From the archive: Enoch and after

New Statesman​

09-07-2025

Photo by David Reed Archive / Alamy
Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech opposed immigration and the Race Relations Bill. For it, Edward Heath dismissed him from the shadow cabinet. The NS political columnist Alan Watkins warned against Powell's menace as an extra-parliamentary demagogue.
The great Bishop Butler was in the habit of walking in his garden with a companion and musing upon the possibility of madness suddenly striking the politicians of his time. Today madness is very much in the political air. Mr Enoch Powell says that we are all mad. Some of Mr Powell's former colleagues in the shadow cabinet, for their part, claim that The word should more properly be used of Mr Powell. 'Mad' is, to be sure, an unsubtle epithet, and of no very precise scientific meaning. Clearly there is a sense in which Mr Powell is as sane as anybody. There is another sense in which he is a politically unbalanced and (to use one of his own favourite adjectives) dangerous man.
There is, for a start, the matter of Mr Powell's appearance. I am sorry if this seems tasteless, but I am consoled by the knowledge that I am not the only person to have been guilty of this particular error over the past few days. Those staring eyes, that tight, occasionally twitching white mask of a face: can the possessor of these characteristics, one wonders, be entirely balanced? But this is not the only or the most important aspect to Mr Powell. Let us go back over his speeches of the past four or five years. Most of them – and here they differ from last Saturday's – are distinguished by wit, clarity, a certain elegance of expression. They are among the few contemporary political speeches that bear re-reading. In all speaking or writing, however, there comes a point at which a certain superficial lucidity is not an aid to thought but a barrier. There is a temptation to make the facts or the emotions fit the construction of a sentence, the shape of a speech. This is a temptation to which Mr Powell continually succumbs.
'I strive to be brief,' said Horace, 'and become obscure': but in Mr Powell's case the distortions that occur are not solely or even mainly due to a striving after literary effect. Mr. Powell practises a conscious political obscurantism. In 1963-4, it will be remembered, he made a succession of speeches about Conservatism and Socialism. These speeches purported to describe the differences not between theories but between real political parties. Even in 1963-4, when socialist hopes for Mr Harold Wilson were rather higher than they are today, Mr Powell's observations bore only the slightest relation to political fact. I remember asking him how he justified them. 'Well,' he replied (or words to this effect), 'one of the best ways of bringing something about is to pretend that it has actually happened.'
Now, it is arguable that this practice, though not perhaps very exalted, is common enough among politicians and publicists. But Mr Powell's liking for antithesis and exaggeration goes further than this. He refuses to qualify his thoughts or admit to doubt because his method of reasoning about politics does not permit him to do so. In some ways this is an attractive characteristic. We all like certainty, or the appearance of certainty. Indeed – and this is not such a digression as may appear – there Is a persuasive though ignorant criticism of political writing which goes something as follows: there are far too many ifs and buts and on the one hands and on the others; back, therefore,, to the models of the 17th and 18th centuries. But nearly all this writing, as anyone who has actually read it knows, is based on one or more of the following elements: appeals to scriptural authority; attacks on personalities; simple and syllogistic reasoning from dubious premises. In his speeches and writings Mr Powell makes particular use of the latter two elements. He begins with an apparently indisputable statement and builds upon it an inverted pyramid of nonsense. He is, in the true sense, a political primitive.
Certainly it is not inevitable that a politician who reasons in this fashion should think of himself as a Messiah. But dogmatism and messianism reinforce each other wonderfully. Mr Powell's doctrinal certainty marches hand in hand with the belief that he has been sent by providence to redeem the times. In addition Mr Powell holds the view, as Gladstone and Cripps did before him, that what is personally convenient for him also happens, by remarkable coincidence, to correspond to the will of the Almighty. I give two examples of this latter characteristic. The first concerns incomes policy. Until he left the Cabinet in 1963, Mr Powell supported, and indeed played a part in the formulation of, Mr Reginald Maudling's incomes policy. When he left the cabinet he attacked the policy, without feeling that he was being at all inconsistent.
My second example brings us to the events of this week. It was Mr Powell, it seems, who suggested the words 'on balance' in the Opposition's so-called reasoned amendment. His speech on Saturday, however, hardly suggested much balance about anything. And the sequence of events seems to have been roughly as follows. Mr Powell deliberately set out to provoke Mr Edward Heath. Mr Heath was more hurt and injured than angry. On Sunday morning he telephoned most members of the Shadow Cabinet. The consensus was that 'things have gone far enough'. Mr Heath is anxious to make clear that at no point did he ask the views of his colleagues about whether he ought to dismiss Mr Powell. Nor, at this stage, did anyone threaten to resign if Mr Powell stayed in the Shadow Cabinet. There is no reason substantially to question this version; though Mr Heath, in an attempt to emphasise his own leadership, is possibly insisting on it too strenuously. Anyway, by midday or thereabouts, Mr Heath had made up his mind to sack Enoch, and shortly after he telephoned his Chief Whip, Mr William Whitelaw, and asked him to come to London. Mr Whitelaw, having driven from the furthest north. arrived at about eight, and Mr Powell was duly dismissed.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
One Labour MP, on hearing the news, sent a telegram of congratulation to Mr Heath. And, indeed, Mr Heath deserved his telegram. On Sunday night it would have been possible to argue that he was, with some courage, risking a split in the party in the House of Commons. Having alienated his left wing by refusing to support the Race Relations Bill, he was now, it must have been thought, provoking his right wing by sacking Mr Powell. But things did not work out quite like this. As far as the Conservative Party in Parliament was concerned, the dismissal of Mr Powell was, in an odd way, a steadying influence. Indeed if it had not been for Mr Powell's weekend speech, Tuesday's debate would have been a far more boisterous occasion. In the event both sides seemed to feel that they had to be moderate, to make amends for what one of their number had said. This was particularly true of Mr Quintin Hogg who, without a note, gave one of the greatest parliamentary performances I have ever heard. Mr Hogg's outstanding characteristic is his magnanimity. He was generous even to Mr Powell, though he had sharp things to say. One felt that he was speaking for the whole House.
And this, curiously, is what is so disturbing about the present situation. While Mr Hogg was speaking for the House, the dockers were demonstrating for Mr Powell. For years and years Mr Powell has been making speeches on defence and economic policy. The speeches were widely reported, certainly, but they struck no response from the public at large. He has now, quite deliberately, decided to exploit the one issue on which many people are scarcely rational. And he has appeared to put himself not only outside his party but outside the system of parliamentary government. He has contrived to tie racism to the disillusion with party politics. He is now, in fact, the most dangerous type of demagogue. As such he is a threat to Mr Heath, not from within the parliamentary party, but from outside it. There was a time, not so long ago, when Mr Powell's contributions to politics could be regarded (by others, if not by himself) as an intellectual diversion. No longer. And the parallel that occurs to me is not Sir Oswald Mosley or Governor Wallace. It is Senator Joe McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Mr Powell exploits prejudice; as with McCarthy, many ordinary people think he is on their side. The main difference is that Mr Powell is more intelligent.
[See also: From the archive: Reality: a charter for avoidance]
Related