrangement was signed by representatives of the three conspiring powers. Madcap plot it may have been, but Suez was never a solo British plan.

The Israelis invaded Sinai on 29 October. The following day Britain and France, as they had secretly agreed, issued ultimatums to both Israel and Egypt and landed troops in Port Said on 5 November. The collusion was not hard to see, and under immense international and — more importantly — financial market pressure, which threatened to drain Britain’s remaining reserves, the two European powers were soon forced to abandon their military operation. The truth is that Britain lacked the confidence in 1956 to act alone. But had she done so, she might well have got away with the deception: it was high-altitude photos of French jets on Israeli runways that alerted Washington to exactly what was going on.

A sense of vulnerability led Britain and France to lash out. Britain, which owed millions to Washington, looked towards its creditor. France, on the other hand, turned to Europe as a way to preserve her empire from American predation. These complexities — in particular the role of money — are lost in the comparison of Suez and Brexit. But then its chief purpose has not been honest, but to denigrate the intelligence of Leavers.