On 29 November 1967 and to the strains of the band of the Royal Marines playing ‘Fings ain't what they used to be’, the then Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson effected a total withdrawal from the Federation of South Arabia, a withdrawal likened by some scholars, notably John Barrett Kelly, to a scuttle. Unable to withstand a range of social and political forces that subsequently sapped its power and willingness to defend its economic and strategic interests across the Middle East, the indecent haste with which Britain evacuated its Aden base in November 1967 marked, according to Wm Roger Louis, ‘the end of the Great Game in Western Asia’.

Whatever the epithet applied, such action on the part of Britain was regarded as the inevitable outcome of the contradictions inherent in London's policy towards South Arabia from the outset. With their loyalty to London so often a transitory commodity, attempts to cohere the disparate tribal groupings of the Protectorates into a collective whole with the foundation of the Federation of Arab Emirates of the South in February 1959 and four years later, the Federation of South Arabia (FSA) that now encompassed what had been Aden colony were, it was argued, doomed. In practice, local politicians in what had been Aden resisted the idea that their monopoly of power, prestige and influence should be diluted by tribal Shaykhs, Emirs, or Sharifs considered to be the very antithesis of progression and modernity. Moreover, the styptic nature of the electoral franchise in Aden colony served to alienate the burgeoning community of immigrant workers from the Federal hinterland and Yemen, from the very structures the British hoped would secure the future stability of the FSA.

When allied to the growing influence of Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the scene was set for a sustained programme of subversion and revolt against British rule, supported both materially and ideologically by President Nasser of Egypt. Thus, within a decade of the 1957 Defence White Paper which identified Aden as the linchpin of British power projection east of Suez, Britain abandoned the Aden colony, bringing to a close a presence in the region that had lasted for 134 years. Comparing the British experience in South Arabia with some notional colonial template that would have dictated French policy in similar circumstances, the former British diplomat, Christopher Gandy, remarked