168 A Short History of the Middle East
trusted the radical and republican tendencies of the younger
Wafdists; and he was therefore ready to exploit to the full the
considerable powers left to him under the constitution, especially
those of nominating a third of the Senate and dissolving at will the
Chamber of Deputies. Even before the Wafd came to power in
1924, he had had an unsuccessful struggle with the moderates in an
attempt to enlarge his powers; and now he dissolved the Chamber
of Deputies with its overwhelming Wafdist majority and ruled
without a parliament through a newly-formed group of'King's
friends', the Ittihad party.1 So unpopular was this regime, however,
that the moderate Liberal party joined the Wafd in a coalition
against it; and early in 1926 the new British High Commissioner
pressed the King to permit the holding of a general election. It
returned the Wafd to power with over 70 per cent, of the seats.2
In view of the murder-campaign under the previous Wafd
government, Britain refused to accept Zaghlul as Prime Minister;
and a compromise was reached by which the Liberal leader headed
a cabinet of six Wafdists, three Liberals and an Independent, with
Zaghlul President of the Chamber.
In 1927 Sarwat Pasha, now Prime Minister in this coalition, came
to London and the Foreign Office put forward for negotiation a
draft treaty closely following the recommendations of the Milner
Report. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, des-
cribed it as 'the high-water mark of British concessions to Egyp-
tian nationalism'. The difference of views between the two sides
was narrowed down to two points: (i) the British personnel in the
Egyptian Army, whom Britain was prepared to convert into a
military mission, and (2) the maintenance of British officials in the
Departments of Police and Public Security pending the reform of
the Capitulations. On this point Britain undertook to support an
Egyptian appeal to the League of Nations if the reform had not
been effected within five years.
At this stage, however, Mustafa an-Nahhas, who had just suc-
ceeded to the leadership of the Wafd on the death of Zaghlul, took
the party into opposition to the draft treaty because it did not
1 Its founder Hasan Nash'at became Egyptian Ambassador to Britain in the
earlier years of the Second World War.
2 The Wafd was, in fact, and has remained the only party in Egypt with a
permanent party-machine covering the whole country: the other parties are little
more than small groups centred round certain personalities without any apparent
positive principles other than personal hostility to the Wafdist leaders.