Anatomy of Enoch Powell
POLITICIANS QUINTIN HOGG, MP
I have always reckoned myself one of Enoch's admirers. To begin with, look how many legends he destroys. They say we have no `char- acters' nowadays. Well, if Nabarro is too crude, Sandys too pontifical, Winnick too small, what about Enoch, a character, a card, a maverick, even an eccentric if ever there was one? They think (though they seldom dare to say) that clever men are all dishonest, that professors are unpractical, that politicians are humourless and drab. Well, bring out Enoch, as clever as the proverbial bag of monkeys, and as men go, honest and good, professor and brigadier, intel- lectual and Minister of Health, travelling on the tube in his hunting pink to a meet of foxhounds, visiting the South of Spain in Harris tweed and a Balaclava helmet because he has worked out that it will keep him cooL Moreover, I do like a man who knows Greek and goes to church on Sundays.
Then consider the immense industry of the man. On my desk, as I write, is A Nation Un- afraid, a hundred and fifty pages of Enoch's speeches, hardly a tithe selected from little more than a twelve months' output, on twenty or thirty different subjects, economics, defence, trade unions, foreign policy, patriotism. The mind boggles at the work involved, the re- search, the writing, the copying, the handouts and the travelling, for, needless to say, they were delivered all over the country. You name it, he has it: Thucydides, the House of Lords, the slim volume of poems, politics, the lot.
I admire, too, his passionate loathing of non- sense, or at least what he regards as nonsense, including some of my own opinions. I find this immensely therapeutic, and as the main targets of his somewhat Manichaean approach to life The Government's position on Rhodesia re- mains the same : no sell-out, no force, no door-slamming, and no policy.' are my enemies as well, most of the time I enjoy the explosions of his dynamite, and borrow a few sticks of it for my own use.
The trouble is, and I must now confess it, I do not take the old boy quite so seriously as I should. His views have changed too bewilder- ingly on too many subjects in too short a time to be serious candidates for infallibility. He has nearly ditched his party twice before 1968 by half-baked judgments on practical issues. His estimate of the power of the human reason, and not least his own, in predicting the prob- able course of future events, I regard as alto- gether excessive. In short, he over-simplifies, and in actual practice he often backs long- priced losers of his own selection in the belief that they are certain winners even if they are not odds-on favourites.
Because of his virtues (which I genuinely love) and in spite of his limitations (which I love all the more) I was frankly horrified at his speech on immigration. Fundamentally, it was not worthy of Enoch. To begin with, it was un- scholarly. His figures, to quote Mr T. E. Utley's latest assessment (Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking, published by William }Umber at 30s), were `almost certainly a false estimate'; in- deed, his actual examples at least in one case probably mythical, and certainly unverified double hearsay. Mr Utley condemns the `genera- lity and unoriginality' of the practical conclu- sions, the 'skirting round of the one major moral dilemma which has perplexed the Tories in the past year,' and the omission of `an essential stage in the argument.' With all this I agree, but in candour I am bound to add that, unlike Mr Utley, I found the speech demagogic. I cannot agree that it was `manifestly not intended to inflame the crowd' (unless you limit yourself to the audience in the hall) or that it would not be `at all likely to provoke acts of violence.' It was, and it did. Worse still, I found .Epoch's own attitude about it frankly disingenuous. After exclaiming : `I can already hear the chorus of execration' how can Enoch claim, and how can Mr Utley accept, that he was 'wholly astonished at the stir he had caused'?
The real value of Mr Utley's book is not his resurrection of the immigration speech, which, to my mind, was an unhappy aberration, but to point out that Enoch has a great deal more to say to the world than talk about the Tiber foaming with blood. Despite an undue atten- tion to the speech, which he condemns, Mr Utley disinters the seriousness, the ability, the industry, and the coherent economic thinking of a man whose claim to be heard is indubit- able, even by his opponents, of whom I am certainly not one.
I hope not to seem churlish, however, if I point to two general weaknesses in Enoch's argumentation,. for it seems to me that his logic is over-praised. The first is over-simplification. The second is his fundamental negativeness. Like the Socialists be condemns, almost all his errors are due to the cocksure omission of some of the significant factors in the calculation. The result is a caricature, valuable as such, but not a portrait, of reality. As exercises in demolition, his speeches are admirable, and immensely wholesome even when they 'are not conclusive. But his positive conclusions are weak. Ask him, .Well, what exactly do you propose?' and he falls back on official party pamphlets. All very well. But then these are supposed to be ex- amples of Baal worship, not good enough for Elijah.
Mr Utley concludes with the assertion, which I would have thought premature for an out- sider to make, that Mr Heath's dismissal of Enoch from the Shadow Cabinet was 'impetu- ous' and a 'serious mistake.' This surely must depend on what ultimately comes of it. There can be no question of Mr Powell's permanent exclusion from the higher councils of the party, unless he chooses voluntary exile, as he has done twice before. But if, at length, he learns that even he is not quite infallible on every subject, and that he owes, both to himself and to others, a certain duty of caution in utter- ance, and if he comes to recognise an obliga- tion towards his colleagues to consult on matters of importance and of common concern, nothing but good can come of it. As Rab would have said, I wish him well.
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