Political drama
“Executives were warned privately that Anthony Eden had ordered a legal instrument to be drawn up allowing his government to take over the BBC”
In November 1956, a 14-minute televised address to the nation by the British prime minister Anthony Eden triggered possibly the single biggest Cold War-era clash between government and the BBC. It stripped bare the intimate, if awkward, relationship between professional broadcasters and the worlds of Westminster and Whitehall. But behind the row lurked another battle between sharply different views on the proper role of television in reporting politics.
The broadcast, on the evening of Saturday 3 November, represented Eden’s hurried attempt to justify a botched and ill-judged military adventure of his own making. In the wake of Egypt’s recent nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Israeli forces had invaded the Sinai Peninsula at the end of October. Israel’s action
