No answers blowing in the wind

Enoch Powell

The publishers, with a candour exceptional in a blurb, describe Lord Home's auto biography* as 'utterly unpretentious'. Even SO, they have not hit upon quite the right adjective. The right adjective is 'naïve'; but One is 'utterly' at a loss to find an adverb adequate to qualify it. When a politician who throughout his life has gone 'the way

the wind blows' actually chooses that phrase as title for his autobiography, it is difficult to know whether one is in the presence of fantastic candour or fantastic innocence.

My first inclination after getting through the first two chapters was to wonder if this Was not an exercise in sustained autobiographical parody which had not quite Come off'—a sort of Don Quixote or Ortundo manqué. There are whole pages of Pure old-boy visiting speaker at Speech Day, Which approach perfection in their genre: What did Oxford do for me? It provided understanding of life and more independence of judgment. It was impossible . . to dine in Hall in the company of portraits of great men without realising that it matters what people do. Impossible too to rub shoulders with brain and brawn, artists, scientists, classical scholars, historians, mathematicians and churchmen Without broadening one's mind. An honorary fellowship at Chris? Church and an honorary degree at the University later set theseal on a most rewarding part of life. Or this: MY father's butler, Col I ingwood, who was faithfully produced in my brother's play The Chiltern Hundreds, was a splendid character and what we should have done Without him I do not know. , Gems of this order are offset by recitals of e autobiographer's cricket scores at school and 'varsity, and even of game bags: One day I recall with particular pleasure was with Henry, David Bowes-Lyon and Cosmo Crawley (the Harrow cricketer). .1 he game-book entry ran : 20 grouse, 5 olack game, 1 partridge, 1 woodcock, 15 snipe, S mallard, Steal, 2 gadwall, 4 golden ,I?slover, 5 pigeon, 18 hares and 26 rabbits. 1-lcit sport was undiluted fun. e:`, las, as the narrative progressed from „arlY manhood, it became painfully clear `Inhat the whole thing was meant seriously and at this was, and is, the man himself and not ,utentional satire.

e have a chapter (Chapter Five) on tell iQfl ('There comes a moment when one wesr:ocricieoadi Confess one's faith, for testing trials which contains whole slabs :721e Way the Wind Blows (Collins, £4.95) resist 'xviewer's italics. I apologise; couldn't , it.

from the author's contribution to a 1946 seminar on 'Why I believe in God'. 'I was and am,' he says in this chapter, 'impatient of the muddle and confusion and division which the churches have made of the simple message of Christ,' of which 'men have made unbelievably heavy weather.' It is an almost terrifying piece of self-revelation. Here is this nice„ honest, honourable schoolboy who never grew up finding nothing but what was plain and simple in the gospel and marvelling at those who made 'heavy weather'. I wonder what he thought when he came to the words 'Take, eat, this is my body' ?— just read on, I suppose, seeing nothing out of the ordinary: At any rate I have in my profession and in my work and play found myself happier and more relaxed and more confident by reason of faith in God, and a set ofpositive values is certainly useful: when trying to decide—in terms of my father's exhortation—what effect my action would have on the other fellow.

When one encounters a man who has lived through forty years of public life and risen to the highest offices of state without having apparently perceived anything not reducible to the ethics of the public school, the temptation is almost irresistible to assume that the whole thing has been a consummate exercise in dissimulation, and that behind the mask is concealed a calculating and ruthless intellect. That is what the knowing ones whisper to one another in the Smoking Room with a chuckle. That is what contemporaries have every motive of amour propre to believe. But, historians, beware! Men high and low are nearly always more or less what they seem to be; and if the former foreign secretary and prime minister, as revealed in these pages even more clearly than in personal intercourse, is a paradox, we ought not to pretend the paradox away, but learn from it anew the old, old lesson that any sort of person can be found in any sort of position and that it is the holder who makes the office, and not the office the holder.

This is not to say it makes no difference what manner of person occupies a position. In 1961 Lord Home wrote: 'I have no doubt what would be best for Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia: they should be in a tight economic and a loose political federation' [viz with Southern Rhodesia]. In 1968 he reported that Scottish aspirations should be met by a directly elected assembly which would take Scottish Bills through some of their legislative stages and 'decide priorities in expenditure', whereby 'Scotsmen would feel that their influence over their own affairs had substance and was real'. This degree of incapacity to perceive contradiction and to analyse problems is not rendered harmless because it is the innocent projection of a mind which cannot understand how others make 'heavy weather' of what it finds plain and simple. In real life such a personality is peculiarly disaster-prone.

It is not likely that The Way the Wind Blows will be a serious historical source. The chapter on 'The Diplomacy of Suez'— another unintentional irony—is exactly four pages long, totally uninformative and ends with the opaque conclusion that `whatever the final verdict of historians on the British occupation of the Canal Zone, they will be bound to record that, had it not been for a sad lapse on the part of American diplomacy, peaceful persuasion had a good chance of gaining the day'. However, I believe that where a reviewer has been an eye-witness, he should add his mite of correction to the record.

My own appearance is limited to the succession to Macmillan in October 1963, where the narrative is remarkable for the size and number of the vital gaps. It is doubtful however how much Lord Home understood the inwardness of what was happening. 'With kindness,' he says, 'and loyalty and sacrifice they [Butler, Hailsham and Maudling] gave me their support, as did all but two of my colleagues in Mr Macmillan's cabinet. They were Mr lain Macleod and Mr Enoch Powell, who were not natural bedfellows but who for the moment had got into a huddle.' Anybody who was unaware of the long and exceptionally intimate association and collaboration between the late lain Macleod and myself, or of our close sympathy and identity of political views until a period later than 1963, could not have known much about what had been happening in the Conservative Party since 1945. Little wonder that Lord Home did not understand the reason why both of us said we would not join the new government unless it was Butler's.

Another error which is also the fruit of incomprehension ought to be corrected. 'In Cabinet [8 October 1963] in the Prime Minister's absence we had a short discussion. The Lord Chancellor said that he was not a candidate for the leadership . . . I said that the same applied to me. Enoch Powell later cited this indication of my position as a kind of pledge from which, when events turned out as they did, I should have had the whole Cabinet's leave formally to withdraw'. When I read this passage I wrote to Lord Home as follows: House of Commons 16 August 1976 Dear Alec,

I am reviewing The Way the Wind Blows

and think that one should use such reviews at least in part for the benefit of future historians. That is why I hope you can let me have a reply to the following query.

On page 181 you say that I 'later cited' the indication of your position which you gave to Cabinet on 8th October 'as a kind of pledge, etc'. I have no recollection of entertaining such an opinion as you attribute to me, nor do I see how such an opinion could reasonably be held. However I know from experience how fickle one's memory can be and I would therefore be grateful if you could tell me what is the nature of the 'citation' to which you refer since the language appears to indicate much more than recollection of a verbal and second-hand communication, but rather written or spoken words which are somewhere on the record.

Yours ever, Enoch.

I received the following reply.

Castlemains, Douglas, Lanarkshire 21 August 1976 My dear Enoch, Thank you for your letter.

I used the word 'cited' in the sense of 'quoted' which I think is accurate. The position was this. It was reported to me from one of the meetings which you and some colleagues had that you had said that I ought to have brought the Cabinet together so that I could withdraw the statement which I had earlier made that I was not in the contest for the leadership. I recall it vividly because I was genuinely worried that I might have done something reprehensible. I soon decided, however, that as I had seen every member of the Cabinet separately and you and lain together* that I should leave the matter alone.

You must, of course, feel absolutely free to say that this is not your recollection of the matter, unless, of course, what I have written now has touched a chord in your memory.

It was nice of you to write.

Yours ever, Alec The interest of this exchange lies not so much in that it disposes of a secondor thirdhand rumour, which as reported might have been taken by readers for factual, but in the incomprehension of the constitutional position, not only on my view but on almost any view which it reveals. In the first place, a Cabinet cannot as such be concerned with the behaviour of its former members after it has been dissolved; and secondly, once Macmillan's resignation was accepted by the Queen, neither Lord Home (either before or after receiving her commission) nor anyone else could bring it together again for any purpose. The view mistakenly attributed to me is therefore one which neither I nor anyone constitutionally literate could hold or argue.

Lord Home clearly never understood the historical significance of the events of October 1963, which was that Macmillan, by publicly carrying out while still in office a process purporting to indicate who should succeed him and by communicating the result to the sovereign when relinquishing his office, effectively destroyed the royal prerogative of selecting a prime minister which until that time still existed except when the Labour Party was in a majority.

Having referred to two points at which I do feature in Lord Home's narrative, perhaps I may mention two incidents involving us both, which he does not happen to record. One is the occasion in July 1965 when he informed me, as he was informing the other members of his shadow cabinet, that he was about to resign the leadership of the Opposition. I remember saying to him, and perhaps he recalls it too, that, whatever had happened in 1963, having joined his shadow team in 1964, I would be 'the last man to leave the ship' if he decided, as hoped he would, to remain in command.

The second occasion dates from early 1971, when I was embarking on a campaign of speeches against the proposition that Britain should join the EEC. Since he was Foreign Secretary I gave him due and friendly notice of my intention. His renlY was this: 'I do wish that instead you would concentrate on making speeches on immigration, because that is so vitally important and you are so right about it.' The friendly candour was characteristic of the man. But so also was the fact that no hint ever reached the public that that was what the Foreign Secretary thought. After all, it was not the way the wind was blowing.