Powell among the Irish tribes
Christopher Walker
Banbridge, Co. Down It is one of the great ironies of the present election that the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell. A man whose views on race are too well known to need repeating, is now guaranteed to regain what must be his last chance of a parliamentary seat as a direct result of the tribal voting patterns which dominate every poll in Northern Ireland. The outcome here always depends more on crude sectarian arithmetic than any debate about issues.
It is equally revealing about the murky backwaters of politics which Mr Powell now inhabits that his Westminster future was ensured only by a decision taken last Saturday by Cecil Harvey, a political nonentity and retired commercial traveller for Beecham's Powders, who bowed to heavy pressure from the powerful Orange Order and withdrew his candidature for the South Down constituency. Until then, Mr Harvey had been attracting a steady stream of bemused pundits to the cramped backroom of the sub post office which he now manages, and from which incongruous spot it appeared that the campaign which would eventually unseat Mr Powell was going to be mounted. Not one of those who subsequently wrote stirring accounts of the battle to come appreciated the extent to which a staunch Protestant like Mr Harvey would be prepared to renege on all his public pledges if the result of his candidature was even half likely to assist a member of the Roman Catholic faith in being returned to the House of Commons.
Had Mr Harvey gone ahead with his longstanding threat to contest South Down on behalf of the extreme and otherwise irrelevant loyalist splinter group, the United Ulster Unionist Party, there was more than an even chance that, a month before his 67th birthday, Mr Powell would have seen his majority of 3,567 overturned. Now, as a result of the built-in Protestant majority among the 91,000-strong electorate and the bitter internal divisions between the various Roman Catholic parties contesting the seat, there is little possibility, besides natural disaster, of his being defeated.
Not that Mr Powell's expected victory will indicate that he has won any great affection during his five years as official Unionist MP for the constituency — although there is evidence, talking to voters among its rolling green hills and stern market towns, that he has gained considerable respect. Had the distinctly uncharismatic Mr Harvey pursued his campaign along the lines with which he had begun it, there were already signs that two factors above all would have deprived Mr Powell of sufficient Protestant votes to lose him the seat: his undisguised enthusiasm for aspects of the Labour Party's policy and a steadfast refusal to bend to the local mood and reverse a lifelong opposition to any form of capital punishment.
What made the challenge to Mr Powell so worrying for members of his official Unionist Party was not the abilities of Mr Harvey or even his close connections with the Paisleyite church (themselves worth a few thousand votes without even a foot being set on the stump), but the undeniable hostility towards the sitting MP by a sizeable number of South Down Protestants. Stories of Mr Powell's tactlessness, his English mannerisms and physicial remoteness have flourished in the constituency since the first day of his arrival, when he was quickly dubbed 'The Wolverhampton Wanderer'. Promising to campaign on what may charitably be described as a limited platform, Mr Harvey had made it plain in his own shrill way that he intended to capitalise on all these alleged faults, and in addition proceeded to lambast Mr Powell in the local press for his preference for integration rather than devolution for Ulster.
There is no doubt that since his unlikely transplant from the mainstream of British politics, Mr Powell has impressed many Unionists here with his intellectual abilities, his skill at exploiting a hung parliament for their benefit and his appetite for hard work. But, handicapped by his awkward personal manner, he conspicuously failed to adapt to the intimate style of politics favoured throughout the 750 square miles of his constituency. This was once summed up by William Whitelaw, who complained that the trouble with running Ulster was that everyone expected to reach a cabinet minister by phone if a cow was having trouble giving birth to a calf.
Certainly Mr Powell has done many of the right things. He has purchased a converted railway worker's cottage in the heart of the constituency, he has acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of local flora, fauna, history and geography and he has been diligent in pursuing written complaints from Protestant and Roman Catholic constituents alike. But he still gives the impression that he would be happier in South Eaton Place, he still sticks out like a tailor's dummy when walking stiffly through the local streets (admitting frankly to journalists that he hates electioneering) and he has patently failed to eradicate the strong suspicion that, despite a long standing interest in the Ulster crisis, he is using South Down to prop up what little remains of his own political career.
Even before Mr Harvey's eleventh-hour capitulation, Mr Powell had been running a surprisingly low-key campaign which opened days later than his rivals with an obscure and uninformative press conference in the tiny front room of his cottage, an embarrassing occasion only enlivened by the very late arrival of one Conor Cruise O'Brien, clutching a reporter's notebook and giving as his excuse a rambling account of having been held up by a nearby funeral. It is not yet clear whether the switch from the energetic pace of the 1 974 campaign Is dictated by complacency or by the pressing needs of personal security. Certainly it Is widely known that Mr Powell is regarded as a prime assassination target by Republican extremists, and he was promptly assigned two bodyguards in the wake of AireY Neave's murder.
Despite his personal vulnerability, Mr Powell consistently distances himself from the daily brutality of the IRA's newlYescalated terrorist campaign in a manner which infuriates even his closest supporters. Last week, he appeared bewilderinglY ignorant at his press briefing that, several hours earlier, a massive bomb had killed four policemen less than ten miles from his own home. More damagingly, he had refused all attempts by members of the local Unionist Association to persuade him to visit constituents bereaved by terrorism, or even to issue the ritual condemnations of IRA atrocities which are the stock-in trade of successful Ulster politicians: 'on one occasion he was within a few hundred yards of a farm whose owner had been gunned down, but he refused absolutely to go and give the family a few words of comfort, complained one party stalwart, 'there is 110 getting away from the unfortunate fact that he is a very cold fish'.
But such complaints do little to disturb the confidence of Mr Powell's well-oiled election machine, whose all-Protestant membership delights in the deep divisions to be found in the Roman Catholic camp. The only contender of any consequence is Edward McGrady, a hard-working SDLP council chairman who — despite a likeabl.e manner — clearly lacks the political flair which enabled his predecessor to attain an unexpected 30,000 votes in 1974. Apart from that, Mr McGrady faces fierce cornpetition for the Catholic vote from both the Republican clubs and the newly-formed Irish Independence Party which is campaigning under the increasingly familia! 'Brits out' slogan. Of the other three candidates, little need be said except that the onlY other Englishman, a Peter Courtney froin Rochdale, appears to share the arrogance which had done Mr Powell so much political harm in South Down. Representing the previously unheard-of Reform Party, which is calling for a Geneva Conference on the Northern Ireland crisis, the unknown IVI.r Courtney told reporters last week: 'It Is time for fresh thinking on Ulster. I flatter myself that I am the man to do it'.
Previous page
