The Museum

Making the event seem as unremarkable as possible, Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd announced to the House of Commons in his most toneless voice last week that "the governments of the United Arab Republic and the United Kingdom have agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations at the level of charge d'affaires." Harried, tight-lipped Selwyn Lloyd is the last survivor in office of the luckless foursome of Eden, Lloyd, Mollet and Pineau, who together planned the ill-fated invasion of Suez in 1956.

Within 24 hours of Lloyd's declaration, which had been foreshadowed by the signing of a financial agreement in Cairo earlier this year, an irritating little incident rubbed open old wounds. Cairo's newspaper Al Ahram blandly reported that a museum would be made out of the Port Said tenement in which Egyptian "resistance" men scored a triumph of sorts over a 20-year-old British officer after the 1956 Suez ceasefire. Lieut. Anthony Moorhouse of the West Yorkshire Regiment, dragged away from his Land Rover, was kept tied up in the tenement for three days, then left in a steel locker to suffocate to death while Anglo-French search parties were combing the neighborhood. As a museum honoring the "heroes" who had kidnaped him, it would display Moorhouse's identity card, the locker in which he was kept, and even the rope that bound him.

"Nauseating," cried London's Daily Telegraph. "A deliberate gesture of contempt," roared Lord Beaverbrook's Express. Just as angrily, Nasser's newspaper Al Gumhuria retorted: "Suppose we make not one but a thousand museums to commemorate the horrible attack on us--what business is that of London's?" Stiffening his upper lip, Selwyn Lloyd took the view that Nasser could not have known of the insult in advance.

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