Anthony Nutting

[close] Sir Harold Anthony Nutting, 3rd Baronet (1920 - 1999) was a British diplomat and Conservative Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1945 and 1956. He was a Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1954 until he resigned in 1956 in protest against the Suez invasion.

During WW2 he entered the Foreign Service, serving as an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. When France fell, he was assigned to the embassy in Madrid, where he organised escape routes for Allied servicemen caught behind enemy lines from 1940 to 1944. He joined the Embassy in Rome from 1944 to 1945 and was briefly private secretary to Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary.

At the 1945 general election, at 25, Nutting was elected as the MP for Melton in Leicestershire. 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 Privy Councillor in 1954 and he led the British delegation to the United Nations General Assembly and Disarmament Commission in 1954 and 1955. He was an internationalist, an early enthusiast for British membership of the European Economic Community and an Arabist who was a founding member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) in 1967.

In 1954, he negotiated the final steps of the treaty with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt under which British troops withdrew from Suez; so when he discovered the joint British and French invasion plan at a meeting on 14 October 1956, he believed that the mission was mistaken and deceitful. On 31 October, despite attempts by future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to persuade him not to resign, Nutting quit his post as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. He did not give the customary resignation speech in the House of Commons for security reasons, and his unexplained action proved so unpopular that his constituents forced him to give up his seat in Parliament.