ALTHOUGH Douglas Dodds-Parker was a Conservative MP from 1945 to 1959 and again from 1964 to 1974, and held junior office under Sir Anthony Eden during the Suez Crisis, he was not really a political animal. He was particularly unhappy over the secret collusion between Britain, France and Israel over the Suez affair, and his career progressed no further when it was over. His knighthood came late in his career, in 1973, when Edward Heath sent this ardent pro-European off to Strasbourg as a member of the British Parliamentary Delegation to the European Parliament.

Paradoxically, he received no official honours from Britain (though he did from France) for what was actually the much more interesting and constructive phase of his life — his wartime period with the Special Operations Executive. As first an intelligence officer, then as a mission planner and finally as commander of SOE operations in the western and central Mediterranean, he was involved successively in organising “dirty tricks”, running agents into occupied Europe and eventually large-scale guerrilla warfare.

He had begun his war as a Grenadier Guards officer with aspirations for a regimental career and perhaps command of a battalion. But it was not to be. His prewar career in the Sudan Political Service and his knowledge of the international political situation gained from extensive travels while on leave made him too valuable to be risked as cannon fodder. Thereafter, first under Orde Wingate in the Horn of Africa, then under Colin Gubbins in London and finally in the Mediterranean, he wielded increasing influence on the conduct of irregular operations in support of resistance movements in territories occupied by the Axis powers.

Arthur Douglas Dodds-Parker was educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated in modern history. In 1930 he entered the Sudan Political Service and in 1934 became Assistant Private Secretary to the Governor-General, Sir Stewart Symes, in Khartoum. From this standpoint he gained an insider’s knowledge of relations with neighbouring French, Belgian and Italian colonies.

Symes also sent him on a number of diplomatic missions on behalf of Sudan. At the League of Nations in Geneva he met the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and the French and Italian Foreign Ministers. On leave periods taken in Rome, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw and Germany he formed a clear notion of impending disaster for Europe, while the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 gave him contact with irregular warfare and subversion at first hand.

When war broke out he resigned from government service and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He was soon taken off regimental duties and seconded to military intelligence and, after its formation in July 1940, to SOE. With the Italian threat to Sudan he was sent to that theatre to engage in the “ungentlemanly warfare” (Churchill’s words) for which the nature of the conflict — massive Italian numerical superiority but terrain and a native population both favouring clandestine operations — seemed to call. In this, his relationship with the volatile Orde Wingate was not always an easy one, but he acknowledged the genius of Wingate’s leadership of a guerrilla campaign which contributed so much to the defeat of the Italians.

In May 1941 Dodds-Parker returned to London, where he was put in charge of organising transport for the insertion by aircraft and boat of SOE agents into occupied Europe from Norway to southern France. It was after one such operation, an abortive drop in the Namur area of Belgium that Dodds-Parker was compelled to report to the Belgian Foreign Minister-in-Exile, Paul Henri Spaak. The Belgian statesman’s words on that occasion were to remain with him and shape his outlook. “When we have won this war,” Spaak told him over dinner “we must unite Europe. We cannot afford any more civil wars among our nations or we will destroy civilisation.”

With the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942, Dodds-Parker was sent to this new theatre where, from Algiers, he had to cope with the difficult problem of sorting out Vichy from Free French sympathisers. The British position in the area was made doubly invidious by the resistance of many local tribesmen to the re-establishment of French authority of any kind over them.

After the clearing of all Axis forces from North Africa the SOE facility in Algiers became the base for operations throughout the western half of the Mediterranean. The SOE played a major role in Operation Monkey, the negotiations for the Italian Armistice in September 1943. Throughout, Dodds-Parker, as SOE’s area commander, was in constant touch with Eisenhower about the timing of this, a delicate matter as it was to coincide with the American seaborne landings at Salerno, knowledge of which had to be kept from the Germans.

Thereafter, from a base in Apulia, SOE trained thousands of Italian partisans. In the wake of the Franco-American landings in the South of France in August 1944, SOE was active in this theatre, too, aiding resistance movements. This was not always the self-evidently logical task it seemed from the outside, since one powerful group of anti-German partisans in the South was committedly Marxist and as likely to fight against other resistance groups as with them.

One of Dodds-Parker’s last missions was in December 1944 when he was sent to Athens at a time of tension between communist and government forces in Greece. But the expected shootout on Constitution Square never materialised. After leaving the Mediterranean theatre, Dodds-Paker saw out the war at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Paris.

Dodds-Parker, who reached the rank of colonel, was awarded the French Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre, and was mentioned in dispatches for his SOE services. (He kept up his SOE connections, becoming a valued and popular member of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, where in later years he would often play host to those historians who sought his help as a valued witness to important events).

At the end of the war he decided to go into politics. At the Labour landslide of 1945 he held Banbury for the Conservatives, albeit with a much reduced majority. He came to be recognised in the Commons as an authority on foreign and Commonwealth affairs and when the Conservatives returned to power in 1951 was asked by Churchill to be his PPS. Dodds-Parker declined (a somewhat strange decision), preferring to retain his chairmanship of the party’s Commonwealth Affairs Committee. From 1951 to 1953 he was on the executive of the 1922 Committee.

In November 1953 he was given his first ministerial appointment as Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In October 1954 he was transferred to the Commonwealth Relations Office as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State. From December 1955, by which time Eden had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, he was again Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

In this capacity he was prominent among those who hosted the famous visit of Bulganin and Khrushchev to Great Britain in April 1956. As such he participated in an unlikely conversation with Khrushchev about the purpose of Russian boarding schools, and was greatly amused when the Soviet leader told the assembled company that the schools were Russia’s equivalent of maids. “We have no domestic help at home and need to get the children out of the house!”

Dodds-Parker was still holding that office in October 1956 when the nationalisation of the Suez canal by Egypt’s ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser, prompted the governments of Israel, Britain and France to agree to attack Egypt, while pretending to the outside world that the action of the two European powers was coincidental with that of Israel.

Before news of the military action broke, Dodds-Parker was firmly against any such thing happening. He was in a doubly difficult position since in the weeks before the action took place he had been put in charge of a committee which was to make recommendations about possible moves against Egypt and Nasser personally. He could not know that a task force was already arming.

When he became aware of the British and French preparations he briefly considered resignation but, with the country in armed conflict with an enemy, he decided that loyalty to the Government was the only course. With the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, absent for much of the time at the UN, it fell to him and other junior ministers to face the storm in the Commons.

It was a wretched time for Dodds-Parker. Relations with his many American friends (his wife was American) were particularly strained. And when Harold Macmillan succeeded Eden as Prime Minister, Dodds-Parker was not forgiven for what was perceived as his lack of loyalty over Suez. Selwyn Lloyd, who had lied to the nation and to Parliament over the Suez collusion, was re- employed as Foreign Secretary. Dodds-Parker was discarded.

He retired from Parliament at the general election of 1959 and applied himself to the various company directorships that were offered to him. But it was not to be the end of his political career. When the Cheltenham seat fell vacant his name was put forward and he returned to Parliament in the general election of 1964. Of his last ten years in Parliament six were to be in Opposition. But Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was replaced a year after the Conservatives’ 1964 defeat by the pro-European Edward Heath.

Dodds-Parker found such a leadership much more congenial and served from 1965 as a delegate to the Council of Europe, and to the North Atlantic and Western European Assemblies.

His most celebrated moment in the political limelight came on live television shortly after 11pm on June 18, 1970, when his Cheltenham result in the general election, the second of the night after the declaration at Guildford, showed a 6 per cent swing to the Conservatives. Raising his arms above his shoulders like a champion boxer, he shouted exultantly, “This means a Tory Government at Westminster.” Although only two results were then in, the electoral pundits in the television studios agreed with him and the Conservatives, against all previous expectations, were returned with a comfortable majority.

The scene of Dodds-Parker’s unabashed delight became a much-replayed film clip and, in later years, he wryly commented that despite all the things he had done in his military and political career, if anyone did remember him, it would only be for those words in Cheltenham Town Hall.

After Heath took Britain into Europe Dodds-Parker was, from 1973 to 1975, a member of the British delegation to the Strasbourg parliament. He retired from Parliament at the second of the two general elections of 1974.

In retirement he published two memoirs: Setting Europe Ablaze (1983), an account of his war with SOE, and Political Eunuch (1986). In 1997 he donated his copious political and personal papers to Magdalen College, Oxford, where they were soon appreciated by historians as a uniquely varied source, especially for the light they threw on some of the murkier corners of the Suez operation he had so despised.

Douglas Dodds-Parker married, in 1946, Aileen, widow of a second cousin, Ellison Woods, who had been killed in Normandy, and the daughter of American parents. His wife and a son and stepson survive him.





Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker, wartime SOE officer and politician, was born on July 5, 1909. He died on September 13, 2006, aged 97.