British politician (1912–1998)For other people named John Powell, see John Powell.

Personal detailsBornJohn Enoch Powell
(1912-06-16)16 June 1912
Birmingham, EnglandDied8 February 1998(1998-02-08) (aged:85)
London, EnglandResting placeWarwick Cemetery, Warwick, Warwickshire, EnglandPolitical party

• Conservative (1947–1974)
• Ulster Unionist (1974–1987)

Spouse(s)Pamela Wilson ​(m.:1952)​Military serviceBranch/serviceBritish ArmyYears:of service1939–1945RankBrigadierUnit

• Royal Warwickshire Regiment
• General Service Corps
• Intelligence Corps

Battles/warsWorld War II

• North African campaign
• India

Awards

• British War Medal
• Africa Star
• Military MBE
• 1939–1945 Star

Academic backgroundAlma materTrinity College, Cambridge
SOAS, University of LondonAcademic workIns*utionsUniversity of Cambridge
University of SydneyMain interestsAncient Greek

John Enoch Powell MBE (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, cl*ical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).

Before entering politics, Powell was a cl*ical scholar. During World War II, he served in both staff and intelligence positions, reaching the rank of brigadier. He also wrote poetry, and many books on cl*ical and political subjects.

Powell attracted widespread attention for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, delivered in April 1968 to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. In it, Powell criticised the rates of immigration into the UK, especially from the New Commonwealth, and opposed the anti-discrimination legislation Race Relations Bill. The speech drew sharp criticism from Powell's own party members and the press, and Conservative Party leader Edward Heath removed Powell from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary.

In the aftermath of the speech, several polls suggested that 67 to 82 per cent of the UK population agreed with Powell's opinions. His supporters claimed that the large public following that Powell attracted helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 general election, and perhaps cost them the February 1974 general election, when Powell turned his back on the Conservatives by endorsing a vote for Labour, which returned as a minority government. Powell was returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party MP for the Northern Ireland cons*uency of South Down. He represented the cons*uency until he was defeated at the 1987 general election.

Contents

• 1 Early years
• 2 Academic career
• 3 Military service
• 4 Entry into politics
  • 4.1 Joining the Conservative Party
  • 4.2 Election to Parliament
  • 4.3 First years as a backbencher
• 5 In and out of office
  • 5.1 Junior Housing Minister
  • 5.2 Financial Secretary to the Treasury
  • 5.3 Hola M*acre speech
  • 5.4 Minister of Health
• 6 1960s
  • 6.1 Leadership elections
  • 6.2 Shadow Defence Secretary
• 7 National figure
  • 7.1 'Rivers of Blood' speech
  • 7.2 'Morecambe Budget'
  • 7.3 House of Lords reform
  • 7.4 Departure from the Conservative Party
• 8 Ulster Unionist
  • 8.1 1974–1979
  • 8.2 1979–1982
  • 8.3 Falklands conflict
  • 8.4 1983 general election
  • 8.5 1983–1987
• 9 Post-parliamentary life
  • 9.1 1987–1992
• 10 Final years
• 11 Death
• 12 Personal life
• 13 Political beliefs
• 14 Portraits
• 15 Dramatic portrayals
• 16 Works
• 17 Elections contested
• 18 See also
• 19 References
  • 19.1 Bibliography
• 20 Further reading
• 21 External links

Early years

John Enoch Powell was born in Stechford, Worcestershire, within the city of Birmingham, on 16 June 1912, and was baptized at Newport, Shropshire, in the church where his parents had married in 1909. He was the only child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872–1956), a primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953). Ellen was the daughter of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his wife Eliza, who had been a teacher. His mother did not like his name, and as a child he was known as "Jack". At the age of three, Powell was nicknamed "the Professor" because he used to stand on a chair and describe the stuffed birds his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home. In 1918, the family moved to Kings Norton, Birmingham, where Powell remained until 1930.

The Powells were of Welsh descent and from Radnorshire (a Welsh border county), having moved to the developing Black Country during the early 19th century. His great-grandfather was a coal miner, and his grandfather had been in the iron trade.

Powell read avidly from a young age; as early as three he could "read reasonably well". Though not wealthy, the Powells were financially comfortable, and their home included a library. By the age of six Powell was addicted to reading, predominantly history books. Powell's Toryism and regard for ins*utions was formed at an early age: around this time his parents took him to Caernarfon Castle and he removed his cap when he entered one of the rooms. His father asked him why, to which Powell replied that it was the room where the first Prince of Wales had been born. Every Sunday Powell would give lectures to his parents on the books he had read and he would also conduct evensong and preach a sermon. Once he was old enough to go out on his own, Powell would walk around rural Worcestershire with the aid of Ordnance Survey maps, which instilled in him a love for landscape and cartography.

Powell attended a dame school run by a friend of his mother's until he was eleven. He was then a pupil for three years at King's Norton Grammar School for Boys before he won a scholarship to King Edward's School, Birmingham in 1925, aged thirteen. The legacy of the First World War loomed large for Powell: almost all his teachers had fought in the war, and some of the pupils who had scratched their names on the desks had subsequently died in the conflict. Powell also read books on the war, which helped form his opinion that Britain and Germany would fight again.

The head of cl*ics at the school saw that Powell had an interest in the subject and agreed to transfer him to the cl*ics side of the school. Powell's mother taught him Greek in just over two weeks during the Christmas break in 1925 and by the time he started the next term he had attained fluency in Greek that most pupils would reach after two years. Within two terms Powell was top of the cl*ics form. His cl*mate Christopher Evans recalled that Powell was "austere" and "really unlike any schoolboy one had known ... He was quite a phenomenon". Another contemporary, Denis Hills, later said that Powell "carried an armful of books (Greek texts?) and kept to himself ... he was reputed to be cleverer than any of the masters". Powell won all three of the school's cl*ics prizes (in Thucydides, Herodotus and Divinity) in the fifth form, two or three years younger than anyone else had won them. He also began to translate Herodotus' Histories and completed the translation of the first part when he was fourteen. He entered the sixth form two years before his cl*mates and was remembered as a hard-working student; his contemporary Roy Lewis recalled that "we thought that the masters were afraid of him". Powell also won a medal in gymnastics and gained a proficiency in the clarinet. He contemplated studying at the Royal Academy of Music but his parents persuaded him to try for a scholarship at Cambridge. Duggie Smith, Powell's form-master in the lower cl*ical sixth and his principal cl*ics master in the upper sixth, recalled in 1952: "Of all my pupils, he always insisted on the highest standards of accuracy and knowledge in those who taught him ... He was a pupil from whom I learnt more than most".

It was during his time at sixth form that Powell learned German and began reading German books, which would influence his move towards atheism. Aged thirteen he also read James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. During the last four years at King Edward's School he was top of his form and won a number of prizes in Greek and Divinity. In 1929 he was awarded the Higher School Certificate with a distinction in Latin, Greek and ancient history, and won the school's Lee Divinity Prize for an essay on the New Testament after having memorised St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians in Greek. Powell also won the Badger Prize for English Literature twice and the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize.

In December 1929, aged seventeen, he sat the cl*ics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge and won the top award. Sir Ronald Melville, who sat the exams at the same time, recalled that "the exams mostly lasted three hours. Powell left the room halfway through each of them". Powell later told Melville that in one-and-a-half hours on the Greek paper, he translated the text into Thucydides' style of Greek and then in the style of Herodotus. For another paper, Powell also had to translate a p*age from Bede, which he did into Platonic Greek. In the remaining time, Powell later remembered, "I tore it up and translated it again into Herodotean Greek – Ionic Greek – (which I had never written before) and then, still having time to spare, I proceeded to annotate it".

He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1930 to 1933. Powell became almost a recluse and devoted his time to studying: on days without lectures or supervisions, he would read from 5.30 in the morning until 9.30 at night. Granta called him "The Hermit of Trinity". He later said "I thought the only thing to do was to work. I thought that was what I was going to Cambridge for, because I never knew of anything else". At the age of eighteen his first paper to a cl*ical journal was published (in German) to the Philologische Wochenschrift, on a line of Herodotus. While studying at Cambridge, Powell became aware that there was another cl*icist who signed his name as "John U. Powell". Powell decided to use his middle name and from that moment referred to himself as "Enoch Powell". Powell won the Craven scholarship at the beginning of his second term in January 1931, the second time since the scholarship was established in 1647 that a freshman had won it.

It was at Cambridge that Powell fell under the influence of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university. He attended Houseman's lectures during his second year in 1931 and later recalled that he was "gripped by the spectacle of that rigorous intellect dissecting remorselessly the textual deformation of poetry which his sensitivity would not permit him to read without betraying his emotions"; it was Housman's "ruthless and fearless logic with which he dissected the text" in an atmosphere of "suppressed emotion" that impressed him. Powell also admired Housman's lectures on Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and Catullus. Powell sent him a correction of Virgil's Aeneid and received the reply: "Dear Mr Powell. You *yse the difficulties of the p*age correctly, and your emendation removes them. Yours sincerely, A. E. Housman". In later life Powell claimed that "no praise in the next forty years was ever to be so intoxicating".

Powell won a number of prizes, including the Percy Pemberton Prize, the Porson Prize, the Yeats Prize and the Lees Knowles. He won a distinction in Greek and Latin for Part I of his Cl*ical Tripos and was awarded the Members' prize for Latin prose and the First Chancellor's Cl*ical Medal. He also won the Cromer Greek essay prize of the British Academy in March 1933, having written on "Thucydides, his moral and historical principles and their influence in later antiquities". Also in 1933, Powell won the Browne Medal and delivered his winning essay in the Senate House, Cambridge. The Chancellor of Cambridge University, the Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin, told the Master of Trinity J. J. Thomson: "Powell reads as if he understands". Shortly before his finals in May 1933, Powell became ill with tonsillitis and then caught pyelitis. His neighbour in Trinity Great Court, Frederick Simpson, arranged that the Tripos examination papers be sent to the nursing home where he was convalescing. Despite having a temperature of 104 degrees when he sat the last of the seven papers, Powell gained a first cl* with distinction. The Cambridge cl*ical scholar Martin Charlesworth said after Powell's graduation: "That man Powell is extraordinary. He is the best Greek scholar since Porson".

As well as his education at Cambridge, Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language. Later, during his political career he would speak to his Indian-born cons*uents in Urdu. Powell went on to learn other languages, including Welsh (in which he edited jointly with Stephen J. Williams Cyfreithiau Hywel Dda yn ôl Llyfr Blegywryd, a text on Cyfraith Hywel, the medieval Welsh law), modern Greek, and Portuguese.

Academic career

After graduating from Cambridge, Powell stayed on at Trinity College as a fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient m*cripts in Latin and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh. He won the Craven travelling scholarship, which he used to fund travels to Italy, where he read Greek m*cripts in libraries. He also learned Italian. On his first trip to Italy, during 1933–1934, he visited Venice, Florence and Parma, and on his second excursion in 1935 he went to Venice, Naples and Turin. Powell was still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933: he told his father in 1934, "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war". He suffered a spiritual crisis when he heard of the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934, which shattered his vision of German culture. He later recalled that he sat for hours in a state of shock: "So it had all been illusion, all fantasy, all a self-created myth ... The spiritual homeland had not been a spiritual homeland after all, since nothing can be a homeland, let alone a spiritual homeland, where there is no justice, where justice does not reign".

In 1935, Powell met the German–Jewish cl*ical scholar Paul Maas in Venice, who confirmed Powell's belief about the nature of National Socialist German Workers' Party Germany, and he had a "furious" argument with an adherent of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Powell of Mosley's merits. He spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates, and worked on a lexicon of Herodotus. In January 1936 Powell delivered an address to the Cl*ical *ociation on "The War and its Aftermath in their Influence on Thucydidean Studies", which was published in The Times. Since 1932 Powell had been working on the Egyptian m*cripts of J. Rendel Harris and his translation from the Greek into English was published in 1937.

Powell's first collection of poems, First Poems, was published in 1937 and was influenced by Housman. The Times Literary Supplement reviewed them and said they possessed to a degree "the tone and temper" of Housman's A Shropshire Lad. The Poet Laureate John Masefield told Powell he read them "with a great deal of admiration for their concision and point", and Hilaire Belloc said "I have read them with the greatest pleasure and interest ... I shall always retain them". His second volume of poems, Casting Off, and Other Poems, was printed in 1939. In its review, The Times Literary Supplement said Powell's "lyrical feeling, reflection, and an epigrammatic conciseness are pleasantly balanced, and he is particularly happy perhaps in saluting the blossoms of spring". Maurice Cowling appraised Powell's poems as "restrained and pessimistic, and written out of a high sense of human destiny. It expressed the position of youth and had an eschatological overtone characteristic of Housman's repressed tombstone emotion. It registered the resigned, masculine gloom of the Trinity ethos into which he had been inducted". A further collection of poems, Dancer's End and The Wedding Gift, were published in 1951, and all his poems were published in one volume in 1990. Powell said the first two volumes were "dominated by the War – the War foreseen, the War imminent, and the War actual", and the second group were a "response to a brief period...of intense emotional excitement".

In 1937, he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney aged 25 (failing in his aim of beating Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). He was the youngest professor in the British Empire. Among his students was future Labor Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam, who described his lectures as 'dry as dust'. He revised Henry Stuart Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press in 1938, and his most lasting contribution to cl*ical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus, published by Cambridge University Press the same year. William Lorimer reviewed the lexicon in the Cl*ical Review and praised Powell's "amazing industry, much thought and care, and fine scholarship". The cl*icist Robin Lane Fox said the lexicon is "an entirely mechanical production with no intellectual power" but is "nonetheless valuable" and demonstrated Powell's "sharp, clear and nit-picking mind". Robin Waterfield, in his translation of Herodotus' Histories for Oxford World's Cl*ics, said Powell's lexicon was "absolutely indispensable". The Australian academic Athanasius Treweek called it "the most fantastically accurate work of this type that I have ever handled".

Soon after arrival in Australia, he was appointed Curator of the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. He stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon begin in Europe and that when it did, he would be heading home to enlist in the army. He later recalled that his at*ude towards Germany was of "great hatred as well as fear ... a fear of my country being defeated" and in his inaugural lecture as professor of Greek on 7 May 1938 he condemned Britain's policy of appea*t and prophesied the coming war with Germany. During his time in Australia as a professor, he grew increasingly angry at the appea*t of Germany and what he saw as a betrayal of the UK's national interests. After Neville Chamberlain's first visit to Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Powell wrote in a letter to his parents of 18 September 1938:

I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having *ulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy to which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable.

During the winter of 1938–1939 he travelled to Britain to arrange his appointment as professor of Greek and cl*ical literature at Durham University, which he was due to take up in 1940. After his arrival in Britain he visited Germany and later remembered his "sensation of embarr*ment on producing a British p*port at the German frontier in December 1938". He met again Paul Maas, other German Jews and members of the anti-National Socialist German Workers' Party movement, and helped Maas obtain a British visa from the British consul, which enabled Maas to escape Germany just before war broke out.

In another letter to his parents in June 1939, before the beginning of war, Powell wrote: "It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors". At the outbreak of war, Powell immediately returned to the UK, but not before buying a Russian dictionary, since he thought "Russia would hold the key to our survival and victory, as it had in 1812 and 1916".

Military service

During October 1939, almost a month after returning home from Australia, Powell enlisted as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He had trouble enlisting, as during the "Phoney War" the War Office did not want men with no military training. Rather than waiting to be called up, he claimed to be Australian, as Australians, many of whom had travelled to Britain at great expense to join up, were allowed to enlist straight away. In a poem, he wrote of men joining the army like "bridegrooms going to meet their brides", but his biographer points out that it is unlikely that many other men shared his joy, particularly not those who were leaving actual brides behind. He purchased a copy of Carl von Clausewitz's On War in the original German in a second-hand bookshop, which he read every night.

In later years, Powell recorded his promotion from private to lance-corporal in his Who's Who entry, on other occasions describing it as a greater promotion than entering the Cabinet. Early in 1940, he was trained for a commission after, while working in a kitchen, answering the question of an inspecting brigadier with a Greek proverb; on several occasions, he told colleagues that he expected to be at least a major-general by the end of the war. He p*ed out top from his officer training.

Powell was commissioned on the General List in 1940 but almost immediately transferred to the Intelligence Corps. He was soon promoted to captain and posted as GSO3 (Intelligence) to the 1st (later 9th) Armoured Division. During this time he taught himself the Portuguese language to read the poet Camões in the original; as insufficient Russian-speaking officers were available at the War Office, his knowledge of the Russian language and textual *ysis skills were used to translate a Russian parachute training manual—a task he completed after 11:pm in addition to his normal duties, deducing the meaning of many technical terms from the context; he was convinced that the Soviet Union must eventually enter the war on the Allied side. On one occasion, he was arrested as a suspected German spy for singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied. He was sent to the Staff College, Camberley.

In October 1941, Powell was posted to Cairo and transferred back to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. As secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Middle East, he was soon doing work that would normally have been done by a more senior officer and was (May 1942, backdated to December 1941) promoted to major. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in August 1942, telling his parents that he was doing the work of three people and expected to be a brigadier within a year or two, and in that role helped plan the Second Battle of El Alamein, having previously helped plan the attack on Rommel's supply lines. Powell and his team began work at 0400 each day to digest radio intercepts and other intelligence data (such as estimating how many tanks Rommel currently had and what his likely plans were) ready to present to the chiefs of staff at 0900. The following year, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his military service.

It was in Algiers that the beginning of Powell's distrust of the United States began. After socially mixing with senior American officers that he met and exploring their cultural views of the world, he became convinced that one of America's war aims was to destroy the British Empire. Writing home on 16 February 1943, Powell stated: "I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or *an ever were... our terrible enemy, America". Powell's suspicion of the anti-British Empire demeanour of the U.S. Government's foreign policy continued for the remainder of the war and into his subsequent post-war political career. He cut out and retained an article from the New Statesman magazine published on 13 November 1943 in which the American writer and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce said in a speech that Indian independence from the British Empire would mean that the "USA will really have won the greatest war in the world for democracy".

After the Axis defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, Powell's attention increasingly moved to the Far East theatre, and he wanted to go there to take part in the campaign against the *anese Imperial Army because: "the war in Europe was won now", and he wanted to see the Union Flag back in Singapore before, Powell feared, the Americans beat the British Empire to it and secured an imperial domination of their own over the region. He had at this time an ambition to be *igned to the Chindits units operating in Burma, and secured an interview with their Commander Orde Wingate to this end while the latter was on a temporary stop-over in Cairo, but Powell's duties and rank precluded the *ignment. Having declined two posts carrying the rank of full colonel (in Algiers and Cairo, which would have left him in the now moribund North African theatre "indefinitely"), and despite expecting to have to accept a reduction in rank to major in order to get the transfer, he secured a posting to the British Imperial Indian Army in Delhi as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence in August 1943. Within a few days of arriving in India, Powell bought as many books as he could about India and read them avidly. On one occasion, he wrote to his parents in a letter "I soaked up India like a sponge soaks up water."

Powell was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command, involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab, an island off the coast of Burma. Orde Wingate, also involved in planning that operation, had taken such a dislike to Powell that he asked a colleague to restrain him if he was tempted to "beat his brains in".

On one occasion, Powell's yellow skin (he was recovering from jaundice), over-formal dress and strange manner caused him to be mistaken for a *anese spy. During this period, he declined to meet a Cambridge academic colleague, Glyn Daniel, for a drink or dinner as he was devoting his limited leisure time to studying the poet John Donne. Powell had continued to learn Urdu and was taught by a nephew of the Urdu poet Altaf Hussain Hali. He had an unrealised ambition to compose a critical edition of Hali's Musaddas, The Rise and Fall of Islam. He also had an ambition of becoming Viceroy of India, and when Mountbatten transferred his staff to Kandy, Ceylon, Powell chose to remain in Delhi. He was promoted to full colonel at the end of March 1944, as *istant director of military intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of William Slim.

Having begun the war as the youngest professor in the Commonwealth, Powell ended it as a brigadier. He was given the promotion to serve on a committee of generals and brigadiers to plan the postwar defence of India: the resulting 470-page report was almost entirely written by Powell. For a few weeks he was the youngest brigadier in the British Army, and he was one of only two men in the entire war to rise from private to brigadier (the other being Fitzroy Maclean). He was offered a regular commission as a brigadier in the Indian Army, and the post of *istant commandant of an Indian officers' training academy, which he declined. He told a colleague that he expected to be head of all military intelligence in "the next war".

Powell never experienced combat and felt guilty for having survived, writing that soldiers who did so carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave" and referring to the Second Battle of El Alamein as a "separating flame" between the living and the dead. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered, "Others will remember me as they will remember me", but when pressed he replied, "I should like to have been killed in the war".

Entry into politics

Joining the Conservative Party

Though he voted for the Labour Party in their 1945 landslide victory, because he wanted to punish the Conservative Party for the Munich agreement, after the war he joined the Conservatives and worked for the Conservative Research Department under Rab Butler, where his colleagues included Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling.

Powell's ambition to be Viceroy of India crumbled in February 1947, when Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. Powell was so shocked by the change of policy that he spent the whole night after it was announced walking the streets of London.: 51  He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth and his urging that the UK should end any remaining pretence that it was a world power.

Election to Parliament

After unsuccessfully contesting the Labour Party's safe seat of Normanton at a by-election in 1947 (when the Labour majority was 62 per cent), he was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West at the 1950 general election.

First years as a backbencher

On 16 March 1950, Powell made his maiden speech, speaking on a White Paper on Defence and beginning by saying, "There is no need for me to pretend those feelings of awe and hesitation which *ail any honourable Member who rises to address this House for the first time."

On 3 March 1953, Powell spoke against the Royal *les Bill in the House of Commons. He said he found three major changes to the style of the United Kingdom, "all of which seem to me to be evil". The first one was "that in this *le, for the first time, will be recognised a principle hitherto never admitted in this country, namely, the divisibility of the crown." Powell said that the unity of the realm had evolved over centuries and included the British Empire: "It was a unit because it had one Sovereign. There was one Sovereign: one realm." He feared that by "recognising the division of the realm into separate realms, are we not opening the way for that other remaining unity—the last unity of all—that of the person, to go the way of the rest?": 195–202 

The second change he objected to was "the suppression of the word 'British', both from before the words 'Realms and Territories' where it is replaced by the words 'her other' and from before the word 'Commonwealth', which, in the Statute of Westminster, is described as the 'British Commonwealth of Nations'":

To say that he is Monarch of a certain territory and his other realms and territories is as good as to say that he is king of his kingdom. We have perpetrated a solecism in the *le we are proposing to attach to our Sovereign and we have done so out of what might almost be called an abject desire to eliminate the expression 'British'. The same desire has been felt:... to eliminate this word before the term 'Commonwealth':... Why is it, then, that we are so anxious, in the description of our own Monarch, in a *le for use in this country, to eliminate any reference to the seat, the focus and the origin of this vast aggregate of territories? Why is it that this "teeming womb of royal Kings", as Shakespeare called it, wishes now to be anonymous?: 196–199 

Powell claimed that the answer was that because the British Nationality Act 1948 had removed allegiance to the crown as the basis of citizenship and replaced that with nine separate citizenships combined together by statute. Therefore, if any of these nine countries became republics the law would not change, as happened with India when it became a republic. Furthermore, Powell went on, the essence of unity was "that all the parts recognise they would sacrifice themselves to the interests of the whole." He denied that there was in India that "recognition of belonging to a greater whole which involves the ultimate consequence in certain cir*stances of self-sacrifice in the interests of the whole." Therefore, the *le 'Head of the Commonwealth', the third major change, was "essentially a sham. They are essentially something which we have invented to blind ourselves to the reality of the position.": 199–201 

These changes were "greatly repugnant" to Powell:

...:if they are changes which were demanded by those who in many wars had fought with this country, by nations who maintained an allegiance to the Crown, and who signified a desire to be in the future as were in the past; if it were our friends who had come to us and said: "We want this," I would say: "Let it go. Let us admit the divisibility of the Crown. Let us sink into anonymity and cancel the word 'British' from our *les. If they like the conundrum 'Head of the Commonwealth' in the Royal style, let it be there." However, the underlying evil of this is that we are doing it for the sake not of our friends but of those who are not our friends. We are doing this for the sake of those to whom the very names 'Britain' and 'British' are repugnant.:... We are doing this for the sake of those who have deliberately cast off their allegiance to our common Monarchy.: 201 

For the rest of his life, Powell regarded this speech as the finest he ever delivered (rather than the much more well-known 1968 anti-immigration speech).: 230 

In mid-November 1953, Powell secured a place on the 1922 Committee's executive at the third attempt. Rab Butler also invited him onto the committee that reviewed party policy for the general election, which he attended until 1955. Powell was a member of the Suez Group of MPs who were against the removal of British troops from the Suez C*, because such a move would demonstrate, Powell argued, that the UK could no longer maintain a position there, and that any claim to the Suez C* would therefore be illogical. However, after the troops had left in June 1956 and the Egyptians nationalised the C* a month later, Powell opposed the attempt to retake the c* in the Suez Crisis because he thought the British no longer had the resources to be a world power.: 99–100 

In and out of office

Junior Housing Minister

On 21 December 1955, Powell was appointed parliamentary secretary to Duncan Sandys at the Ministry of Housing. He called it "the best ever Christmas box". In early 1956, he spoke for the Housing Subsidies Bill in the Commons and argued for the rejection of an amendment that would have hindered slum clearances. He also spoke in support of the Slum Clearances Bill, which provided en*lement for full compensation for those who purchased a house after August 1939 and still occupied it in December 1955 if this property would be compulsorily purchased by the government if it was deemed unfit for human habitation.

In early 1956, Powell attended a subcommittee on immigration control as a housing minister and advocated immigration controls. In August, he gave a speech at a meeting of the Ins*ute of Personnel Management and was asked a question about immigration. He answered that limiting immigration would require a change in the law: "There might be cir*stances in which such a change of the law might be the lesser of two evils". But he added, "There would be very few people who would say the time had yet come when it was essential that so great a change should be made". Powell later told Paul Foot that the statement was made "out of loyalty to the Government line". Powell also spoke for the Rent Bill, which ended wartime rent controls when existing tenants moved out, thereby phasing out regulation.

Financial Secretary to the Treasury

At a meeting of the 1922 Committee on 22 November 1956, Rab Butler made a speech appealing for party unity in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. His speech did not go down well and Harold Macmillan, whom Butler had taken along for moral support, addressed them and was a great success. In Powell's view this was "one of the most horrible things that I remember in politics:... seeing the way in which Harold Macmillan, with all the skill of the old actor-manager, succeeded in false-footing Rab. The sheer devilry of it verged upon the disgusting". After Macmillan's death in 1986 Powell said "Macmillan was a Whig, not a Tory:... he had no use for the Conservative loyalties and affections; they interfered too much with the Whig's true vocation of detecting trends in events and riding them skilfully so as to preserve the privileges, property and interests of his cl*". However, when Macmillan replaced Eden as Prime Minister, Powell was offered the office of Financial Secretary to the Treasury on 14 January 1957. This office was the Chancellor of the Exchequer's deputy and the most important job outside the Cabinet.

In January 1958 he resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest at government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch advocate of disinflation, or, in modern terms, a monetarist, and a believer in market forces. Powell was also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which Powell believed to be the cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less. Inflation rose to 2.5 per cent, a high figure for the era, especially in peacetime.

During the late 1950s, Powell promoted control of the money supply to prevent inflation and, during the 1960s, was an advocate of free market policies, which at the time were seen as extreme, unworkable and unpopular. Powell advocated the privatisation of the Post Office and the telephone network as early as 1964, over 20 years before the latter actually took place; and 47 years before the former occurred. He both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the Conservative Party to become a modern business-like party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network" *ociations. In his 1958 resignation over public spending and what he saw as an inflationary economic policy, he anticipated almost exactly the views that during the 1980s came to be described as "monetarism".

Hola M*acre speech

On 27 July 1959, Powell delivered a speech on the Hola Camp of Kenya, where eleven Mau Mau were killed after refusing work in the camp. Powell noted that some MPs had described the eleven as "sub-human", but Powell responded by saying: "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 judgement 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'.": 206–207  Powell also disagreed with the notion that because it was in Africa, different methods were acceptable:

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 Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.: 207 

Denis Healey, a member of parliament from 1952 to 1992, later said this speech was "the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard:... it had all the moral p*ion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes". The Daily Telegraph report of the speech said that "as Mr Powell sat down, he put his hand across his eyes. His emotion was justified, for he had made a great and sincere speech".

Minister of Health

Powell returned to the government in July 1960, when he was appointed Health minister, although he did not become a member of the Cabinet until 1962. During a meeting with parents of babies that had been born with deformities caused by the drug thalidomide, he was unsympathetic to the victims, refusing to meet any babies affected by the drug. Powell also refused to launch a public inquiry, and resisted calls to issue a warning against any left-over thalidomide pills that might remain in people's medicine cabinets (as US President John F. Kennedy had done).

In this job, he developed the 1962 Hospital Plan. He began a debate on the neglect of the huge psychiatric ins*utions, calling for them to be replaced by wards in general hospitals. In his famous 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said:

There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside—the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our *ault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm.

The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s. In 1993, however, Powell claimed that his policy could have worked. He claimed the criminally insane should have never been released and that the problem was one of funding. He said the new way of caring for the mentally ill would cost more, not less, than the old way because community care was decentralised and intimate as well as being "more human". His successors had not, Powell claimed, provided the money for local authorities to spend on mental health care and therefore ins*utional care had been neglected while at the same time there was not any investment in community care.

After his speech on immigration in 1968, Powell's political opponents sometimes alleged that he had, when Minister of Health, recruited immigrants from the Commonwealth into the National Health Service (NHS). However, the Minister of Health was not responsible for recruitment (this was left to health authorities) and Sir George Godber, Chief Medical Officer for Her Majesty's Government in England from 1960 to 1973, stated that the allegation was "bunk:... absolute rubbish. There was no such policy". Powell's biographer Simon Heffer also stated that the claim "is a complete untruth. As Powell's biographer I have been thoroughly through the Ministry of Health papers at the Public Record Office and have found no evidence to support this *ertion".

During the early 1960s, Powell was asked about the recruitment of immigrant workers for the NHS. He replied by saying "recruitment was in the hands of the hospital authorities, but this was something that happened of its own accord given that there was no bar upon entry and employment in the United Kingdom to those from the West Indies or anywhere else ." Powell did welcome immigrant nurses and doctors, under the condition that they were to be temporary workers training in the UK and would then return to their native countries as qualified doctors or nurses. Shortly after becoming Minister of Health, Powell asked R.A. Butler (the Home Secretary), if he could be appointed to a ministerial committee which monitored immigration and was about to be re-cons*uted. Powell was worried about the strain by NHS immigrants, and papers show that he wanted a stronger restriction on Commonwealth immigration than what was p*ed in 1961.

1960s

Leadership elections

In October 1963, along with Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Lord Hailsham, Powell tried in vain to persuade Rab Butler not to serve under Alec Douglas-Home, in the belief that the latter would be unable to form a government. Powell commented that they had given Butler a revolver, which he had refused to use in case it made a noise or hurt anyone. Macleod and Powell refused to serve in Home's Cabinet. This refusal is not usually attributed to personal antipathy to Douglas-Home but rather to anger at what Macleod and Powell saw as Macmillan's underhand manipulation of colleagues during the process of choosing a new leader. However, at the meeting at his house on the evening of 17 October, Powell, who still enjoyed a liberal reputation on racial issues after his Hola M*acre Speech, reportedly said of Home: "How can I serve under a man whose views on Africa are positively Portuguese?"

During the 1964 general election, Powell said in his election address, "it was essential, for the sake not only of our own people but of the immigrants themselves, to introduce control over the numbers allowed in. I am convinced that strict control must continue if we are to avoid the evils of a 'colour question' in this country, for ourselves and for our children". Norman Fowler, then a reporter for The Times, interviewed Powell during the election and asked him what the biggest issue was: "I expected to be told something about the cost of living but not a bit of it. 'Immigration,' replied Powell. I duly phoned in my piece but it was never used. After all, who in 1964 had ever heard of a former Conservative cabinet minister thinking that immigration was an important political issue?"

Following the Conservatives' defeat in the election, he agreed to return to the front bench as Transport Spokesman.: 316  In July 1965, he stood in the first-ever party leadership election but came a distant third to Edward Heath, obtaining only 15 votes, just below the result Hugh Fraser would gain in the 1975 contest. Heath appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Defence. Powell said that he had "left his visiting card", i.e. demonstrated himself to be a potential future leader, but the immediate effect was to demonstrate his limited support in the Parliamentary Party, enabling Heath to feel more comfortable calling his bluff.

Shadow Defence Secretary

In his first speech to the Conservative Party conference as Shadow Secretary of State for Defence on 14 October 1965, Powell outlined a fresh defence policy, jettisoning what he saw as outdated global military commitments left over from the UK's imperial past and stressing that the UK was a European power and therefore an alliance with Western European states from possible attack from the East was central to the UK's safety. He defended the UK's nuclear weapons and argued that it was "the merest casuistry to argue that if the weapon and the means of using it are purchased in part, or even altogether, from another nation, therefore the independent right to use it has no reality. With a weapon so catastrophic, it is possession and the right to use which count". Also, Powell called into question Western military commitments East of Suez:

However much we may do to safeguard and re*ure the new independent countries in Asia and Africa, the eventual limits of Russian and Chinese advance in those directions will be fixed by a balance of forces which will itself be Asiatic and African. The two Communist empires are already in a state of mutual antagonism; but every advance or threat of advance by one or the other calls into existence countervailing forces, sometimes nationalist in character, sometimes expansionist, which will ultimately check it. We have to reckon with the harsh fact that the attainment of this eventual equilibrium of forces may at some point be delayed rather than hastened by Western military presence.

The Daily Telegraph journalist David Howell remarked to Andrew Alexander that Powell had "just withdrawn us from East of Suez, and received an enormous ovation because no-one understood what he was talking about". However, the Americans were worried by Powell's speech as they wanted British military commitments in South-East Asia as they were still fighting in Vietnam. A transcript of the speech was sent to Washington and the American emb*y requested to talk to Heath about the "Powell doctrine". The New York Times said Powell's speech was "a potential declaration of independence from American policy". During the election campaign of 1966, Powell claimed that the British government had contingency plans to send at least a token British force to Vietnam and that, under Labour, "Britain has behaved perfectly clearly and perfectly recognisably as an American satellite".

Lyndon B. Johnson had indeed asked Wilson for some British forces for Vietnam, and when it was later suggested to Powell that Washington understood that the public reaction to Powell's allegations had made Wilson realise he would not have favourable public opinion and so could not go through with it, Powell responded: "The greatest service I have performed for my country, if that is so". Labour was returned with a large majority, and Powell was retained by Heath as Shadow Defence Secretary as he believed Powell "was too dangerous to leave out".

In a controversial speech on 26 May 1967, Powell criticised the UK's post-war world role:

In our imagination the vanishing last vestiges:... of Britain's once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets. Under God's good providence and in partnership with the United States, we keep the peace of the world and rush hither and thither containing Communism, putting out brush fires and coping with subversion. It is difficult to describe, without using terms derived from psychiatry, a notion having so few points of contact with reality.

In 1967, Powell spoke of his opposition to the immigration of Kenyan Asians to the United Kingdom after the African country's leader Jomo Kenyatta's discriminatory policies led to the flight of Asians from that country.

The biggest argument Powell and Heath had during Powell's time in the Shadow Cabinet was over a dispute over the role of Black Rod, who would go to the Commons to summon them to the Lords to hear the Royal *ent of Bills. In November 1967, Black Rod arrived during a debate on the EEC and was met with cries of "Shame" to "'Op it". At the next Shadow Cabinet meeting Heath said this "nonsense" must be stopped. Powell suggested that Heath did not mean it should be ended. He asked whether Heath realised that the words Black Rod used went back to the 1307 Parliament of Carlisle and were ancient even then. Heath reacted furiously, saying that the British people "were tired of this nonsense and ceremonial and mummery. He would not stand for the perpetuation of this ridiculous business etc".

National figure

'Rivers of Blood' speech

Main article: Rivers of Blood speech

The Birmingham-based television company ATV saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they filmed sections of the speech. Earlier in the week, Powell said to his friend Clement 'Clem' Jones, a journalist and then editor at the Wolverhampton Express & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."

Powell was renowned for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature. On 20 April 1968, he gave a speech in Birmingham in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked m* immigration from the Commonwealth to the UK. Above all, it is an allusion to the Roman poet Virgil towards the end of the speech which has been remembered, giving the speech its colloquial name:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the 20th century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

The Times declared it "an evil speech", stating, "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history."

The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1968 (by the Labour Government at the time), which Powell found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing, where many local authorities had been refusing to provide houses for immigrant families until they had lived in the country for a certain number of years.

One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he received detailing the experiences of one of his cons*uents in Wolverhampton. The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last White person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from non-Whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a "racialist" outside her home and receiving "excreta" through her letterbox.

When Heath telephoned Margaret Thatcher to tell her that he was going to sack Powell, she responded: "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis". Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow cabinet the day after the speech and he never held another senior political post again. Powell received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74 per cent of those asked agreed with his speech and only 15 per cent disagreed, with 11 per cent unsure. One poll concluded that between 61 and 73 per cent disagreed with Heath sacking Powell. According to George L. Bernstein, many British people felt that Powell "was the first British politician who was actually listening to them".

After The Sunday Times branded his speeches "racialist", Powell sued it for libel, but withdrew when he was required to provide the letters he had quoted from because he had promised anonymity for the writer, who refused to waive it.

Powell had also expressed his opposition to the Race Relations legislation being put into place by the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson at the time.

Following the "Rivers of Blood" speech, Powell was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across the UK. Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against the "victimisation" of Powell, with slogans such as "we want Enoch Powell!" and "Enoch here, Enoch there, we want Enoch everywhere". The next day, 400 meat porters from Smithfield market handed in a 92-page pe*ion in support of Powell, amidst other m* demonstrations of working-cl* support, much of it from trade unionists, in London and Wolverhampton.

Conservative politician Michael Heseltine stated that in the aftermath of the "Rivers of blood" speech, if Enoch Powell had stood for leadership of the Conservative party he would have won "by a landslide" and if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a "national landslide".

'Morecambe Budget'

Powell made a speech in Morecambe on 11 October 1968 on the economy, setting out alternative, radical free-market policies that would later be called the 'Morecambe Budget'. Powell used the financial year of 1968–69 to show how income tax could be halved from 8s:3d to 4s:3d in the pound (basic rate cut from 41 to 21 per cent): 484  and how capital gains tax and Selective Employment Tax could be abolished without reducing expenditure on defence or the social services. These tax reductions required a saving of £2,855,000,000 and this would be funded by eradicating losses in the nationalised industries and privatising the profit-making state concerns; ending all housing subsidies except for those who could not afford their own housing; ending all foreign aid; ending all grants and subsidies in agriculture; ending all *istance to development areas; ending all investment grants; and abolishing the National Economic Development Council and the Prices and Incomes Board. The cuts in taxation would also allow the state to borrow from the public to spend on capital projects such as hospitals and roads and spend on "the firm and humane treatment of criminals".

House of Lords reform

In mid-1968, Powell's book The House of Lords in the Middle Ages was published after twenty years' work. At the press conference for its publication, Powell said if the government introduced a Bill to reform the Lords he would be its "resolute enemy". Later in 1968, when the Labour government published its Bills for the new session, Powell was angry at Heath's acceptance of the plan drawn up by the Conservative Iain Macleod and Labour's Richard Crossman to reform the Lords, *led the Parliament (No. 2) Bill. Crossman, opening the debate on 19 November, said the government would reform the Lords in five ways: removing the voting rights of hereditary peers; making sure no party had a permanent majority; ensuring the government of the day usually p*ed its laws; weakening the Lords' powers to delay new laws; and abolishing the power to refuse subordinate legislation if it had been p*ed by the Commons. Powell spoke in the debate, opposing these plans. He said the reforms were "unnecessary and undesirable" and that there was no weight in the claim that the Lords could "check or frustrate the firm intentions" of the Commons. He claimed that only election or nomination could replace the hereditary nature of the Lords. If they were elected it would pose the dilemma of which House was truly representative of the electorate. He also had another objection: "How can the same electorate be represented in two ways so that the two sets of representatives can conflict and disagree with one another?" Those nominated would be bound to the Chief Whip of their party through a sort of oath and Powell asked "what sort of men and women are they to be who would submit to be nominated to another chamber upon condition that they will be mere dummies, automatic parts of a voting machine?" He also stated that the inclusion in the proposals of thirty crossbenchers was "a grand absurdity", because they would have been chosen "upon the very basis that they have no strong views of principle on the way in which the country ought to be governed". Powell claimed the Lords derived their authority not from a strict hereditary system but from its prescriptive nature: "It has long been so, and it works". He then added that there was not any widespread desire for reform: he indicated a recent survey of working-cl* voters that showed that only one-third of them wanted to reform or abolish the House of Lords, with another third believing the Lords were an "intrinsic part of the national traditions of Britain". Powell deduced from this, "As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, that which is prescriptive".

Following more speeches against the Bill during early 1969, and faced with the fact a bloc of left-wing Labour members were also against reforming the House of Lords as they desired its abolition altogether, Harold Wilson announced on 17 April that the Bill was being withdrawn. Wilson's statement was brief, with Powell intervening: "Don't eat them too quickly", which provoked much laughter in the House. Later that day Powell said in a speech to the Primrose League:

There was an instinct, inarticulate but deep and sound, that the traditional, prescriptive House of Lords posed no threat and injured no interests, but might yet, for all its illogicalities and anomalies, make itself felt on occasion to useful purpose. The same sound instinct was repelled by the idea of a new-fashioned second chamber, artificially constructed by power, party, and patronage, to function in a particular way. Not for the first time, the common people of this country proved the surest defenders of their traditional ins*utions.

Powell's biographer, Simon Heffer, described the defeat of Lords reform as "perhaps the greatest triumph of Powell's political career".

In 1969, when it was first suggested that the United Kingdom should join the European Economic Community, Powell spoke openly of his opposition to such a move.

Departure from the Conservative Party

A Gallup poll in February 1969 showed Powell to be the "most admired person" in British public opinion.

In a defence debate in March 1970, Powell claimed that "the whole theory of the tactical nuclear weapon, or the tactical use of nuclear weapons, is an unmitigated absurdity" and that it was "remotely improbable" that any group of nations engaged in war would "decide upon general and mutual suicide", and advocated enlargement of the UK's conventional forces. However, when fellow Conservative Julian Amery later in the debate criticised Powell for his antinuclear pronouncements, Powell responded: "I have always regarded the possession of the nuclear capability as a protection against nuclear blackmail. It is a protection against being threatened with nuclear weapons. What it is not a protection against is war".

The 1970 general election took place on 18 June and was unexpectedly won by the Conservatives, with a late surge in their support. Powell's supporters claim that he contributed to this surprise victory. In "exhaustive research" on the election, the American pollster Douglas Schoen and University of Oxford academi