Elegy for a contrarian.

• Author: McConnell, Scott
• Position: Enoch Powell

After Enoch Powell's death in February, at the age of eighty-five, he received the kind of broad-based acclaim from the British establishment never offered during the key battles of his lifetime, and denied him most particularly during the pivotal half dozen years after 1968, when he was expelled from the Tory leadership only to emerge as Britain's foremost "nationalist" politician. Thirty years later Paul Johnson wrote that save for Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, Powell would be the most remembered British political figure of the century. He probably has no equal in capacity to provoke argument. Barely two months after his death, the BBC's Channel Four put on the screen "The Trial of Enoch Powell" - a disparaging program whose very production nonetheless signaled the extent of Powell's pull on the public imagination.

Since he held no office higher than a minor ministry in an unremarkable Harold Macmillan cabinet, such appreciation was testament, certainly, to the extraordinary influence Powell accumulated entirely through the spoken and written expression of his ideas. But it was also an acknowledgment, more tacit than openly stated, that the issues for which Powell stood and fought - ones revolving around Britain's sovereignty and identity - remain as unsettled, vital, and potentially explosive as ever.

He was brilliant, a rare intellectual in politics. A scholarship boy from Birmingham who won all the classics prizes at Cambridge, Powell was named to a full professorship at the University of Sydney at the unprecedented age of twenty-five. During the war, which he spent mainly in North Africa and India doing intelligence work, he rose from the rank of private to brigadier general, the only soldier to make such a progression. Out of the army he entered politics as a Conservative and in 1950 won a seat in Wolverhampton, a largely lower-middle class city in the industrial midlands, not far from his birthplace. In Parliament he soon made his mark as his party's most forceful advocate of free markets, always ready to heap pointed derision on economic planning and escalating levels of public spending: a position quite at odds with the bipartisan Tory/Labour consensus - the socalled Butskellism - of the 1950s and 1960s.(1)

Powell's character was unusual for a politician. He was very much a loner, and had more than his share of quirkiness. He also possessed unmatched powers of concentration and a will to pursue matters to their ends. (His work in 1949 on a research brief on House of Lords reform, for example, culminated in his co-authorship, eighteen years later, of a massive scholarly tome, The House of Lords in the Middle Ages.) Though deeply patriotic, Powell was never a conservative jingoist, and early in his career became one of Parliament's voices of conscience against British mistreatment of prisoners suspected of terrorism during Kenya's Mau Mau uprising.

With his great talents, Powell progressed rapidly upward through his party's ranks, and his principled resignation as a junior minister in 1958 over a matter of budget policy did him little harm. By the beginning of 1968, he was firmly established in the small circle of Tory leaders, the defense spokesman in Edward Heath's shadow cabinet. Had he stayed on course and played the game in orthodox fashion, it is quite likely that the party would have turned to him rather than the little-known Margaret Thatcher after Heath's defeat in 1974. But orthodoxy was not his forte.

A single powell speech, delivered before eighty-five members of a Birmingham Conservative club on a Saturday afternoon in April 1968, changed everything. In taking up the question of "colored immigration", Powell plunged into an issue that most politicians were careful to ignore. Evasiveness had begun as early as 1948, after the Labour Party's British...