24 How the Suez Crisis broke British power

Two fading empires launch a secret war to save themselves - and an American president destroys them with a phone call and a currency threat. This is the episode where a drugged-up British prime minister mistakes an Egyptian colonel for Mussolini, Israel invades the Sinai as a staged pretext, and Eisenhower threatens to crash the British pound unless the tanks turn around. Episode 24 of Crude Ambition tells the story of how one week in November 1956 killed the British Empire, crowned America as the Middle East's supreme power, and accidentally invented the supertanker.