influence During this period some thought they detected undue influence by Lady Eden over her husband. For example, Lady Jebb, wife of the British ambassador in Paris, alluded in her diary to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and referred to "Clarissa's war". (It should be borne in mind, however, that her husband, Sir Gladwyn, a "figure of some grandeur, if not hauteur", was furious at his exclusion from an Anglo-French summit in Paris two weeks before the Suez invasion.) In December 1956, Walter Monckton, a member of Eden's government who opposed the Suez invasion, apparently told a Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, that Lady Eden was a powerful force in politics, with great influence on her husband, and that "now she knows [Monckton] opposed Anthony she won't have anything to do with him". Monckton claimed, among other things, that, during a rail strike in 1955, Eden, by then prime minister, had, at his wife's urging, taken a tougher public stance concerning the railwaymen than that advised by Monckton, as Minister of Labour, and senior civil servants (although there is evidence that Churchill had also privately advocated to Eden the need for a strong line). In private correspondence just after Suez, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper derided Lady Eden's remark about "the Suez Canal flowing through [her] drawing room" and declared not only that the "vain and foolish" Eden was "wholly managed" by her, but that she would listen only to Cecil Beaton, whom he described (with reference to the Svengali of the last Russian czarina Alexandra) as her "Rasputin". Protective influence Less dramatically, there were suggestions that Anthony Eden's touchiness and over-sensitivity to criticism, characteristics frequently remarked upon by colleagues, were exacerbated by Lady Eden (described by historian Barry Turner, without explanation, as "equally touchy"). One of Eden's private secretaries claimed that she had a habit of "stirring up Anthony when he didn't need it". However, Eden's biographer D. R. Thorpe concluded that such imputations arose from a misreading of the Edens' relationship, noting also that, during Suez, the only two people in whom Eden could confide without inhibition were his wife and the Queen. Indeed, as historian Ben Pimlott put it, "if Lady Eden came to believe that the Suez Canal flowed through her drawing room, the Queen must have felt pretty damp as well". David Dutton, another (not notably sympathetic) biographer of Eden, noted that "some observers believed that Clarissa