Sir Harold Anthony Nutting, 3rd Baronet (11 January 1920 – 23 February 1999) was a British diplomat and Conservative Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1945 until 1956. He was a Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1954 until he resigned in 1956 in protest against the Suez invasion.
Early and private life
Nutting was the son of Sir Harold Stanmore Nutting, 2nd Baronet, member of a wealthy family who owned estates in England, Scotland, and Ireland. and was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge
Nutting supported the idea of moving Iraqi troops into Jordan in response to aggressive Israeli military raids in the West Bank that were carried out in response to attacks, by the Palestinian fedayeen, on Israel. Such a deployment could have provoked war with Israel, as Britain had a defence treaty with Jordan at the time, and Jordan could appeal for British military assistance if there was any Israeli action to stop it. However, when Nutting telephoned Prime Minister Anthony Eden to press the case, Eden angrily told Nutting, "I will not allow you to plunge this country into war merely to satisfy the anti-Jewish spleen of you people in the Foreign Office".
Later life
He kept his silence over the Suez Crisis until 1967. Then, his book, No End of a Lesson, explained that backing the Suez action would have put him in the position of lying to the House of Commons and the United Nations.
"Either I had to tell the whole story as I saw it, or say nothing at all," he wrote. "And as long as any of the chief protagonists of the Suez war still held high office in Britain it would clearly have been a grave disservice to the nation, which they still led and represented in the councils of the world, to have told the whole story." The crisis had caused so much bitterness that even eleven years after his resignation, he came under pressure from the Cabinet Secretary not to proceed and there was even a threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.
He stood one more time, unsuccessfully, in Oldham East in 1964. In his later years, still a political outcast, he divided his time between writing biographies and histories in London, fox hunting in Shropshire and farming at Achentoul, Scotland.
In 1969, Nutting was banned from entering Israel because of a speech to students in Beirut in which he reportedly said that the Palestine question had to be resolved by force, and it was up to Palestinian guerillas to impose a solution.
Nutting was a long-standing member of the board of Middle East International, the London based bimonthly journal on Middle East events.
He died at the Royal Brompton Hospital, London of heart failure on 23 February 1999, aged 79, and was cremated on 4 March at the West London Crematorium.