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Like the Roman:
Remembering Sir Enoch Powell (1912-1998)

Mark Gullick

June 16, 2023

The following is being published in commemoration of Enoch Powell’s 111th birthday today.

Like the Roman, I seem to see “the Tiber foaming with much blood.” — from a speech by Sir Enoch Powell

Enoch was the best parliamentarian I ever knew. — Margaret Thatcher

Sir Enoch Powell was arguably the greatest Prime Minister Great Britain never had. He looms large in the national consciousness largely because of a speech he gave in 1968 at a hotel in his home town of Birmingham to an audience of Conservative Party members. There were no crowds outside attempting to cancel or deplatform him; that would come later. The address, misleadingly known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech, is both famously misquoted and led to Powell’s dismissal from the Conservative Party. Powell’s name today is as toxic to the Left as those of Sir Oswald Mosley and David Irving. Today this speech is increasingly seen by those, shall we say, not on the political Left — which does not necessarily place them on the Right — as both prophetic and exemplary of Powell’s love of country.

John Enoch Powell was born, apparently during a thunderstorm, in the English Midlands town of Birmingham on June 16, 1912. Such a preternaturally intelligent child that he was nick-named “the professor” by his parents at the age of three, it was no surprise when he later gained a scholarship and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge to read Classics.

Powell would remain a classicist all of his long life, and took his notes in the House of Commons not in shorthand, as many ministers did, but in ancient Greek, the language of Homer and Thucydides. His absorption of languages — he also spoke several living languages — led to military assignments during the Second World War, and was doubtless aided by his being a loner at university. Although he noticed the presence of women, he preferred not to associate with them as he found their “analytical power under-developed.”

In 1937 Powell took a professorship in Greek at the University of Sydney, and relocated to Australia. Pessimistic about the coming war, he nevertheless volunteered and counted his days in the army as among the happiest of his life. Powell’s mental ability, mingled with ambition, took him to a top intelligence job, and he was posted to North Africa to join the campaign against Rommel, the much-feared tank commander. Success led to a further posting, one which would show that Powell was not the “little Englander” his posthumous critics have portrayed him as. Arriving in India as a Brigadier — which rank Powell was the only private soldier during the war to attain — Powell slept rough at Delhi railway station. When he awoke, he recalled, “I discovered that I had fallen in love with India.” His love for the country and its culture — he spoke Hindi and Urdu — he credits with taking him into British politics. He had noticed that standing in British political life was highly approved of in India, and he saw Parliament as a stepping-stone to his ambition: to become Viceroy of India or, at the very least, a provincial governor. But, as far as the British Empire and the Raj were concerned, Powell had arrived late to the party.

Back in Blighty, Powell worked as a Conservative researcher before being put forward for the seat of Wolverhampton South-West, which he won. Classicist, codebreaker, poet (some of his love poetry verged on the erotic), and soldier of the Raj, Powell was now a member of the mother of all parliaments. Powell took up fox-hunting and married a Colonel’s daughter, and seemed to be slipping comfortably into the upper classes. His wife Pamela told her mother that marrying Powell would be “like going to university every day for the rest of my life.”

Powell climbed the political ladder effortlessly, his intellectual capability landing him a key job at the Treasury. Then, in 1958, he resigned from Harold Macmillan’s government in protest over increased public spending. Today, with the money-presses whirring day and night, MPs are as likely to resign in protest against gravity than the ever-growing national debt.

However, back in government two years later, Powell seemed to have allied himself with the high tax-high spend mania of a government in the middle of an economic boom. By 1965, however, the Tories were back in opposition, the leadership was open, and Powell was among the front-runners, along with Ted Heath and Reginald Maudling. Heath won the leadership, but was aware of Powell’s popularity among the party faithful. They would come to blows.

Powell had found his feet and was interested in seeing how far they would take him. He was ambitious, but that was entry-level for politicians, then as now. Chat show host Melvyn Bragg asked Powell whether he had ambitions to become Prime Minister in 1973, with Bragg building up the point and not expecting the “yes or no” answer he requested. “Well, you needn’t have made all that fuss,” the hawkish but jovial Powell replied. “Of course!”

Powell went about his parliamentary career the way he went about everything: coldly assessing and seeing the reality of what he was dealing with, then following it with nationalist zeal. He became interested in race relations and immigration, saying in a later interview that “a man can have a love for India without wishing to see India on the streets of Birmingham.” A colleague saw that this inclination could, under the relentless Powellite intellectualization of practical problems, lead to trouble. “Poor Enoch,” said a colleague. “Driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic.” This remorselessness would lead him to a fateful night in Birmingham, his home town, on April 12, 1968.

This has been horribly mutated today. Now, the Western political class believe the supreme function of statesmanship is to instruct us that the preventable evil of mass, unvetted immigration is not only inevitable, but beneficial. Sir Enoch Powell would have been very familiar with the story of Cassandra, although perhaps surprised that a quarter of a century after his death he himself would be fulfilling the role of the soothsayer no one heeded.

The contentious lines were, in fact, supplied by two of Powell’s constituents in Wolverhampton, and the Roman poet Virgil, whom Dante famously led through the circles of heaven and hell and whose Aeneid Powell quoted. A woman in Powell’s ward had told him nervously that she couldn’t go out at night, and had had windows smashed and excreta pushed through her letter-box. She told Powell that children jeered at her in the street, and spoke no English but the word “racialist.” Another man told Powell that “in ten or 15 years’ time, the black man will have the whip-hand over the white man.” This was the phrase that really riled the Left who, then as now, despise the working-class for their actual, untutored opinion.

But the line that gave the speech its soubriquet was – inevitably, since it was spoken by Enoch Powell — a classical reference. The entire transcribed paragraph is worth repeating in full in order to understand just how much Powell got right:

For these dangerous and divisive elements, the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with legal weapons which the ignorant and ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

This paragraph of prophecies led immediately to Powell becoming a prophet without honor in his own land. Heath fired him from the Conservative Party the next day, and it was not simply personal chagrin. Margaret Thatcher, by then very much on the Conservative scene, said that there would have been many resignations if Powell was not ejected.

Powell imagined in the speech he could already hear the “chorus of execration” which would inevitably follow. He would be, he supposed, asked what gave him the right to say these things. Powell replied, “I don’t have the right not to.” One of the immediate chorus was that old fraud Tony Benn, who was careful, as a Labour man of the people, never to use his full name of Anthony Wedgwood Benn. He showed that Leftist hyperbole was, as it is today, alive and well by comparing Powell’s speech to Nazi flags fluttering “over Dachau and Belsen.”

The political class, as now, had no interest in public opinion except on voting day, but the public gave its opinion on Powell, who received tens of thousands of letters of support from the public, sometimes 50,000 a day. It is odd to see the sacks of mail being emptied onto the Powell family’s dinner table in this age of electronic messaging. As today, charges of racism were made by a powerful few and transmitted by government. As soon as the cage was open, the rabid animals were out and free. Powell’s university speeches were heavily barracked by students.

Note that the name chanted at Powell’s constituent by the children in the street, “racialist,” then meant to be prejudiced against someone by virtue of their ethnicity or skin color. This is the meaning that has been smuggled into “racism,” which used to mean a simple awareness of racial difference. Powell is speaking before this semantic shift when he asks in an interview:

“What’s wrong with racism? Racism is the basis of nationality.”

In 1969, on The Dick Cavett Show, Enoch Powell told Cavett that the word “racist . . . is a term of abuse, and it works best the less defined it is.” This is the point at which language and meaning have been subject to ideological gain of function, and “racism” takes on a more poisonous aspect.

The animosity between Powell and Heath smoldered on. The 1970 General Election victory for the Tories ended any chance Powell might have had for the premiership, and Heath’s decision to take Britain into Europe caused the final rift. Powell even told the electorate to vote Labour in the 1974 election, as at least they had promised a referendum on Europe. How different things could have been. At a campaign speech Powell was heckled by a member of the audience, who shouted that he was “Judas!” Powell’s response was both witty and self-revealing: “Judas was paid! I’m making a sacrifice.”

When the Conservatives lost narrowly in 1974, letting in Harold Wilson’s minority government, Heath resigned. Powell was concise in his commentary: “I had my revenge on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom.”

Powell also famously said that “all political careers end in failure,” and his own went fairly quietly into the shadows. He was never a showman, as so many politicians attempt to be. “I’ve no patience with the political appeal,” he told an interviewer.

He became an Ulster Unionist MP, but again was chasing a lost cause as passionately as he ever did a fox. He remained connected with politics in later life, but as a curio, a relic, a man whose time had come and gone and was hated by some just as he was honored by others. Powell’s retirement was given over to studies of the gospel, including a new (re-)translation of the Bible into Greek. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1992, and died four years later. Powell’s prognostications, on the other hand, had a much longer life.

Enoch Powell correctly predicted the future of the United Kingdom in terms of the effects of immigration, much of which has had catastrophic effects on British culture. As always, when immigration is the subject, “the UK” means England. New arrivals want to go to London, not Gwent or Stranraer, towns in counties that are still around 95% white.

London has been rendered unlivable and, I suspect in the seven years I have been away, has become unvisitable. I was born in London and have lived in the north, south, east, and west of the city. The last time I lived there the city was already dirty, noisy, and with a constant undertow of ethnic aggression and violence which rose or fell depending on the postcode. Immigration has been a monumental success if you happen to be an immigrant, an unmitigated disaster if you are unfortunate enough to be a white Englishman. With the help of his white liberal trainers, the black man certainly does have the whip-hand over the white man.

In an interview before the 1968 speech, Powell said, “This speech is going to fizz like a rocket. But whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up.” It is still up there, just, twinkling in a night sky which, for Powell’s beloved England, is getting ever darker and more threatening.

Visit Mark Gullick’s blog: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.

Stay tuned.

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