100 years of Enoch Powell

I heard a wonderful anecdote the other day. A well to-do couple knelt to receive communion. A man knelt next to them. They noticed that he was Enoch Powell. They told a friend after the service that a church which accepted Powell as a communicant was not for them.

It is Enoch Powell’s centenary today, and his monstrous reputation persists, even at the communion rail. Sunder Katwala, the thoughtful former general secretary of the Fabian Society, believes that Powell, and in particular his infamous views on immigration and identity, should be regarded as ‘a historical figure, an important, troubled voice in Britain’s difficult transition to the post-imperial society which we have become.’

Katwala’s advice is constructive, but it is important to remember that there was rather more to Powell than the ‘Rivers of Blood’. Peter Oborne wrote a column earlier this week in defence of Powell, though not the language and predictions that precipitated his fall. Powell was, Oborne said, a politician whose modernity and integrity can still awe those who forgive his aberration. 

Powell’s political conscience and spectacular intellect are preserved in the Spectator’s archive. There are several hundred reports on his parliamentary career, charting his monumental influence on the Tory party throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s. It is no exaggeration to say that he was a giant of that era, particularly in the period after Macmillan’s resignation and his fall from grace in 1968, an epoch in which, by my calculation, the Spectator’s political correspondents mentioned him in the dispatches almost every week.

Powell also wrote extensively for the Spectator throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. The archive contains a coruscating demolition of American intervention in Vietnam. There are several attacks on the Heath government’s European policy, which argued that Britain would always be on the fringes of Europe because its free constitution was incompatible with the illiberal project conceived there. There are several articles about penal reform and one article, written in 1964, in opposition to welfarism that might have been written by Iain Duncan Smith, who, incidentally, has penned an introduction to a new collection of Powell’s speeches and writings. 

It is impossible to pick one of those essays and say ‘this defines Enoch Powell’, so I will quote a passage from an article written during the 1965 Tory leadership contest by Spectator editor and Tory MP, Iain Macleod (who went on to vote for Heath):

‘Powellism is not wholly or even 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 a 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.’

Macleod concluded that this excess of logic, which came at the expense of political art and the ability to recognise a flawed premise, was Powell’s worst enemy. That was prescient.