Mehmed Ali knew that the messages he was receiving from Barker were the Consul's own personal opinions and Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, who was later adamant in upholding the principle of preserving the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, was completely silent on the issue of his struggle with the Sultan. "There is not a single word either to Constantinople and Alexandria or to the British ambassadors at Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg; hardly any observation can be noticed during 1832 on despatches coming from these centers and touching on the subject of the Syrian war." The hostility that Palmerston felt towards Mehmed Ali developed later and, as will be shown in chapter 7 below, had other causes.

XREF: Pays off the earlier claim at loc 182 that Palmerston's silence masked his later firm policy; here the source specifies the hostility had separate origins. Pays off: "Ottoman sultan resisted Egypt's Syrian expansion with armed threats."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 254