[BITList] Enoch Powell

[John Feltham]

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Powell,  (John) Enoch  (1912-1998), politician, was born on 16 June 1912 in Flaxley Lane, Stetchford, Birmingham, the only child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872-1956), schoolmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886-1953), daughter of Henry Breese, a policeman, of Liverpool, and his wife, Eliza. The Powells were of Welsh descent, though by the time of John Enoch's birth had lived in the Black Country for four generations, working first as miners and then in the iron trade. He grew up in a household where learning and self-improvement were prized. His father was an elementary school headmaster, and his mother gave up her own teaching career on her marriage. As soon as her son could grasp the letters of the alphabet, she put them up on cards around her kitchen and taught them to him. By six he was a precocious reader, and would lecture his parents on the subjects of his previous week's reading each Sunday evening. Thanks largely to his mother's coaching he won a scholarship to King Edward's School in Birmingham in 1925; and after a term there she taught him Greek (in which she herself was self-taught) so he could transfer to the classical side of the school. He also became an accomplished clarinettist, and contemplated a career in music. However, by the time he left school in 1930, on a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, he had collected almost all the school prizes for classics, and had begun his own translation of Herodotus. That achievement and a love of Thucydides made him decide on a career as a scholar. Since there was already a well-known classicist named J. U. Powell-and J. E. Powell feared confusion with him-the boy known as Jack to his parents now began to style himself J. Enoch Powell, in confident anticipation of his own fame in his chosen field.

Academic and military career

Powell maintained this academic excellence at Cambridge, whence he graduated with first-class honours in the classical tripos in 1933. At university as at school he was a loner, obsessed with scholarship. From the start of his undergraduate career he was submitting articles analysing fragments of Greek texts to learned journals. In his spare time he also undertook papyrological research. He had very little social life. Under the influence of A. E. Housman he developed his skills as a textual critic, an arid branch of study but one that gave the logician in Powell great satisfaction. He became the first freshman ever to win Trinity's Craven scholarship, which he soon followed with the college's Greek prose prize. He won many such trophies at Cambridge, notably the Porson prize and the Sir William Browne medal.

Powell for a time considered a career in the diplomatic service, his linguistic skills already extending beyond the classics and into French, German, and Italian. However, he accepted his father's advice that the fellowship Trinity offered him after a year of postgraduate study, and at the remarkably early age of twenty-two, was too good to turn down. None the less, he found Cambridge suffocating. He spent much of his three and a half years as a fellow of Trinity studying ancient manuscripts in Italian libraries, mainly in the course of work on Thucydides. His translation of that author was published in 1942, and his other main work of research, his Lexicon to Herodotus, appeared in 1938. His translation of Herodotus into the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible-not an affectation, but a means of accentuating its antiquity-did not appear until 1949.

As an emotional outlet, Powell started to write poetry, lyrics that appear heavily, if not extremely, influenced by Housman. There is not just a metrical similarity, but also a thematic one, Powell (like the author of A Shropshire Lad) being obsessed with early death and echoing a repressed sexuality. Two volumes were published before the war, First Poems in 1937 and Casting off in 1939. His poetry was influenced by his belief that the First World War had been interrupted, not ended, and that battle would be rejoined soon. His other main cultural obsession was with German thought and literature, though he developed a distaste for Germany after the rise of Hitler. Attracted to atheism as a schoolboy reading The Golden Bough, he was confirmed in that mindset by a thorough reading of Nietzsche in his twenties.

Powell determined to beat Nietzsche's record of securing a professorship by the age of twenty-four. However, universities to which he applied rejected him as soon as they discovered his age. Eventually one took the bait: and in the winter of 1938, still aged twenty-five, Powell was on the flying boat to Australia, to become professor of Greek in the University of Sydney. On arrival he stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon break out in Europe, and that when it did he would be heading home to enlist in the army. The next eighteen months were a time of torture for Powell, as he witnessed from afar the abasement of his country before Hitler, yet felt powerless to do anything to expiate the shame. On 4 September 1939 he kept his promise, and started for England. With no military experience he had trouble enlisting, eventually doing so as a private soldier in the Royal Warwickshire regiment, but only after passing himself off as an Australian. Selected for officer training within weeks, he was commissioned second lieutenant in May 1940, and began a long and unsuccessful struggle to be posted to the front line. Recognizing this officer's superior intellectual abilities-he had by now added various other languages, from Russian to medieval Welsh, to his armoury-the army had no intention of allowing Powell to do anything other than staff jobs. Though he found these frustrating, he nevertheless played an important part in the war.

In October 1941 Powell was posted to Cairo, where he was soon promoted major. For the next two years he helped mastermind the attack on Rommel's supply lines that contributed so much to his defeat and the German evacuation of north Africa. The hardest time for Powell was seeing brother officers go to their deaths at El Alamein, while he remained in comparative safety. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel in August 1942 and given command of an intelligence group, MI (Plans). In this capacity he attended the conference between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Casablanca in the spring of 1943, an event that would have a profound intellectual effect upon him. He confronted the American political mind for the first time, and it made him profoundly anti-American. He believed from that moment that America's main war aim, and in the peace that followed its main foreign policy aim, was to extinguish British imperial and strategic power.

With the war effectively over in north Africa, Powell determined to be posted to India, for a chance of fighting the Japanese. Although he secured the posting, he was no more successful at seeing action. He arrived in Delhi in August 1943, having been appointed a military MBE for his work in north Africa, and soon set about helping to plan the war in the Far East. Despite having pressed his case with General Orde Wingate, he was kept at staff work to the end of the war and beyond. However, he found India deeply rewarding. He loved the country, its cultures and peoples. He learned Urdu and immersed himself in the native literature, and it was in India that he acquired the love of architecture that became a main antiquarian interest in later life. By 1945, promoted brigadier, he was one of a small commission charged with settling the shape of the Indian army after the war, the report on which he wrote single-handedly. With early independence that hard labour, too, bore less fruit than it might have done. The commander-in-chief in India, Sir Claude Auchinleck, offered Powell the commandant's post at what was intended to be the Indian equivalent of Sandhurst. Powell turned this down, and returned to England in February 1946. Even at this late stage he still had an unshakeable belief that India would remain British indefinitely. He had formed the ambition to be viceroy, and thought that the best way to accomplish this was from the House of Commons.

Into politics

Despite having voted for Attlee in the 1945 election-not for ideological reasons, but to punish those responsible for Munich-Powell was a visceral tory, and it was to the Conservative Party that he went on his arrival in London. As a brigadier and former fellow of Trinity he cut an impressive figure. He was immediately appointed to the party's parliamentary secretariat, later merged into the research department. He shared an office with Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling, and together they set about shaping the party's policies for its renaissance in the 1950s.

Powell's viceregal ambitions crumbled in February 1947, when Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. Powell was shocked by the change of policy, so much so that he spent the whole of the night after it was announced walking the streets of London, trying to take it in. He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth, and his urging that Britain should scrap any remaining pretence that she was a world power.

Although he could no longer achieve his main ambition, Powell had unintentionally stumbled upon a new, more passionate love, that of parliament itself. Being a member of parliament would now be an acceptable end in itself. That same winter he fought a hopeless by-election for the Yorkshire mining seat of Normanton, and then set out to find a seat he could win at the next general election. It was not easy. Despite his political, academic, and military qualifications, his manner was off-putting. A spare man of medium height, he had his hair cut en brosse which, with his intently staring eyes and stern demeanour when not among intimates, made him rather terrifying. He spoke in an exact way, with a slight but metallic west midland accent. He had little small talk, and at that stage no point of contact with women. When he finally secured the nomination for a seat-Wolverhampton South-West, in December 1948-the agent advised the selection committee not to be put off by his 'short hair on end and his bulging eyes'  (Heffer, 126).

For the next year Powell nursed the constituency carefully, cutting down and finally resigning from his work at the research department. He was returned at the general election of 1950 after a campaign run like a military operation. He became an active opponent of the government, and with Macleod and other new members formed the One Nation group of MPs. In June 1950 he rebelled against his party by refusing to support the Schuman plan, adoption of which would have made Britain one of the founder members of the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union. This act of independence set back his career, but was indicative of Powell's anti-careerist view of politics. Through One Nation he articulated a radical, free-market Conservatism for which there was then little sympathy in the party. He and Macleod both specialized in the health and social services, but it was Macleod who, to Powell's chagrin, was invited to become minister of health in the spring of 1952, barely six months after the Conservative Party had regained power. Later that year Powell refused a job at the Home Office with responsibility for Welsh affairs, saying that he was interested only in an economic ministry. He had to wait three years for another offer, while his contemporaries clambered up the greasy pole.

Powell's emotional life had been somewhat unconventional. A religious experience in 1949 caused him to abandon his militant atheism. His poetry revealed turbulent inner forces that he otherwise kept repressed. A double volume of it was published in 1951: Dancer's End, a collection of verse written during the war, and The Wedding Gift, written in a period of 'epic struggle' with his emotions in the summer of 1950  (Powell, ix). The 'struggle' had been to persuade the first woman with whom he had fallen in love-at the age of thirty-eight-to marry him. He failed. He had earlier had two intense friendships with men, one a pupil at Cambridge and the other a brother officer in India, but there is no evidence that they had a physical side. He married, on 2 January 1952, Margaret Pamela Wilson (b. 1926), a former colleague from Conservative central office, who provided him with the settled and happy family life essential to his political career. They had two daughters.

In the Commons, Powell demonstrated a wide range of expertise in his speeches and interventions, whether on his pet social services interests, or on defence, or on the constitutional questions that were becoming of deep interest to him. He believed his speech in March 1953 on the Royal Titles Bill was the finest of his life. He argued in it that the substitution of the idea of the queen's 'realms' for 'realm' was 'literally meaningless'  (Hansard 5C, 512.242). It was an early example of his opposition to the idea of a Commonwealth as a sticking plaster for the wound left by the amputation of empire, and helps explain why he was not one of those tories distressed by the failure of the Suez operation in 1956.

Into government

In 1954 One Nation published a pamphlet entitled Change is our Ally, mostly written by Powell and his friend and colleague Angus Maude. It argued for a fast retreat from the planned economy in order to maximize efficiency. However unclubbable and intellectually isolated Powell was, his sheer ability could not be ignored indefinitely. On 21 December 1955 Anthony Eden appointed him parliamentary secretary to Duncan Sandys at the Ministry of Housing. He soon mastered the detail of the Housing Subsidies Bill then before parliament. He took charge of measures on slum clearance and, finally, oversaw the Rent Bill. This was a measure close to Powell's radical heart, deregulating leaseholds and decontrolling many rents after years of wartime and post-war state control. Such was the assurance and technical mastery Powell displayed that, after barely a year, he was promoted on 14 January 1957 to the most important departmental post outside the cabinet, that of financial secretary to the Treasury.

There, Powell could take on the Keynesian forces whose essentially socialist doctrine still underpinned the Conservative government. With sterling depressed after the debacle of Suez in late 1956 and the country living beyond its means, tough measures were needed to steady the economy. Together with the economic secretary, Nigel Birch, Powell impressed upon the chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, that inflation was the government's doing. The three men agreed in the summer of 1957, largely under Powell's guiding influence, that inflation was a monetary phenomenon; and that only by strict control of the money supply could it be eliminated and sound money restored. Two basic tools were used to enforce this discipline. First, the bank rate was increased in September 1957 from 5 to 7 per cent. Second, Thorneycroft told his cabinet colleagues in the summer of 1957 that they would have to pare back government spending in 1958-9 to the levels of the previous year. Fearing political damage, they were reluctant to agree, and the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was at best ambivalent. This studied freedom from conviction by the then prime minister, whom Powell regarded as an actor-manager rather than as a politician, would be at the root of Powell's later intense-and reciprocated-dislike of him.

Powell had long been attracted by the economic ideas of the Manchester Liberals of the nineteenth century, tying in as they did with his belief in the individual over the corporate state. It was also, for him, a matter of logic that inflation was caused by having too much money in circulation, and therefore by governments. He reinforced these views with later readings of Hayek and Adam Smith, but he came to them largely by his own reasoning. As financial secretary, he had to deal directly with the spending bids of ministers. The matter came to a head in a series of cabinet meetings at the turn of 1957-8, when Thorneycroft-armed with intellectual arguments by Powell-refused to back down from demanding that a further £50 million of spending cuts had to be found. On 6 January 1958, when Macmillan refused to back the chancellor, Thorneycroft and his two colleagues resigned. Powell's doubts about Macmillan, although he served him again, matured into contempt.

In this first period on the back benches after holding office, Powell suffered increasing frustration, though he continued to make a name for himself as both a thinker and a politician. He used his time to return to some literary work put aside earlier. Since the late 1940s he had been working on a history of the House of Lords, and he took up that task again wholeheartedly, though it was not published until 1968, and then only covered the period to 1540. He also wrote a shorter book entitled Great Parliamentary Occasions (1960), reflecting his love of the institution. More substantially, in 1959-60 he wrote an important tract of liberal economics, Saving in a Free Society (1960); and, after a relative parliamentary silence in 1958 (once he had signalled his opposition to the legislation introducing life peerages), he began once more to make weighty contributions from the back benches in 1959. The most significant of these was his speech in July 1959 on the Hola Camp massacre in Kenya, in which he attacked British policy in the colony. In it, he argued that the government could not:

have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home ... we must be consistent with ourselves everywhere ... we cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility. (Hansard 5C, 610.237)

The Hola Camp speech won Powell many new admirers on all sides of the house, and distanced him further from the old imperialist tory party. He had repudiated the Suez group of tory MPs, even before Suez, having detected as early as 1954 an unwillingness and incapacity on Britain's part to defend what remained of its empire. It was the logical end of his idea that, once India had gone, there was no point in preserving the rest of the empire, of which India had been the focal point. During the Suez crisis itself in 1956 he took no part, recognizing the futility of the convulsions through which most of his colleagues were going. He had felt, and recovered from, such pains in 1947, when India went. His attack on the treatment of the Kenyans in Hola is difficult to reconcile with later accusations that he was a man motivated by theories of racial superiority. Powell believed that, where British rule still pertained, so too should a principle of civis Romanus sum, with the same standards of justice that applied in Britain applying in her colonies too, irrespective of the race of those governed.

When Thorneycroft was brought back into the cabinet on 27 July 1960 as minister for aviation, Powell felt that he could in honour return to serve Macmillan. His three years as minister of health were intellectually satisfying for him, as he set about reforming the National Health Service and making it more responsive to its patients. He suspected that the service was run more for the benefit of its staff than of its clients, and his subsequent experiences confirmed him in this-and compelled him to try to improve matters. He won the funding for a ten-year hospital building programme, which he announced in 1962. He established a programme to close and demolish the Victorian lunatic asylums, which he found offensively dehumanizing. He instituted regular meetings with chairmen of regional health authorities, and often toured hospitals to meet health service staff. In July 1962 he was promoted, in the same post, to the cabinet: although Macmillan found him uncongenial, he could not ignore Powell's prodigious talent in a party that was short of it.

In a parliamentary career of thirty-seven years Powell had just fifteen months in the cabinet. Once he found his feet he proved a powerful force for radicalism, out-arguing more experienced and less ideological colleagues for a programme based on liberal economics and the dismantling of the socialist state. Even he, though, had to make compromises. Under collective responsibility he supported an incomes policy in which he did not believe-for he felt, as a monetarist, that it had no effect on inflation. It caused him great intellectual, as well as political, difficulty when nurses threatened industrial action in the spring of 1963 over pay limits. As the party prepared for the election due by the autumn of 1964, Powell's was a rare voice arguing for a return, effectively, to the liberal economics of the period before 1914. Such calls were met with incomprehension from colleagues, and derision from economists for whom Keynesianism was the only possible orthodoxy.

In the leadership campaign in the Conservative Party caused by the resignation of Macmillan in October 1963, Powell and Macleod, who had fallen out in previous years, made common cause to try to have R. A. Butler made the next leader. Butler was an odd choice, given the scale of their divergence on policy. However, Powell felt a personal loyalty to him that dated back to his time in the research department in the late 1940s. He regarded him as having the most intellectual and moral integrity of any of the available candidates. Butler had also, like Powell, seen through Macmillan early on. When Butler failed to press his case, Powell, like Macleod, refused to serve under Lord Home. Powell harboured no animosity towards Home, but felt that having opposed his candidacy so strongly it would be hypocritical to serve under him: 'I'd have to go home and turn all the mirrors round' was how he justified his position  (Heffer, 331).

Opposition

Powell used his new-found freedom to argue in public for policies and remedies he had hitherto advocated in private. As well as pleading for his party to be released from the pointless strait-jacket of incomes policies, he advocated other courses that became the basis of Thatcherism over a decade later-denationalization and deregulation chief among them. Although this won him new followers on the intellectual right, his former colleagues regarded his interventions as unhelpful, with Quintin Hogg likening his ideological fervour to that of Chairman Mao. Noting, for almost the last time, the dangers his individualism might pose to his party, Powell remained anonymous when he wrote three articles under the byline 'A Conservative' for The Times in April 1964. All attacked the lack of ideas, decisiveness, and principle in his party, and made a strong impact. Powell was widely supposed to have been the author of at least one of the articles: but he denied having any hand in them, and the truth was revealed only after his death.

When the Conservatives went into opposition in October 1964, Powell returned to the front bench as transport spokesman. He spent an unhappy nine months in that post, estranged from the issues on which he felt so passionately. When Douglas-Home resigned from the leadership in July 1965, Powell joined Edward Heath and Reginald Maudling in the party's first elective leadership contest. He came a distant third with just fifteen votes, but observed 'I left my visiting card'  (Heffer, 385)-by which he meant that he had laid down a marker for the future on behalf not only of himself, but also of his liberal-nationalist values. It was at this time that the term 'Powellism' first came into vogue to describe his doctrine: the coinage itself a tribute to Powell's intellectual influence. The doctrine was consolidated by the publication in July 1965 of the first of several collections of his speeches, A Nation Not Afraid, subtitled The Thinking of Enoch Powell.

Heath offered Powell the pick of shadow portfolios. To general surprise, Powell-who might have been thought, given the burden of many of his speeches, to covet the post of shadow chancellor-asked to be defence spokesman. This was not only because he was interested in the disposition of the armed forces, but also because he wished to alert his party to the changed role of Britain in the world through the prism of the country's defences. In addition to the economic heresies he believed his party was committing, he felt equally strongly that it had not yet recognized the realities of Britain's post-imperial condition. This policy brought him into immediate conflict with Heath. A speech at the party's annual conference in October 1965, in which Powell advocated British withdrawal from east of Suez, caused shock waves in America. Heath, who had initially praised the speech, felt forced, under diplomatic pressure, to repudiate his colleague within days. Powell believed passionately in a European-based defence strategy; and in the election campaign of 1966 he attacked the notion that the Wilson government might be preparing to send British troops to Vietnam to assist the Americans. Although Powell did this at the urging of Conservative central office, Heath felt embarrassed by this, too, and sought to distance the party from what Powell appeared to have been saying.

After Heath had lost the election in 1966, he was urged by some colleagues to sack Powell from the front bench; Heath summoned his defence spokesman and asked him to follow the party line more closely in his pronouncements. He also asked him not to comment on matters within the portfolios of others. It was not merely that there were disagreements over defence. Keen still to repudiate socialist control, Powell had stepped up his advocacy of denationalization, and had been seeking to expose the futility both of incomes policies and of general economic planning in a free society. The Conservative Party, being in a quandary about the alternatives, was reluctant to depart from the consensual orthodoxy on any of these questions. Whatever assurances Powell may or may not have given Heath at his meeting, he continued to advocate the principles in which he firmly believed, on defence or on anything else. He felt that collective responsibility could not, under the British constitution, exist for an opposition in the same way as for a government; and that it was the job of experienced politicians like himself to try to develop policy irrespective of their nominal shadow responsibilities. In saying this he was merely following the precedent of how Churchill had conducted opposition in Powell's time in the parliamentary secretariat and the research department. Fatally, Powell chose to ignore the fact that Heath, being far less self-confident as a politician than Churchill and with no comparable record of achievement, was less happy to give colleagues a free rein.

The Birmingham speech

Since the mid-1950s, Powell had, when in government, argued on departmental committees that mass immigration was having a damaging effect on certain parts of the country where immigrants tended to settle. His own experience in Wolverhampton confirmed him in this view. Powell's detractors later falsely claimed that he had, in fact, encouraged such immigration to staff the National Health Service during his time as minister of health. The truth was that ever since he had, as a party official, advised the then home affairs spokesman, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, to oppose the British Nationality Bill of 1948, Powell had worried about the capacity of British communities to absorb and integrate large concentrations of immigrants without causing social unrest. He had believed this in 1948 not because of racism on his part, but because of the impossibility, as he saw it, of offering British citizenship to the hundreds of millions of people living in the old empire. He felt, too, that there was a lack of logic in giving such a privilege to those who, because their countries were becoming independent, no longer had any allegiance to the crown. Later, when he came to sit for Wolverhampton South-West, he also had the empirical evidence of the strains and difficulties he witnessed among his own constituents. He argued, too, that his objections would be the same even if substantial numbers of Europeans arrived in one community en masse.

In the spring of 1968, at a time when his relations with Heath and many of his colleagues were strained in any case, Powell expressed dissatisfaction with his party's relatively conciliatory position on the Race Relations Bill which was then going through parliament. He felt that the Conservative leaders, few of whom sat as he did for constituencies with large immigrant populations, simply did not understand the unhappiness of many people at what was being done to their communities without their having been consulted. Heath and Hogg, the home affairs spokesman, thought that they had dealt successfully with Powell's reservations, since Powell gave them no indication at a meeting of the shadow cabinet where the question was discussed that he had any unresolved difficulties on the matter. However, on 20 April 1968 Powell made a speech at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, about immigration. This speech thereafter defined his place in British political culture. He told the story of a little old lady, the last white woman in her street, who was taunted by immigrants and had excrement pushed through her letterbox. Sensing the chorus of execration that was about to break over him, he said that he had no right to remain silent when things such as this were happening to his electors. He predicted that, unless something was done to stop mass immigration, there would be a breakdown in public order. 'Like the Roman,' he told his audience, quoting Virgil, 'I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood'  (Powell, Freedom and Reality, 1969, 213-19).

Heath, angry at being caught unawares by the speech, decided that it was racist in tone, and sacked Powell the next day. The political class sided with Heath, but there was widespread public support for Powell. A month after his speech Gallup found that 74 per cent of people agreed with Powell, 15 per cent disagreed, and 11 per cent did not know  (Gallup, 1026). He received over 100,000 letters in the weeks after his speech, only a small proportion of which disagreed with him. Heath, by contrast, had the obloquy of his party's grass roots heaped upon him. Trade unionists, to the embarrassment of the Labour leadership, marched to the Commons from the London docks and the Smithfield meat market in support of Powell. Although the furore was hard on Powell and particularly upon his wife and two daughters, he came to terms with his sudden celebrity, and sought to take advantage of the freedom his new position on the back benches allowed him.

I felt like a man walking down a street who is hit on the head by a tile falling from a roof ... I saw it immediately that I would never hold office again; and I determined to make the best use I could of my circumstances. (The Independent, 9 Feb 1998)

Much criticism was directed at Powell for his use of the 'little old lady'. Despite the best efforts of the press, she was never traced; nor was her daughter-in-law, who lived in Northumberland, and who had written the letter highlighting the old lady's concerns. The letter itself was not found in Powell's papers after his death, though he meticulously kept all other significant documents. To opponents of Powell's, some details in the letter seemed incredible. There was also suspicion that it was a hoax, and that Powell had failed to check its, and her, bona fides. In future speeches on the question he was careful to give chapter and verse when citing examples of tension provided to him by correspondents.

After the Birmingham speech Powell stepped up his programme of political speeches around the country, though for years he was pursued by demonstrators who attempted to disrupt his meetings. Despite the forces ranged against him in the liberal establishment and the media, he succeeded in establishing himself as a formidable political force, thanks largely to his powers of communication. He became adept at the television and radio interview, and carefully timed his speeches to command press attention. As his Birmingham speech showed, he was an early master of the sound bite. His message was enhanced by the drama of his public performances-an intensely charismatic style based on his hypnotic combination of staring eyes and a metallic tone of voice. His language was memorable, his convictions clear, his naked patriotism a direct appeal to the masses. His friend and political opponent Tony Benn later observed that 'people listen to him fascinated by his intellect and clarity and he mesmerises Labour MPs like rabbits caught in a headlamp'  (Benn, 55).

At the Conservative Party conference at Blackpool in 1968 the evidence of support for Powell within his party disconcerted the leadership. Although heckled by a few, Powell was rapturously received when he dismissed the caution and lack of radicalism of his former colleagues with the Nietzschean observation: 'Whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible'  (Heffer, 483). Powell was no longer bound by any sort of collective responsibility, and did not in future allow his thought or his words to be trammelled by any considerations of party orthodoxy, or of loyalty to its leadership. This meant that, in expounding matters of policy, he could steal an initiative, and appear to have trumped the less radical impulses of his colleagues. A coherent framework of ideology was, by the late 1960s, fully in place, rooted in economic liberalism and social nationalism. It was not a menu from which it was possible to dine a la carte. One who admired him greatly, Margaret Thatcher, recalled that 'the very fact Enoch advanced all his positions as part of a coherent whole made it more difficult to express agreement with one or two of them'  (Thatcher, 147). None the less, by the time Mrs Thatcher left office, almost the only parts of the Powell doctrine she had not come to embrace were his anti-Americanism and his opposition to the death penalty.

After 1968 Powell fought to acquit himself of the charge of racism, with the support of unlikely friends such as Michael Foot, a prominent left-wing Labour MP. However, it was a badge that was uncritically attached to him by his opponents, for the rest of his life. Powell was infuriated when anyone referred to his speeches on 'race', for he claimed that he had never offered any opinions on the subject. 'It so happens that I never talk about race', he said during the 1970 election campaign. 'I do not know what race is'  (The Guardian, 6 June 1970). His speeches, he said, were about immigration. He had no time for genetic or scientific theories of race, but relied on analysing the demographic and cultural effects of mass immigration on an area with a distinctly different culture. He was most concerned not about absolute numbers of immigrants, but at the pace of growth in an immigrant population overwhelmingly comprising people of child-bearing age. Powell was strongly influenced by what he perceived to be the racial tensions in America caused by the creation of ghettos, and was concerned that such a phenomenon should not be allowed to happen in Britain. Over the next few years he returned in his speeches frequently to immigration, his task made easier by less than honest presentation of the immigration figures by the government. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1971, passed by the next Conservative government in a belated attempt to limit immigration, was in part the result of Powell's raising of public consciousness on the question. However, even as late as 1985 he urged a policy of voluntary repatriation, to prevent areas of Britain having Asian or African-descended populations that were a third of the total. Otherwise, he warned, 'it will be a Britain unimaginably wracked by dissension and violent disorder, not recognizable as the same nation as it has been, or perhaps a nation at all'  (The Times, 21 Sept 1985). Powell was speaking in the wake of riots at Handsworth in Birmingham, a predominantly immigrant-populated suburb. These riots were but the latest in a string of inner-city disturbances in the early 1980s that many thought justified another component in Powell's objections to mass immigration: its effect on public order.

Eventually Powell's reliance on statistics and facts in his speeches, and his avoidance of anything smacking of prejudice or of what was conventionally understood to be racism, forced his opponents to take him seriously in a way they would not have done had he been a simple bigot. He highlighted practical problems of housing, education, and crime caused by the concentration of immigrants in geographically small areas like his own constituency. These were issues to which politicians had no choice but to respond. The Labour cabinet minister Anthony Crosland, for one, recognized the deep feelings of his party's own working-class supporters, with whom Powell was striking a chord. Angered by the self-righteousness with which these sentiments were labelled 'fascist', he wrote in 1973 that 'to condemn such feeling as racialist is libellous and impertinent. They [sic] reflect a genuine sense of insecurity, and anxiety for a traditional way of life'  (The Observer, 21 Jan 1973). However, the emotion with which Powell invested his pronouncements on immigration undeniably whipped up unhealthy sentiment among some of the less discerning of his audience. He could not be held responsible for the actions of those who took his words, contrary to their intention, to legitimize hostility towards immigrants. None the less, many blamed him for the racist feeling that grew in Britain in the late 1960s and beyond. Powell himself believed that the growth of such feeling was the consequence of failing to act on the problem he had identified at Birmingham. He also believed firmly that he did not, as a parliamentarian, have the right to remain silent. He shared with Walter Bagehot a belief that parliament should mirror national opinion, and debate national concerns. In a speech on 7 September 1968 he warned that 'people rightly look to see their wishes and views voiced and discussed in parliament and if, over a long period, they feel this is not happening a dangerous estrangement can set in between electorate, Parliament and Government'  (Sunday Times, 8 Sept 1968).

It was not just on immigration that Powell felt that parliament was ignoring the concerns of the people: he felt it was true on foreign policy, the Commonwealth, free trade, taxation, and crime too. As a result, and in his new-found populist clothes, he was keen to attack the political orthodoxy on an even broader basis than before. The unifying theme was his regard for the freedoms, integrity, constitution, and customs of the British nation, and his mounting sense that the public shared that regard. His attack on immigration was the first salvo on this nationalist front, and he continued to stress the integrity and identity of the nation in speeches on that and other topics. He said at Wolverhampton on 9 June 1969 that 'we have an identity of our own, as we have a territory of our own ... the instinct to preserve that identity, as to defend that territory, is one of the deepest and strongest implanted in mankind'  (The Times, 10 June 1969).

On the fringe of the Conservative Party conference in 1968 Powell delivered his 'Morecambe budget'. In it he argued that with drastic cuts in public spending, and the reduction of the role of the state, the standard rate of income tax could be halved (from 8s. 3d. to 4s. 3d. in the pound). That autumn he put himself at the head of a cross-party movement to prevent the House of Lords from being reformed as a result of a deal done by the two front benches in the House of Commons. So successfully was the government impeded during the committee stage of the Parliament (No. 2) Bill early in 1969 that the prime minister, Harold Wilson, was forced to abandon the measure.

In March 1969 Powell opened a new front, on the possibility that Britain might join the European Economic Community. This drew great criticism from his own side, for opposition to entry had hitherto been confined largely to the Labour Party. As supporters of Heath pointed out, Powell had sat quietly in the cabinet in 1962-3 when Macmillan had, unsuccessfully, tried to take Britain in. Powell argued that he was consistent: he had voted against the Schuman plan in 1950 and had supported entry hitherto only because he had been convinced that the Common Market was simply a means to secure free trade. Now it was clear to him that the sovereignty of parliament was in question, as was Britain's very survival as a nation. This nationalist analysis powerfully attracted millions of grass-roots Conservatives and others, and as much as anything else made Powell the implacable enemy of Heath, a fervent pro-European.

When Wilson went to the country in June 1970, Powell was at odds with his party's leadership on almost all the main questions. His second collection of speeches, Freedom and Reality (1969), was selling well and had been reprinted, indicating the following he could command by his dissent. Under his economic influence, however, his party was preparing to fight on a manifesto-hammered out at a meeting at the Selsdon Park Hotel early in 1970-that deferred to the free market more than had any manifesto since the war. Powell's election address in Wolverhampton mentioned the Conservative Party only once: his was a personal manifesto that went well beyond what Labour caricatured as 'Selsdon man'.

The Heath government

Heath's victory, predicted by almost no one, was a shattering blow to Powell. He felt his chance of leading his party-a notion that had come to seem more feasible to him as he examined his postbag and witnessed the great displays of admiration that met him as he tirelessly toured the country-was at an end. Until early in 1971 he licked his wounds and made relatively few public pronouncements. He was waiting for Heath to make mistakes, and only then would he attack. Such opportunities soon came. Since 1968 Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to maintain British rule. From early in 1971 he opposed, with increasing vehemence, Heath's approach to Ulster, the greatest breach with his party coming over the imposition of direct rule in 1972. By then, though, other matters had caused Powell and his party to undergo a divorce in all but name.

The Common Market was the main cause. The Conservatives had promised at the 1970 election to negotiate about entry, that entry to be accomplished only with the full-hearted consent of the British parliament and people. When Powell saw Heath sign an accession treaty before parliament had even debated the issue, when the second reading of the bill to put the treaty into law passed by just eight votes on second reading, and when it became clear that the British people would have no further say in the matter, he declared open war on his party's line. He voted against the government on every one of the 104 divisions in the course of the European Communities Bill. When finally he lost this battle, he decided he could no longer sit in a parliament that was not sovereign. In the summer of 1972 he prepared to resign.

As he was about to do so, Powell changed his mind. He felt compelled to stay in parliament to articulate the fears of his supporters about a new wave of mass immigration, caused by the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by the dictator Idi Amin. Powell argued, and in law was correct, that Britain had no legal obligation to accept these refugees: but the government dismissed his objections and admitted the Ugandan Asians for humanitarian reasons. The issue was the subject of a noisy debate at the party conference in October 1972, at which Powell spoke. Unusually, a vote was taken, in which a two-to-one victory for the leadership barely disguised the support Powell commanded at the grass roots.

In the following month the issue that brought down the Heath government, not least because it gave Powell his most formidable line of assault against it, blew up. Heath had told the country in 1970 that he would not countenance an incomes policy. Having expanded the money supply at the astonishing rate of 30 per cent a year, Heath came to the House of Commons in November 1972 to announce the introduction of prices and incomes controls, in an attempt to counter the rampant inflation that had resulted. The government would not, however, admit to having caused the problem, which went back to the unlearned lessons of 1957-8. Powell could see at once not just a flagrant breach of promise, but an utterly futile and politically damaging measure in the making. In an electric moment he asked Heath, on the floor of the Commons, whether he knew 'that it is fatal for any Government or party or person to seek to govern in direct opposition to the principles on which they were entrusted with the right to govern'. He asked, further, whether Heath had 'taken leave of his senses'  (Hansard 5C, 845.631-2). The personal breach between the two men, hitherto kept largely private, was out in the open.

From then until the government lost the general election of February 1974, Powell's position of open dissent became a matter of keen public and media interest. Substantial grass-roots dissatisfaction with Heath led to various 'Powell for prime minister' campaigns, which Powell ignored. However, he maintained his high-profile attacks on various elements of government policy in speeches inside and outside the Commons, which led colleagues loyal to Heath to demand that he have the whip withdrawn from him. However, Heath and his chief whip, Francis Pym, did not wish to make Powell more of a martyr than he already was. A speech by him at Stockport in June 1973 seemed the final straw, for he signalled clearly in it that his party no longer merited the loyalty of its supporters. He rode out the wave of anger that this provoked, though some in his constituency by this time felt that he was trying their patience. At his constituency party's annual general meeting in December 1973 he successfully faced down criticism, and gained the support of his activists for his campaign, though some remained implacably hostile. He argued that he was fighting on the platform on which he and his party had been elected in 1970, a platform that Heath had largely abandoned. He disappointed his association officers by refusing to tell them what he would do if Heath called an early election. It had become apparent to them that Powell would have difficulty standing as a Conservative in such an election, but he maintained that he saw no prospect of one being called. This was disingenuous, for he well knew that in the following eighteen months he would have to make up his mind.

The matter was forced far more quickly than anyone had expected. An essential part of Heath's new strategy was to impress upon trade unions that they had to accept pay restraint. With grim inevitability this provoked a confrontation with the miners that came to a head in December 1973 - January 1974. A shortage of coal caused Heath to announce a three-day working week for industry, and power cuts for domestic consumers. Powell believed that, having adopted this confrontational stance, Heath would now follow it through to maintain his political authority. However, when Heath called an election on what was represented as the issue of 'who governs?', Powell was outraged. Though it had long been hard to see how he could ever have stood again as a Conservative, given his extensive disagreements with the leadership, his hand was now forced. As soon as he heard that the election had been called, he sent a letter to his association in Wolverhampton saying that he would not be a candidate. His supporters there felt a keen sense of betrayal, as did adherents of Powellism across the country, who felt that that was no time for him to be ditching the Conservative Party-not least for his own sake.

For the first fortnight of the three-week campaign Powell said nothing in public, except to deliver a theological sermon at a church service. However, in the five days before the poll he made two speeches, at Birmingham and at Saltaire in Yorkshire, to anti-EEC rallies. At both he implied heavily that people should vote Labour, as Labour was committed to a referendum on continued membership of the EEC, which Britain had joined thirteen months earlier. At the second meeting, when Powell compared Heath unfavourably with Wilson, a heckler cried out: 'Judas!' Powell shouted back: 'Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!'  (Heffer, 709).

Heath stayed in office for four days after the election, trying to form a minority government. Powell took great pleasure in his failure to do so, but had also to confront the fact that he had apparently ended his own political life too, and was despised by many Conservatives. There could be no possibility of any reconciliation while Heath remained leader, or while the party remained committed to Europe and to failed methods of economic management. Several Conservative associations approached Powell and asked him to be their candidate, but he declined all such offers. He was also approached by representatives of the Unionist coalition in Northern Ireland. They suggested he might be a Unionist candidate in the election the minority Labour government was expected to call within months. Powell agreed, and when a vacancy arose for a candidate in the Down South seat he was adopted to fill it. At the election of 10 October 1974, after seven months in the wilderness, he was back in the Commons.

Northern Ireland

As an Ulster Unionist MP, Powell had to devote much of his time to a cause in which he firmly believed-the maintenance of British rule in Ulster-but this inevitably took him away from mainstream political issues. A posthumous victory for Powellism in the removal of Heath from the Conservative leadership seemed to bring him no comfort, even though Heath's successor, Margaret Thatcher, set about establishing policies drawn straight from Powellite economic doctrine. Speaking of their ideological sympathies, she said that 'economically we both hold the same views ... I originally got them from Enoch, but also of course Keith Joseph took them up, and we developed them'  (Odd Man Out). Joseph, too, had learned them from Powell, who had directed him towards the Institute of Economic Affairs during the 1960s. Joseph's influence on Mrs Thatcher was profound, and through him, therefore, Powell's was more profound still. Nevertheless, for some years Powell was hostile to Mrs Thatcher, partly because he felt that women were unsuited to the House of Commons and to high politics, but also because he doubted the strength of the ideological conversion of those who had sat happily in the Heath cabinet. Inevitably, many also felt that his feelings stemmed from pique at having missed a golden opportunity for himself.

Powell regained some of his clout during the 1974-9 parliament by persuading his Unionist colleagues to support the Labour government after it lost the slim majority it had won at the October 1974 election. Although this support was given in return for favours to Ulster, and undeniably advanced the Unionists' interests, it deepened the sense of betrayal that Conservatives felt towards Powell. His greatest achievement was to secure increased parliamentary representation for Northern Ireland at Westminster. In the end, though, even he could no longer bring himself to support the Callaghan government. The Unionists were instrumental in its losing the vote of confidence on 28 March 1979.

Powell was returned for Down South a second time at the election of May 1979, but regarded Mrs Thatcher's victory as 'grim' (Heffer, 820). Her clear majority meant that an influential role for the Unionists in general, or for Powell in particular, was over. Powell maintained a big national following, and was still greatly in demand as a speaker, as a journalist, and as a television and radio performer. As he approached his seventies there were signs of his mellowing, the public face of unbending, logical sternness now and then complemented by revelations of the poetical side of his character. He also took up new political interests, not least his sponsorship of a private member's bill in the 1984-5 session of parliament to ban embryo experimentation. The bill failed, but only after a long battle in which every trick of parliamentary procedure was used to try to keep it alive.

In time Powell reached an accommodation with the Conservative government, giving warm support not just to its monetarist economic policies but also to Mrs Thatcher's determination to retake the Falkland Islands after the Argentinian invasion of April 1982. He had regular meetings with Mrs Thatcher, who valued his counsel highly. As a result of this relationship he was again able to advance Ulster's cause with Downing Street. However, his public denunciation of the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement as an act of treachery put relations back into the freezer, where they remained for some years until finally thawed. In response to that agreement Powell reluctantly joined all his Unionist colleagues in resigning his parliamentary seat and fighting a by-election in January 1986. He had won in 1983, but his majority had narrowed thanks to a growing nationalist vote and to his being opposed by a Democratic Unionist. In the by-election Powell had no Unionist opponent, and won. However, at the general election of 1987 Powell's thirty-seven-year parliamentary career ended when he lost the seat to his Social Democratic and Labour Party opponent. Although he had known victory was uncertain, he was devastated by the result. He was offered a life peerage, which was regarded as his right as a former cabinet minister, but declined it. He argued that, as he had opposed the bill that established life peerages in 1958, it would be hypocritical for him to take one.

Instead, Powell resumed a life of scholarship. He had long wanted to write a study of the Greek New Testament, and began with a controversial book, The Evolution of the Gospel (1994), on the gospel according to St Matthew, which among other things called into question whether there had literally been a crucifixion of Christ. He published his Collected Poems in 1990, the availability of some of which after half a century out of print made him 'glad in a vaguely melancholy sort of way' (Collected Poems, vii). He continued to speak at public meetings regularly into his eighties, and assumed a unique place as a public figure-though one who, to the end, provoked fierce emotions.

In 1994 Powell was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson's disease. He fought the affliction with his customary resolution, despite mounting incapacity. For the last few years of his life he managed occasional pieces of journalism, co-operated in a television documentary about his life in 1995, and began but did not complete work on a study of the gospel according to St John. He died on 8 February 1998 in the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in London. Dressed in his brigadier's uniform, he was buried in his regiment's plot in Warwick cemetery on 18 February 1998. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.

Powell's legacy

Powell claimed that 'all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs'  (Powell, Joseph Chamberlain, 1977, 151). Not only did Powell not become prime minister, or even leader of his party: he served in the cabinet for only fifteen months, and it was usually by his own will that he did not hold higher offices. He made no concessions to those who might otherwise have tentatively explored his way of politics. Also, when he entered into conflict with Heath and his supporters after 1968, much of that conflict, while rooted in ideology, took on a personal tone that indicated a strong animus on Powell's part against some of his rivals. He himself revealed that, on the morning after the general election of February 1974, he went to his bathroom 'and sang the Te Deum' on reading that Heath had failed to secure a majority-something he in part attributed to his own role in that campaign. He added: 'I didn't mean it vindictively', though towards the end of his life he admitted 'I had had my revenge on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom'  (Heffer, 710-11).

Powell was also prevented from maximizing his influence during his political prime because of what many felt to be the contradictory nature of his philosophy: the contrast of his liberal economics with his high tory social policy, notably on immigration. At the height of his popularity, induced as it was by his views on immigration, he often spoke over the heads of some of the audiences who came to hear him by treating them to detailed discourses on, for example, the theory of floating exchange rates. He also allied himself with causes that allowed his opponents to stigmatize him as reactionary and anti-populist. He was, for example, opposed to legislation to prevent discrimination against women, though he took this view for precisely the same reasons for which he opposed laws against race discrimination. He found them an affront to individual liberty, and believed that the market, if allowed to work, would eliminate discrimination through a meritocratic pursuit of profit. Such rarefied arguments were seldom appreciated by the general public, though on greater reflection their logic became more apparent.

However, as a populist figure Powell had few rivals in his generation, and his long-term political influence was considerable. Much of the programme of what came to be called Thatcherism was propagated by Powell during the twenty years before Mrs Thatcher came to power. In British political terms he was the father of monetarism and privatization. His example spurred on a group on the Thatcherite right of the Conservative Party who exposed and attacked the moral and logical contradictions of the policy of John Major, particularly towards Europe. The shift to the right by the party under William Hague brought it more into line with Powell's doctrine than ever before, highlighting the Powellite mixture of liberal economics and social conservatism. Nor was Powell's influence confined just to what had once been his own party. In the months before his death he saw a Labour chancellor of the exchequer pursuing precisely the monetary policy he, Thorneycroft, and Birch had advocated, and so been forced to resign. His warnings of the constitutional dangers of British membership of the European Union came to be recognized as having some validity in the late 1980s and 1990s, after the Single European Act and the treaty of Maastricht. In an age when the presentation of policy often took on greater importance than the policy itself, Powell exemplified the ability of the well-organized, coherent politician to survive attack by the media, and ultimately to capture them and put them to work for his own cause.

On the issue with which Powell's name is inevitably most associated-that of the risks of conflagration provoked by mass immigration-his worst predictions have not come true, though he argued to the end of his life that the early part of the twenty-first century would see him vindicated. None the less, like Joseph Chamberlain and scarcely anyone else in the twentieth century, he established with the public a reputation as a political figure that is usually accorded only to prime ministers. His main motivations-patriotism, and a profound understanding of how the people of England valued their liberties and wished to be left alone by the state-touched an undeniably popular chord. His was above all a career that demonstrated how a superfluity of principle and a loathing of pragmatism preclude success in politics by any conventional measure. It also showed how intellectual originality and the radicalism it strives to beget were for much of the twentieth century regarded with suspicion, and even fear, in British political life. 'I may have failed', he told a television interviewer in 1989. 'That does not mean I was wrong'  (The Independent, 9 Feb 1998).

Simon Heffer 

Sources  S. Heffer, Like the Roman: the life of Enoch Powell (1998) + J. E. Powell, Collected poems (1990) + T. Benn, Against the tide: diaries, 1973-76 (1989) + M. Thatcher, The path to power (1995) + G. H. Gallup, ed., The Gallup international public opinion polls: Great Britain, 1937-75, 2 (1976) + M. Cockerell, Odd man out, 11 Nov 1995, BBC 2 + The Observer (21 Jan 1973) + The Independent (9 Feb 1998) + The Times (10 June 1969) + The Times (21 Sept 1985) + The Times (9 Feb 1998) + The Guardian (6 June 1970) + The Guardian (9 Feb 1998) + Daily Telegraph (9 Feb 1998) + WWW + personal knowledge (2004) + private information (2004) [Margaret Powell, widow] + d. cert.
Archives CAC Cam., papers + priv. coll., papers + PRONI, Down South constituency corresp., speeches, and papers + Staffs. RO, Wolverhampton constituency papers + U. St Andr. L., speeches | BLPES, interview with Anthony Seldon + King's Lond., Liddell Hart C., corresp. with Sir B. H. Liddell Hart + NL Wales, letters to Professor S. J. Stephens as co-editor of 'Ilyfa Blegynryd' FILM BBC, London + Independent Television News + University of Leicester, Media Archive for Central England SOUND BBC, London
Likenesses  H. A. Freeth, etching, 1937, NPG · H. A. Freeth, chalk drawing, 1940, priv. coll. · H. A. Freeth, etching, 1951, priv. coll. · photographs, 1956-86, Hult. Arch. · H. A. Freeth, oils, 1959, priv. coll. · H. A. Freeth, oils, 1966, priv. coll. · J. Bown, photograph, 1968, priv. coll. [see illus.] · G. Scarfe, ink and collage on paper, 1971, NPG · F. Topolski, oils, 1976, priv. coll. · A. Newman, bromide print, 1978, NPG · C. Cutner, photograph, 1979, priv. coll. · N. Sinclair, bromide print, 1992, NPG · M. Cummings, pen-and-ink drawing, NPG · P. Friers, pen-and-ink drawing, NPG · D. Waugh, colour print, NPG · photograph, repro. in The Times (9 Feb 1998) · photograph, repro. in The Independent · photograph, repro. in The Guardian (9 Feb 1998) · photograph, repro. in Daily Telegraph
Wealth at death  £246,603: probate, 23 March 1998, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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