Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell MBE (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974) and was Minister of Health (1960–1963) then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987). Before entering politics, Powell was a classical scholar. During the Second World War, he served in both staff and intelligence positions, reaching the rank of brigadier. He also wrote poetry, and many books on classical and political subjects.
Enoch Powell
8 February 1998 (aged 85)
London, England
Warwick Cemetery, Warwick, England
- Conservative (1947–1974)
- Ulster Unionist (1974–1987)
2
1939–1945
Powell attracted widespread attention for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, delivered on 20 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 some of Powell's own party members[1] and The Times,[2] with Conservative Party leader Edward Heath dismissing Powell a day after the speech 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.[3][4][5] His supporters claimed that the large public following[6][7] that Powell attracted helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 general election,[8] and perhaps cost them the February 1974 general election,[9] 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 constituency of South Down. He represented the constituency until he was defeated at the 1987 general election.
Early years[edit]
John Enoch Powell was born in Stechford, Warwickshire, within the city of Birmingham, on 16 June 1912, and was baptised at Newport, Shropshire, in St Nicholas' church where his parents had married in 1909.[10] 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".[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]
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.[14] By the age of six Powell was addicted to reading, predominantly history books. Powell's Toryism and regard for institutions 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.[15][12] 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.[16] 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.[17]
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 in Birmingham in 1925, aged thirteen.[17] 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.[18]
The head of classics at the school saw that Powell had an interest in the subject and agreed to transfer him to the classics 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 classics form. His classmate Christopher Evans recalled that Powell was "austere" and "really unlike any schoolboy one had known ... He was quite a phenomenon".[19] 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".[20]
Powell won all three of the school's classics 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 classmates and was remembered as a hard-working student; his contemporary Roy Lewis recalled that "we thought that the masters were afraid of him".[20] 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.[21] Duggie Smith, Powell's form-master in the lower classical sixth and his principal classics 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".[22]
It was during his time in the 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.[23][24] 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.[25] Powell also won the Badger Prize for English Literature twice and the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize.[26]
In December 1929, aged seventeen, he sat the classics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge, and won the top award.[25] 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.[27] For another paper, Powell also had to translate a passage 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".[28][29]
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.[30][31] Granta called him "The Hermit of Trinity".[32] 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".[33] At the age of eighteen his first paper to a classical journal was published (in German) in the Philologische Wochenschrift, on a line of Herodotus.[34] While studying at Cambridge, Powell became aware that there was another classicist 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".[29][25] 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.[32]
It was at Cambridge that Powell fell under the influence of the poet A. E. Housman,[35] then Professor of Latin at the university. He attended Housman'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.[36] Powell sent him a correction of Virgil's Aeneid and received the reply: "Dear Mr Powell. You analyse the difficulties of the passage 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".[32]
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 Classical Tripos and was awarded the Members' prize for Latin prose and the First Chancellor's Classical 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".[37] 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".[38] Shortly before his finals in May 1933, Powell became ill with tonsillitis and then suffered 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 (40 °C) when he sat the last of the seven papers, Powell gained a first class with distinction.[39][38] The Cambridge classical scholar Martin Charlesworth said after Powell's graduation: "That man Powell is extraordinary. He is the best Greek scholar since Porson".[39]
As well as his education at Cambridge, Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies (now SOAS, 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.[8] Later, during his political career he would speak to his Indian-born constituents in Urdu.[40] 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),[41] modern Greek, and Portuguese.
Military service[edit]
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.[76] 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.[77] 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.[77] 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.[78]
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.[79] 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.[80] He passed out top from his officer training.[79]
On 18 May 1940, Powell was one of the cadets from the 166th, 167th, 168th, and 170th Officer Cadet Training Units commissioned as a second lieutenant onto the General List.[81] He was 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 analysis 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.[82] On one occasion, he was arrested as a suspected German spy for singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied.[83] He was sent to the Staff College, Camberley.[83]
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[84]) 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,[85] 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.[83] The following year, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his military service.[86]
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 Japan ever were... our terrible enemy, America".[87] 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 congresswoman 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".[88]
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 Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) 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.[89] He had at this time an ambition to be assigned 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,[90] but Powell's duties and rank precluded the assignment. 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 Indian Army in Delhi as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence in August 1943.[90] Within a few days of arriving in India, Powell bought as many books as he could about India and read them avidly.[90] On one occasion, he wrote to his parents in a letter "I soaked up India like a sponge soaks up water."[90]
Powell was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Lord Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command,[91] 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 were tempted to "beat his brains in".[92]
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 Japanese spy.[93] 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.[94] 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.[95] He also had an ambition of eventually 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 assistant director of military intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of Sir William Slim.
Having begun the war as the youngest professor in the British Empire, 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,[96] and he was one of only two men in the entire war to rise from private to brigadier (the other being Sir Fitzroy Maclean). He was offered a regular commission as a brigadier in the Indian Army, and the post of assistant commandant of an Indian officers' training academy, which he declined.[97] He told a colleague that he expected to be head of all military intelligence in "the next war".[92]
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.[98] 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".[99]
In and out of office[edit]
Junior Housing Minister[edit]
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".[8] 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 entitlement 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.[106]
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 Institute 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 circumstances 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".[107] Powell also spoke for the Rent Bill, which ended wartime rent controls when existing tenants moved out, thereby phasing out regulation.[108]
Financial Secretary to the Treasury[edit]
At a meeting of the 1922 Committee on 22 November 1956, 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 class".[109] 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.[110]
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.[111] 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;[112] 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" associations.[113] 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".[114]
Hola Massacre speech[edit]
On 27 July 1959, Powell delivered a speech in the Commons about the Hola Camp in 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'."[103]: 206–207 Powell also disagreed with the notion that because it was in Africa, different methods were acceptable:
1960s[edit]
Leadership elections[edit]
In October 1963, along with Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Lord Hailsham, Powell tried in vain to persuade Butler not to serve under the Earl of Home (soon to be known as Sir 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.[128] Macleod and Powell refused to serve in Lord 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.[129] 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 Massacre Speech, reportedly said of Lord Home: "How can I serve under a man whose views on Africa are positively Portuguese?"[130]
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".[131] 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?"[131]
Following the Conservatives' defeat in the election, he agreed to return to the front bench as Transport Spokesman.[13]: 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.[132] 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.[133]
Shadow Defence Secretary[edit]
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".[134] Also, Powell called into question Western military commitments East of Suez:
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".[135] 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 embassy 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".[136] 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".[137]
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".[138] 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".[139]
In a controversial speech on 26 May 1967, Powell criticised the UK's post-war world role:
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.[141]
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 Assent 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".[142]
Ulster Unionist[edit]
1974–1979[edit]
In a sudden general election in October 1974, Powell returned to Parliament as Ulster Unionist (UUP) MP for South Down, having rejected an offer to stand as a candidate for the far-right National Front, formed seven years earlier and fiercely opposed to non-white immigration. He repeated his call to vote Labour because of their policy on the EEC.[182]
Since 1968, Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint, he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom. From early 1971, he opposed, with increasing vehemence, Heath's approach to Northern Ireland, the greatest breach with his party coming over the imposition of direct rule in 1972. He strongly believed that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate completely with the United Kingdom by abandoning devolved rule in Northern Ireland. He refused to join the Orange Order, the first Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member (and, to date, one of only four, the others being Ken Maginnis, Danny Kinahan and Lady Hermon), and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist loyalism espoused by Ian Paisley and his supporters.
In the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) on 21 November 1974, the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). During its second reading, Powell warned of passing legislation "in haste and under the immediate pressure of indignation on matters which touch the fundamental liberties of the subject; for both haste and anger are ill counsellors, especially when one is legislating for the rights of the subject". He said terrorism was a form of warfare that could not be prevented by laws and punishments but by the aggressor's certainty that the war was impossible to win.[183]
When Heath called a leadership election at the end of 1974, Powell claimed they would have to find someone who was not a member of the Cabinet that "without a single resignation or public dissent, not merely swallowed but advocated every single reversal of election pledge or party principle".[184] During February 1975, after winning the leadership election, Margaret Thatcher refused to offer Powell a Shadow Cabinet place because "he turned his back on his own people" by leaving the Conservative Party exactly 12 months earlier and telling the electorate to vote Labour. Powell replied she was correct to exclude him: "In the first place I am not a member of the Conservative Party and secondly, until the Conservative Party has worked its passage a very long way it will not be rejoining me".[185] Powell also attributed Thatcher's success to luck, saying that she was faced with "supremely unattractive opponents at the time".[186]
During the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC, Powell campaigned for a 'No' vote. Powell was one of the few prominent supporters of the 'No' camp, with Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and Barbara Castle. The electorate voted 'Yes' by a margin of more than two to one.[187][188]
On 23 March 1977, in a vote of confidence against the minority Labour government, Powell, along with a few other Ulster Unionists, abstained. The government won by 322 votes to 298, and remained in power for another two years.
Powell said that the only way to stop the Provisional IRA was for Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the United Kingdom, treated the same as any other of its constituent parts. He said the ambiguous nature of the region's status, with its own parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the IRA that it could be detached from the rest of the UK:
Portraits[edit]
Powell sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait[295] in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Powell portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive[296] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist. English photographer Allan Warren photographed many portraits of Powell. There are 24 images of Powell in the National Portrait Gallery Collection including work by Bassano's studios, Anne-Katrin Purkiss,[297] and a 1971 cartoon by Gerald Scarfe.[298]