Enoch Powell's monstrous reputation hides the real man

What remains of his legacy is a name with which to, if not quite frighten children, at least bludgeon opponents

Enoch Powell on the campaign trail
Enoch Powell on the campaign trail Credit: Photo: PA

When Enoch Powell died in 1998, Tony Blair praised him as “one of the great figures of twentieth century British politics” – which, at that time, was an unremarkable thing to say. Powell, after all, was still a familiar figure in the 1990s, appearing on BBC Question Time, speaking at public meetings, contributing to newspapers. His last major foray, in 1994, had been typically idiosyncratic: an attempt to show, by textual exegesis, that Jesus was more likely to have been stoned to death than crucified.

A curious thing happened, though, over the next two decades. As memories of the living, breathing Enoch faded, he ceased, for most people, to be a human being and became instead a symbol – a symbol of irrational hostility to immigrants. By 2007, a Conservative parliamentary candidate in the West Midlands was forced to stand down after asserting, in a newspaper, that Enoch “was right”.

The odd thing was that the man’s posthumous reputation declined at precisely the moment that the multiculti groupthink was fracturing. In 1998, when Tony Blair spoke his panegyric, to call for stricter immigration controls was to place yourself beyond polite society. During the 2001 general election campaign, William Hague was howled down for voicing far milder opinions than we now hear daily from Labour frontbenchers. It is these days accepted, in a way that it wasn’t then, that decent people might have respectable concerns about pressure on space and services.

Unable to call for unrestricted inward migration any more, a few politicians and commentators have had to adopt alternative ways of brandishing their cosmopolitan credentials. Savaging a man who is no longer here to gainsay them is one way to do so.

So, was Enoch right? Well, on the issue which we’re all now supposed to judge him by, no. He feared, as others did during the 1960s, that mass immigration would lead to social breakdown; and his fears were, I’m glad to say, never realised. The River Tiber did not foam with much blood. Neither, closer to home, did the Rivers Tame or Trent. Britain succeeded in integrating an unprecedented number of settlers without major unrest. That’s not to say that there were no problems but, by and large, the country was able to enlarge its sense of what national identity meant. To this day, foreign visitors remark on how well Britain functions as a multiracial society. We don’t have to look far abroad for less happy examples.

On the two big issues of his day, though, he was dead right. First, he grasped, long before other politicians, that the post-war corporatist consensus was unsustainable, and that Britain was on the road to inflation, stagnation and debt. The Thatcherism that was seen as almost impossibly bold and radical in the late 1970s had been on his agenda since the late 1950s. He, as much as anyone, taught that creed to the rest of his party.

Second – again, decades ahead of his time – he saw that what is now the European Union was not a trade arrangement but a political project incompatible with full parliamentary democracy.

Of course, these causes are still not universally popular; but they are now close to the consensus whereas, when he first took them up, they were so eccentric as to appear deranged.

The constant of Enoch Powell’s career was precisely his constancy. A master logician, he sometimes followed the arrow-flight of his logic to implausible places. Yet there is no doubting his brilliance. This is the man who, as a 17-year-old translating a passage from Bede into classical Greek for his Cambridge scholarship exam, found the task so easy that, to fill the allotted time, he translated it into Platonic, then Herodotean, then Ionic Greek, and then annotated it. This was the youngest professor in the Empire, the youngest Brigadier in the British Army, a master of several ancient and modern languages, the greatest parliamentary orator of his age.

Fewer and fewer people remember any of these things. Hardly anyone now recalls the issue where he first made his name as an MP, namely his championing of the right of Kenyan insurgents to the full protection of the British laws that they were fighting to throw off. Fifty-five years on, his speech about the Mau Mau terrorists who had been tortured seems uncannily apt to our present discontents:

"It has been said – and it is a fact – that these 11 men were the lowest of the low; subhuman was the word which one of my honourable Friends used. So be it. But that cannot be relevant to the acceptance of responsibility for their death. In general, I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgment on a fellow human being and to say, ‘Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow.’

"Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, ‘We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home.’ We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere."

All this is gone now, lost in time like tears in rain. What remains is a name with which to, if not quite frighten children, at least bludgeon opponents.

Yet, oddly enough, Enoch Powell was keenly interested in turning theories into policy. His close friend and executor, Richard Ritchie, wrote yesterday that Enoch Powell would not have backed Ukip because he would have seen that party as, paradoxically, an obstacle in the path of securing a parliamentary majority for a referendum on leaving the EU. On that matter too, tragically, I suspect Enoch was right.