Sir Charles Dilke and the British Intervention In Egypt, 1882: decision making In a nineteenth-century cabinet

“There's Dilke that has done it all”, remarked Wilfrid Scawen Blunt to Lord Blandford as they watched Dilke walk down Piccadilly one day in July 1882.1 The “it” was the British intervention in Egypt which entangled Britain in Egyptian affairs for two generations. More soberly, Louis Mallet, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the India Office, wrote to Evelyn Baring a year later that the Liberal government of William Gladstone had made themselves “the unconscious, and some of them (not all) the unwilling instruments of a policy from which Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury would have shrunk, and which is big with future disaster”. “Dilke and Chamberlain” he wrote, “I consider mainly responsible for the Egyptian war.” In The Trouble Makers, A. J. P. Taylor came to the conclusion, “The occupation of Egypt in 1882 marked Gladstone's decisive breach with Radicalism. Indeed it ruined Radicalism for more than a generation. It began modern British Imperialism…”. How ironic if the ruin of British radicalism was brought about by the two leading radicals of Gladstone's predominantly Whig administration. What do the Dilke and Chamberlain papers among others reveal about the exact role of the two men in the crisis ?