Political Leaders

"Powell's impact has not just been limited to public opinion polls. The Butler–Stokes data from 1970 and 1974 clearly demonstrated that Powell played a decisive role in winning the 1970 election for the Tories and came back to make an important contribution to the Labour victory in February 1974. He has been able to mobilise his supporters in opposite directions at two different elections four years apart without the benefit of a political organisation or a strong base in the leadership of either political party; influence of this sort is probably unprecedented in British political history... His ability to fill a hall was unrivalled in British politics between 1968 and 1974."

"We badly need another Enoch Powell to articulate the role of the nation state in the twenty-first century, but until such a paragon appears, we can return to the canon of his writings and speeches to remind us why the nation state still does and should matter... As well as Disraeli, but very few Tory thinkers since, Enoch Powell himself had a mission "to teach the English their nationhood", as well as a genius for defining it."

"The essence of representative democracy, Powell argued, is majority rule. No matter how consociational arrangements, there will always be some party or interest that is left out of the ruling coalition. So what is it that persuades the minority to put up with rule by the majority? Lincoln had suggested that it was the opportunity to change the government by swinging public opinion behind the opposition. But why should they be prepared to wait, particularly if the odds on success are long and there is a better chance of influencing events by taking the law into their own hands? Powell's answer was that the minority will only put up with majority rule, if there is some overarching community sentiment which is stronger than the conflicts of ideological, economic or political interest that customarily divide people on a daily basis."

"I tried to persuade him that he was too logical, a concept which he could neither accept nor understand... I do not recall meeting anyone else with a mind that had such a power of acquiring knowledge. At one stage when Enoch was detailed to become an expert on town and country planning, he acquired the standard textbook and read it from page to page, as an ordinary mortal would read a novel. Within a matter of weeks he had fully grasped both the principles of the problem and the details of the legal situation. Within a matter of a few months he was writing to the author of the textbook, pointing out the errors that he had made."

"Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes."

"Poor Enoch! Driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic!"

"Enoch Powell has the finest mind in the House of Commons. The best trained, and the most exciting... Powellism is not wholly or even a mainly a right-wing creed: by those rather absurd touchstones that 'progressives' delight to use—abolition of corporal and capital punishment, implementation of the Wolfenden Report, the humanising of penal and mental health reform—Powell is a progressive. Typically, Powell declines to be typed. He does not fit into any political slot. He is just Enoch Powell... I am a fellow-traveller, but sometimes I leave Powell's train a few stations down the line, before it reaches, and sometimes crashes into, the terminal buffers. I am certainly less logical in my political approach, but I would argue that Powell suffers sometimes from an excess of logic."

"Powell is the politician who dominates our age as no other does. The arguments that he articulated in the 1960s and 1970s resonate across the world. On the one hand, the seemingly unstoppable rise of the populist right, from France's Marine Le Pen to Hungary's Viktor Orban. On the other, the abiding split on Europe within the Conservative party that no leader has ever healed. The age of Brexit is the age of Powell."

"On a robust set of assumptions, Powell was responsible for the victory of the Conservatives in 1970 and of Labour in February 1974."

"In the mid-Seventies he came to Oxford to give a talk about devolution... [A] large audience, perhaps half black and brown, came to heckle and boo their bogeyman. They were very quickly silenced as Powell wove his spell, proving that devolution was a nonsense, but adding that decolonisation had surely taught us that morally we couldn't refuse a vote for independence from a people that wanted it... Finally, someone suggested he couldn't mean it: what if Oxford voted for independence? Would he grant that? He replied that you could reduce any argument to absurdity with an absurd example but yes, if the people wanted it, how could one refuse? And then added, cuttingly, but why talk such nonsense about Oxford? Why not use real examples: what if Bradford, Brixton or Southall, which are really different, vote for independence? The words were spat out with real venom, eyes flashing. Immigration had not previously been mentioned: in the audience heads lurched back, as if a collective slap in the face had been administered. At the end everyone filed out in silence, as if physically beaten. Over dinner, I asked him why he had done it: he had come close to getting a standing ovation and then he had deliberately thrown it all away. “Oh yes,” he said, “I could see I had won them over, so I thought, if you want to accept me, it's got to be the whole package, not just my views on devolution. So I showed them the cloven hoof. I don’t want any easy victories.”"

"It's a dependable party game: who was the MP who...emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act ... became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech.) As Minister of Health the same politician earned an extremely progressive reputation by attacking the mental hospitals as oppressive Victorian institutions which ought to be closed to allow more humane care within the community... This MP was...the first in any party to argue for a minimum income for the old and the unemployed, argued for the nationalisation of the universities and completely free education for all students, and refused...the offer of a life peerage... Most people...would volunteer all sorts of left-wing Labour MPs: not one in a hundred would have guessed that the right answer was Enoch Powell."

"I never came close to understanding Enoch Powell. He was the only adversary in the House of Commons who ever seriously worried me. Others were nimble and could disconcert me for a moment, but Powell, by his appearance, voice and choice of words, radiated an authority which I had no immediate resources to match. We were almost neighbours in South Eaton Place, and he was invariably courteous to my wife. But I never had a friendly conversation with him, and never understood the admiration verging on worship which he inspired in intelligent commentators. I saw at first hand the harm done in turn by his negative eloquence on immigration in 1968, on Ireland in 1984/5 and throughout on Europe. It was a tragedy that such patriotic fervour, deep learning and forceful talent should have been dedicated to detecting non-existent conspiracies and upholding different causes of the sour right."

"If Enoch Powell had stood for leadership of the Conservative party he would have won "by a landslide" and if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a "national landslide"."

"Enoch Powell was unique in the absolutism of the intellectual and moral propositions on which he based his arguments. When he was Professor of Greek at Sydney his colleagues used to call him “the textual pervert”. He built glass towers of dazzling logical integrity, whose foundations in the real world became more and more precarious as they rose higher and higher. In politics as in life, a logical conclusion is usually a reductio ad absurdum."

"I think the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard was by Enoch Powell in 1959, castigating the Macmillan Government over the murder of African prisoners at Hola camp in Kenya; it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes."

"All our hopes for England rest now on Enoch Powell."

"When I came to England in the late 60s, Sergeant Pepper was ruling the land, de Gaulle was the Great Satan and it was only months before Enoch Powell made his classical allusion to the Tiber. It is right that his speech that night has become a myth of a dark moment in contemporary British culture. His mean and ugly prophecies of bloodshed - rivers frothing with blood, no less - was not simply a mad outburst. It did not come from nowhere...It was no surprise, in the end, that Powell should pluck that evil image from his knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world to portray the panic that had gripped the country. He was not speaking for himself alone, but he spoke too strongly, abandoning post-imperial euphemisms about non-European foreigners. His eyes flashed with prophetic conviction and suddenly, so it seemed to Ted Heath, the lunacy had gone too far. He sacked him from the shadow cabinet"

"I have met, talked with, and participated in meetings with Enoch Powell on a number of different occasions. He has a better and deeper understanding of economic principles, and a clearer conception of the relation between economic and personal freedom, than any other major political figure I have ever met. And even this is to put it mildly. Broaden the field as widely as you want, and I have met few men who have as sophisticated an intelligence on these matters as Powell."

"Everyone who wrote about him was certain of one thing: Enoch Powell was not a racist. He "said things we didn't agree with" (Tony Blair). He was "an extreme nationalist, but not a racialist" (Denis Healey). He inspired racialists "but was not a racialist himself" (Tony Benn). The Tory papers which revered him and called for parliament to be prorogued in his memory would not contemplate the possibility that he was a racialist. The unanimity was complete. Which is all very odd because the most important thing by far about Enoch Powell was that he was a racist pig of the most despicable variety."

"The Tory Kingdom would sooner or later have been his to command, for he had all the shining qualities which the others lacked. Heath would never have outmanoeuvred him; Thatcher would never have stepped into the vacant shoes. It was a tragedy for Enoch, and a tragedy for the rest of us too."

"What a theme, and what a speech, and what a speaker, and how Oliver Cromwell himself would have been thrilled to hear the parliamentary cause elevated to its rightful pre-eminence... Writing as an impenitent Leveller who still begs to differ with you (and Oliver Cromwell) in so many matters, I still cannot withhold my wonder and excitement at what I heard there today."

"If one thinker is to be credited with starting the long rightward shift in British conservatism from the 1980s onward, it is Enoch Powell (1912–1998). In a period of centrist compromise, Powell heralded Thatcherism, but he also did more. In elevating the market, Thatcherism, if not Thatcher herself, was at root global and multilateral. Powell revered the global market but wanted to return politics to the nation. At once economically globalist and geopolitically unilateralist, Powell was the herald of British conservatism’s turn against Europe. When sacked in 1968 from the shadow cabinet for an inflammatory speech on immigration, a shrewd Tory editorialist who sensed Powell’s appeal wrote that containing Powellism would occupy his party for the next decade. The editorialist was off by a factor of five. Containing Powellism would occupy the party for the next half century and, in the 2010s, it would finally fail."

"In Britain, a herald of the twenty-first- century hard right, made himself heard. Enoch Powell set himself and his career against the state-friendly centrism and multilateralism that attracted Toryism in the 1950s and 1960s. A powerful, unyielding mind, Powell was an early framer of a popular counter-faith in the unstable dual monarchy of the free market and nation that before long captured the right across Europe and the United States."

"I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got."

"He simply believes in Order and Authority and is always prepared to offer a half-brilliant, half-mad, intellectual defence of them."

"Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, "You know, I've told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans." You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now."

"I do wish that instead [of talking about the EEC] you would concentrate on making speeches on immigration, because that is so vitally important and you are so right about it."

"“Even if I were convinced that the result would be that we would have Labour administrations for the rest of my lifetime, I would say: Well, so be it.” Torn out of their context and repeated in a long series of news bulletins, Enoch Powell's words seemed far more savage than they did at the end of what must have been one of the most civilized political discussions of recent years. Each from his own standpoint, our two most distinguished Parliamentarians had expressed their passionate belief in our British system of Parliamentary democracy and their determination to rescue it even now from the perils of the EEC. If it had been a Labour Government that had taken us into the Market, Michael Foot would have been faced with Mr Powell's dilemma, and I am pretty certain he would have come to the same conclusion. Read in its context, the statement reveals only what we already know, that Mr Powell has one thing in common with Mr Foot—he cares more about our British Parliamentary democracy than about anything else in the world."

"Mr. Powell is an economic Whig but a political Tory."

"His current doctrines are an intellectualized version of ideas which have been the common diet in most parts of the body of the Conservative party for the last 25 years, but they have been transformed in the course of exposition and given a wider range of relevance than they had before... They are in fact the expression of a feeling, which is to some extent present in all classes, that the language used by politicians is not the language the body of the people understands and that the distance between politicians and the public is great and growing. Above all they confirm the impression that anyone who speaks a language the public wants to hear will attract the hysterical censure Mr. Powell has attracted from the self-appointed leaders of the 'thinking classes', i.e. the 'great big world of Fleet Street, Whitehall, St. James's Street', etc. ... Nothing done by Mr. Powell has been more important than his demonstration that they can be rejected by a highly articulate thinking politician who attracts hysterical censure precisely because he rubs in the unpalatable truth that a rhetoric maybe offensive to these parts of the 'thinking classes' and yet reflect opinions that are widely shared, deeply held and common to all classes in this country... What Mr. Powell has done is to change the climate of opinion. This is a matter of great importance. Over the last thirty years a morally conservative, hard headed and patriotic electorate has been persuaded to defer to an eccentric element amongst the progressive intelligentsia."

"Whatever one may wish to believe, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Powell's impact on the [1970] election was great, that he made a strong appeal to many of the 'ordinary people'...and that the two-year campaign he brought to an independent climax in the ten days before the election struck oil in places where Conservatives had not struck oil before."

"That man Powell is extraordinary. He is the best Greek scholar since Porson."

"The main Tory supporter on our side [during the 1975 EEC referendum] was Enoch Powell. It could have been politically embarrassing, but Enoch played it straight down the line, scrupulously keeping party politics out of it. He also revealed old-world courtesy. When, for instance, we found that a press conference we had arranged for him clashed with one I had been hoping to hold, he insisted on giving way to me, postponing his own. In fact, he showed more sense of solidarity than Tony Benn, who like so many politicians with exceptional talents did not like working in a team."

"Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to “Western values”. Mrs Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values. Powell: “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.” Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): “Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” “No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.” Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism."

"Enoch Powell in his speech of April 1968 quoted the remarks of a constituent that the black man would have the whip hand over the white man in Britain within fifteen to twenty years. I note that there is not yet a single black Member of Parliament, that they are absent from the higher ranks of the law, the Civil Service, the police and the Armed Forces, and that the election of a black mayor is still regarded as newsworthy... Mr Powell's constituent will have to wait for many more years before coloured people reach the heights which so alarmed him, and by that time I trust that he will have discovered that we all share a common humanity."

"Mr Powell is the first Conservative politician since Stanley Baldwin who seems to have made a significant impact on the minds of the working classes."

"There was nothing languid or easygoing about Enoch Powell...he was probably the most intellectually formidable of the men who have passed through the Research Department. He took an interest in almost every subject, and on almost every subject he had a strong and pungently expressed views. Only some of these were eccentric... Powell has an inventive mind. He has also a warm heart and I think it a thousand pities that he ever made his first notable speech on immigration, when the Tiber was to run with blood. This led him on to an incurable rift with his own party leaders which has been made wider by the variety of causes of schism which he espouses. Powell could be a most valuable lieutenant instead of a lost assailant, and this is a pity."

"In April 1968, Powell made the notorious speech in which he foresaw “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” in consequence of excessive immigration... His solution was mass repatriation of non-white people. The speech led to racial violence in the Midlands but it made Powell a hero, particularly to the lumpenproletariat, astonished and gratified to discover a person of culture and refinement prepared to echo their fouler thoughts. There are signs in this centenary volume that Powell came to regard the speech as something of a mistake. It was, in truth, unforgivable."

"However controversial his views, he was one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics, gifted with a brilliant mind. However much we disagreed with many of his views, there was no doubting the strength of his convictions or their sincerity, or his tenacity in pursuing them, regardless of his own political self-interest."

"I am glad I went [to Powell's funeral]. Enoch was somebody who believed what he said and said what he believed. He treated people with respect. He would talk to shopkeepers in Wolverhampton about the PSBR as if they were bankers and they listened because they knew they were being treated respectfully... [At the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution in Paris] the only comment Enoch made was that "the revolution proved once again the absurdity of trying to build a constitution based on the Rights of Man". The French looked at him as if Edmund Burke was still alive, which in a way he was."

"Powell was a first rate classicist."

"Looking back at the full text of Powell's speech, you will find it springs a number of surprises. Not least, Powell never used the phrase "Rivers of blood". He actually quoted a line from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. "I see the river Tiber foaming with much blood" ("Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno", line 86)... Uncharacteristically, Powell seems to have overlooked the way the quotation might contradict his own arguments. True, the Sibyl was referring to the bloodshed that would result from Aeneas' attempt to found his new city in Latin territory, integrating his own line into that of the native population. But that bloodshed would lead to a strong and proudly mixed community of Trojans and Latins. And Aeneas' Rome in due course would become the most successful multi-cultural society of the ancient world – granting full citizenship to the inhabitants of its imperial territories, and eventually seeing Spaniards, Africans and others on the Roman imperial throne... Powell should have thought a bit harder about the implications of his clever classical allusion."

"[T]he Western world, which has always stood on very shaky foundations, is coalescing according to the principle under which it was organized, and that principle is white supremacy. From England to Sacramento, Ronald Reagan and Enoch Powell are the same person."

"The supreme intellectual among the Tories was their supreme rebel: Enoch Powell. Powell was a true intellectual, more of an intellectual than any Labour politician: for he was a scholar. No other politician had the ability to translate the law book of a medieval Welsh king, edit Greek texts with a dryness that made Housman look gushing, master the intricacies of the medieval House of Lords, and reinterpret the New Testament... He was a formidable speaker, logical, precise, incandescent, as fluent as Benn but more ordered, more gifted in his use of metaphor and in the balance of his sentences... Our generation considered him the embodiment of all they feared... His curious classless voice, his staring eyes that might have been transplanted from Rasputin, his clear incisive sentences, made him a demonic figure for his contemporaries... Powell himself was content to await the verdict of history, certain that that verdict would prove him to be the most far-sighted man of his times."

"I would say Mr. Powell, Enoch is fully supported by me on what he has said. He's not discriminating against any races, but he wanted the indigenous Londoners, their children, to have a brighter future. He does not want England to be colonised by Africa, by Asia. London for Londoners, Scotland for Scottish, Wales for Welsh and Uganda for Ugandans. Rhodesia for Zimbabwean people, not for the white minority regime, South Africa for the black majority. London can have any technical assistance, anybody that wanted to employ in London but not to dominate the people of England. Therefore I support him as a person which all Great British people should have to be their Prime Minister."

"Powell did strike me, however, as an extremely capable and intelligent Conservative politician. There was no fanatical gleam in his eyes, though I do remember feeling that his attitude to India was slightly strange. I could not place it at the time; it was neither jingoism nor simply nostalgia, but nor was it the scholarly interest of a historian or the detached reflections of a logician. Many years later when I was reading Paul Scott’s opus on the British in India, I suddenly remembered Powell. One of the major characters in Scott’s novels reminded me of him. It was Ronald Merrick, whose ambiguous class background in Britain ultimately exploded in colonial India. This was a reflection of something that ran very deep in many middle- and lower-middle-class Englishmen and women who had served as colonial administrators or officers in India."

"I did not speak, but when I saw you turn And cross your right leg on your left, and fold Your hands around your knee, I felt a flow Of white-hot lava seething up the old Volcano-shaft. That selfsame attitude, Though not of yours, it was which long ago Fired me, an innocent, unknowing boy, And led me on to sin and on to learn And onwards to the very fount of woe."

"Now I alone sit by the fire, And one remains of three; For two have got their heart's desire And left their grief to me."

"While yesteryear I tarried In a garden in the south, I met a youth who carried A rose-bud in his mouth.I gave him chase and caught him, And would not set him free, But held him and besought him To give the flower to me.He smiled, and broke a petal And laid it in my hand— It seared like molten metal, And here is yet the brand."

"Mother, with longing ever new And joy too great for telling, I turn again to rest in you My earliest dwelling."