32362jbalits7 Very practical politics old and new?
Q&@
LATE IN THE MORNING OF 16 DECEMBER 1915, a promising young politician named Sir Mark Sykes hurried into Downing Street for a meeting. The prime minister had summoned the thirty-six-year-old baronet to advise him and his war cabinet on how a row about the future of the Ottoman Empire they might resolve that looked as if it could tear Britain's fragile alliance with France apart. 'By extraordi-nary luck,' MS put it afterwards, 'I was allowed to make a statement to the war council!' WHAT HE SAID WAS TO SHAPE THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST.
SYKES's surprise at being called to Number 10 was genuine, for he had managed to carve himself a role as the government's chief ad-viser on Middle Eastern matters in the space of just four years. Elected as the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Yorkshire port of HULL in 1911, he staked his claim to be an expert on the Ottoman Empire in his maiden speech. In it he described a recent visit to North Africa, then still in Ottoman hands, and declared that he believed 'a strong and united Turkish Empire' was 'as important to Eng-lish commerce and strategy now' as it had been in Disraeli'sctime, thirty years before. But when war broke out in 1914, the Ottomans had joined Germany to fight Britain and France, and Sykes had been forced to change his mind.
To the meeting with the war council MS brought a map and a three-page précis of what he was about to say.
THIS document survives among the paperwork he left when, three years later, he died from influenza at the age of just thirty-nine.
His distinctive, muscular but juvenile handwriting gives it the look of a schoolboy's last-minute revision notes, but it was by far the most significant thing he ever had written?!
For the tour d'horizon it sketched helped him to convince the cabinet that they must urgently reach agreement on how to divide the Ottoman Empire with France, and that he was the man to mastermind that deal!
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi ~~~
LATE IN THE MORNING OF 16 DECEMBER 1915, a promising young politician named Sir Mark Sykes hurried into Downing Street for a meeting. The prime minister had summoned the thirty-six-year-old baronet to advise him and his war cabinet on how a row about the future of the Ottoman Empire they might resolve that looked as if it could tear Britain's fragile alliance with France apart. 'By extraordi-nary luck,' MS put it afterwards, 'I was allowed to make a statement to the war council!' WHAT HE SAID WAS TO SHAPE THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST.
SYKES's surprise at being called to Number 10 was genuine, for he had managed to carve himself a role as the government's chief ad-viser on Middle Eastern matters in the space of just four years. Elected as the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Yorkshire port of HULL in 1911, he staked his claim to be an expert on the Ottoman Empire in his maiden speech. In it he described a recent visit to North Africa, then still in Ottoman hands, and declared that he believed 'a strong and united Turkish Empire' was 'as important to Eng-lish commerce and strategy now' as it had been in Disraeli'sctime, thirty years before. But when war broke out in 1914, the Ottomans had joined Germany to fight Britain and France, and Sykes had been forced to change his mind.
To the meeting with the war council MS brought a map and a three-page précis of what he was about to say.
THIS document survives among the paperwork he left when, three years later, he died from influenza at the age of just thirty-nine.
His distinctive, muscular but juvenile handwriting gives it the look of a schoolboy's last-minute revision notes, but it was by far the most significant thing he ever had written?!
For the tour d'horizon it sketched helped him to convince the cabinet that they must urgently reach agreement on how to divide the Ottoman Empire with France, and that he was the man to mastermind that deal!
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi ~~~
14 aug 2018 - bewerkt op 16 aug 2018
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