Radio
Powell's legacy
Michael Vestey
Interviewing Enoch Powell could be an unnerving experience. He would fix you throughout with an unwavering bleak stare that bored right through you and reply with sentences that were perfectly formed but which were so long and abstract in their logic that your brain was flat out trying to grasp precisely what he meant. That is, if you weren't so mesmerised by the passion behind his stone-like features and the strange gaseous Brummie voice that your attention wandered from what he was saying.
Still, it was always an event which can't be said of contact with most politicians, even those holding high office which, of course, Powell never did. Even the grandeur of the foreign secretary's vast office couldn't make an interview with Sir Geoffrey Howe eventful. I first encoun- tered Powell at the Commons the night in March 1979 that the Callaghan government lost a vote of confidence by one vote and had to resign. Reporting for the Today pro- gramme, I approached a red-faced Denis Healey and asked for an interview. 'What's Today?' boomed Healey. Enoch Powell happened to be passing. 'Tuesday,' he quipped, smiling like a cat.
When Powell died this year his obituaries took up more space than any other I could remember; there can be few people about whom we know so much and yet so little. Radio Four tried to enlighten us this week with Enoch Powell: A Career Considered, produced by Dennis Sewell and presented by Michael White of the Guardian. It was a well-made, interesting programme, even- handed too, but at the end his true charac- ter remained, for me anyway, still somewhat elusive.
White asked if Powell would be one of those 'exotic footnotes' in the history of Britain but his defenders argued that Pow- ell was right about most things. Lady Thatcher said he was one of the first peo- ple to realise inflation was nothing to do with prices and incomes but the money supply. He was consistent on Europe. His warnings in the early Seventies about the threat to Britain's democracy and political independence by membership of what was then the Common Market make many of us wonder why we didn't listen to him then.
His biographer Simon Heifer, a great admirer and friend of Powell's, conceded that his 'rivers of blood' and 'piccaninny' speech in Birmingham in 1968 was the biggest miscalculation of his career. Powell believed Edward Heath wouldn't sack him from the opposition front bench but Heath had been looking for an excuse for years. Nicholas Budgen, who succeeded Powell in his Wolverhampton seat, talked of the hypocrisy of the British political establish- ment. Party grandees and those from com- fortable backgrounds simply couldn't understand the tensions in working-class areas over race. James Callaghan, he said, was rude about Powell but then set about reducing the rate of immigration as hard as he could.
Although Powell was right to raise the issue, his language was wrong for such a sensitive and potentially dangerous issue. The Labour minister Paul Boateng, 'I was then one of those piccaninnies', remem- bered how he was shouted and spat at in the street the day after Powell's speech. For someone with such a great intellect Powell was foolish not to realise what he might unleash with such language. He failed to become leader of the Tory party, but when you compare his achievements with those of Heath what do you have? There is free-market Powellism which even this Labour government is observing and in Heath's case there is a discredited, ruinous and undemocratic European Union. Powell didn't have to become prime minister to leave a better legacy.
It's amazing to think that Powell was once a member of the same party as Edwina Currie. She has a new show on Radio Five Live on Saturday and Sunday nights, Late Night Currie, a fairly standard mish-mash of interviews, news, sport and a phone-in. The start of her first show was delayed 20 minutes by commentary of an ice-hockey match, of all things, and when it did get under way it wasn't as tasteless as its earlier promotion might have suggested.
Currie had said, `I'd like to get between the sheets with millions of people, tickle them and get them thinking, and I'm sure they'll respond accordingly.' One can see the metaphor, of course, but on the same note of vulgarity she might just as well have said, 'Jump into my knickers and broaden your horizons.' In the event, Currie didn't tickle us or get us thinking though she managed to make us feel sorry for Clare Short, the international development secre- tary, something I had not thought possible.
`I'm sorry, but I'm unclear as to who eats whom.' Short told Currie that she'd been 'shocked incredibly' by some of the misbehaviour of her colleagues after they'd formed the gov- ernment. She thought they'd all behave reasonably to each other, poor thing. But she had now come to accept that some people are nasty.
It was really quite funny, the notion of a Labour collegiate tendency. Doesn't she realise they all hate each other?
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