Lord Howard (Ed): Enoch at 100: A Re-Evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell

The New Criterion, October 1, 2012

When The Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s ground-breaking chronicle of Stalinist atrocity, was reissued in the twilight of the Gorbachev era, its author (so the story—cooked up, apparently, by Kingsley Amis—goes) was asked whether he would like to give it a new title. He suggested “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”

Whatever Conquest may or may not have said, we can be sure that the British politician Enoch Powell (1912–1998), a rather less exuberant figure, would never have summed things up quite like that. The satisfaction that Powell derived—and, as he was not a modest man, there was certainly some—from so often being proved right (at least as he saw it) was tempered by the sadness that is frequently the lot of a prophet of doom. Amongst the Powell speeches reproduced in Enoch at 100, a new (and, as such works are, largely admiring) Gedenkschrift published to mark his centenary and edited by Lord Howard of Rising, there is one delivered to the (High Tory) Salisbury Group at a dinner held shortly after the 1987 election defeat that ended his parliamentary career.1

The speech was melancholy, even by the standards of Powell, a virtuoso of gloom. It was a dark, scornful lament for the manner in which the Britain he had idealized and, as incarnated in Parliament, idolized, had willed itself out of existence, leaving him behind, still bound by duty to that vanished country: “there [was] no way out.”

Reactionaries are a tough bunch, and pessimism comes with the territory, but the port must have flown round the table as Powell was speaking. He had famously said that all political lives end in failure, but the failure outlined in this speech was of a nation, not of just one man: it is striking that he made not one reference to Mrs. Thatcher’s third consecutive election victory just a month or so before. His Britain was dead, a suicide; it made little odds that its wake would be better run.

But if Powell’s life was a failure, it was a failure of a grandeur that can be glimpsed in a quick recital of just a few of its details (fortunately, Enoch at 100 includes a helpful biographical sketch by Philip Norton). Professor Powell, Brigadier Powell, the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, MP, failed only when measured against the reach of his dreams. The only child of provincial teachers, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and, by his mid-to-late twenties, the youngest professor in the British Empire, as well as the author of two books on Herodotus. He began the war a private and emerged a brigadier. He was elected as a Conservative MP in 1950.

Promotion followed, and then the first of three key turning points. In 1958, Powell and two others quit the Treasury team over the (Conservative) government’s refusal to further cut spending. The trio was worried about the money supply, whatever that was. No lasting damage was done to Powell’s ascent. He was to spend a good part of the next ten years on the Conservative front bench.

Then, on April 20, 1968, came the second turning point: the notorious speech in Birmingham on the dangers of mass immigration that has defined his place in British history: “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ” That was too much foaming for a fuming Ted Heath, the Tory leader. He took the opportunity to fire Powell, a potential rival from the right. Powell was now both Britain’s most controversial and most popular politician. His speeches during the 1970 election campaign secured the Conservatives a mildly surprising victory over the governing Labour Party. There was no reward, nor would he have expected one.

Heath was a technocrat, an economic illiterate, and a corporatist. It is no surprise that he took Britain into the European Economic Community, the precursor of today’s EU, the step that triggered Powell’s final great turn. He declined to stand in the first of 1974’s two elections, endorsing a party committed to a renegotiation of the UK’s EEC membership. That was Labour. Heath duly lost. Accused by a heckler of being a “Judas,” Powell retorted that Judas “was paid” while he had made a sacrifice. To hurl biblical, classical, or historical insults at Powell was to tangle with a tiger. Powell’s smile at the end of the exchange said it all.

But sacrifice it was: this “born Tory” was never a member of the Conservative Party again. As a passionate defender of the integrity of the United Kingdom, however, he was (so far as an Englishman ever could be) a natural pick for the embattled Ulster Unionists. He spent the last third of his parliamentary career as their MP for South Down, until that defeat in 1987 and a final decade as sage, historian, polemicist, and distinctly unorthodox biblical scholar. The infamous xenophobe had studied Hebrew in his later years to add to a Babel that reportedly comprised English, French, Greek (classical and modern), Italian, Urdu, and Latin and a “reading knowledge” of Welsh, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The old man died in 1998, with Britain entering yet another period of mass immigration, and with Tony Blair eagerly eying the EU’s exciting new single currency.

Was Enoch Powell a failure, then? Those three crucial turnings are a good starting point for a consideration of that question. The issues surrounding the first, the 1958 resignation, and its longer-term political and intellectual consequences, are ably discussed in Enoch at 100 by Simon Heffer, the author of Like the Roman (1998), the definitive, invaluable biography of Powell. As Heffer notes, by the late 1950s Powell had satisfied himself that the key to inflation was the money supply, an idea with fatal ramifications for his career at the Treasury. But this was not the end of his attachment to monetarism. At the time, such beliefs were widely seen to be the province of cranks (and by embracing them Powell seemed to confirm the view that he was just that), but they dovetailed neatly with his broad (and deep) economic liberalism. Within a few years he was to deploy these ideas in relentless and typically forensic mockery of Heath’s disastrous management of the economy. Not much later, Powell’s thinking in this area was, one way or another, appropriated by someone who Heath hated even more—Margaret Thatcher. The sweetest revenge of all? It worked. A failure? Not in this respect.

On Europe, the last of the three turning points, Powell failed. Worse, he was let down. His lodestar was a profound emotional and intellectual reverence for Britain’s nation state (something well addressed in Enoch at 100 by Andrew Roberts) as the living expression of a people shaped by shared history, kinship, and institutions into something that was distinctly, uniquely itself—even if it didn’t always know exactly what. Powell wanted, he said, to tell the British who they were, and their essence, he argued, weaving the myth in which he himself clearly believed, could be found in Parliament, both core and pinnacle of their sovereign self.

As Roger Scruton shows in the sharp analysis of Powell’s language that is his contribution to this book, Powell “gave a visionary character, even to the most plain and prosaic words. Having heard Powell speak a handful of times, I can only agree. Yet he was unable to dissuade this allegedly marvelous parliament, and the great people he thought it incarnated, from surrendering their sovereignty to the EEC. It was not for want of trying. Powell’s trademark close reading of the European treaties led him to a chillingly prescient analysis (neatly summarized in Enoch at 100 by Nicholas True) of the true nature of the European project. He laid it all out, but to no avail.

And so matters still stand: Despite mounting discontent in the UK and the Eurozone’s stagnant chaos, the chances of a British exit remain remote. Nevertheless, it is Powell’s understanding of the EU that lies at the heart of the long rearguard action still being fought by Britain’s euroskeptics, a struggle that has, if nothing else, acted as an occasionally useful brake on Britain’s integration within the Brussels regime and, critically, played a major part in keeping the UK out of the single currency responsible for a catastrophe that Powell, that economic crank, predicted with familiar uncanny accuracy as early as the 1970s.

No such partial consolation would have been available to him in respect of the second, and the most significant, of the three turnings, the April 1968 speech on immigration. In Enoch at 100 this topic is handled by Tom Bower, a canny selection, no member of the fan club. Bower traces Powell’s genuinely growing concern over immigration, but leaves room (reasonably enough) for the notion that the timing and the nature of the Birmingham speech were partly intended to bolster his position within the Conservative Party. I am shocked, shocked. Powell might have been (much) more principled than many politicians, but he shared their ambition and, more than is generally acknowledged in this book, their, uh, elasticity, something that should disappoint only those who were hoping for a saint.

As for that speech, Bower understandably highlights the passages that, whatever the rationalizations for them, hinted at a genuine racial animus, treacherous ground in the course of any discussion of mass immigration into a country that, like many others then, and quite a few still even now, had an idea of ethnicity, real or otherwise, as the base of its identity. The extent and the nature of Powell’s racism, if that’s the right word, can be debated, but, as a master of language, he would (whatever his denials) have had no illusions about the harsher signals he was sending in that speech and, not infrequently, thereafter.

The irony is that those signals were also picked up, and used by those in Britain who, for whatever reason, wished to suppress substantive, democratic discussion on the topic of immigration that was proceeding at a pace and on a scale that could not help but transform (and possibly Balkanize) the country that Powell had always seen as a gradually evolving, organic whole. And not only Powell: Opinion polls showed that some eighty percent of Britons agreed with what he had said that April afternoon. To claim (as do Bower and two other contributors to this book) that Powell’s lapses into extremism long made it impossible to confront the issues raised by mass immigration is a tribute not to logic, but to the cowardice of Britain’s governing class. The consequences have changed Britain forever—with very little in the way of genuine popular consultation, let alone whole-hearted consent. If you think that there are similarities between this and the manner in which that same class has handed the UK over to the EU in recent decades, you’d be correct.

There’s more, much more, to Powell. And there’s quite a bit of it to be found in Enoch at 100, including his legendary speech attacking British mistreatment of insurgents in Kenya, his views (bizarre, brilliant, and sometimes both) on defense, and his perverse hostility to America, if perhaps too little (too embarrassing?) on how that degenerated in later life into outright conspiracism. Frank Field, one of modern Labour’s most interesting MPs, shines a delightful light on Powell’s odd, spiky personality, and the book concludes with a charming interview from earlier this year with Powell’s widow, Pam. But all of this should be no more than a hors d’oeuvre to Like the Roman. Get to it; it’s only a thousand pages.

And when it comes to judging Powell’s success or failure, this comment (reprinted in Enoch at 100) from The Daily Telegraph on the day after his death will do for now:

His speeches and writings will be read so long as there exists a political and parliamentary culture in which speaking and writing matter.

To which Powell would probably have replied that that would not be very long.