Wilfrid Blunt was not vital in the relay of this information to the British Consul General in Egypt, as everybody in Egypt knew that the indigenous Egyptians resented foreigners – whether they were Muslim Turko-Circassian or Christian Greek, Italian or Armenian – who were growing rich while the natives remained in poverty. Blunt felt he had been used by Malet and Colvin who were only pretending to be sympathetic to the Nationalists. However, Malet, Colvin, Cromer and other British officials dismissed Blunt as a romantic idealist of a quixotic type. Indeed, his own claim to be for Arabs what Byron had been to the Greeks, was sufficient to make him utterly ridiculous to the British public because he was not a good poet, whereas Byron was one of the greatest British poets of all time.
