Anatomy of Enoch Powell
LETTERS
From Geoffrey Grigson, D. E. Folkes, T. C. Skeffington-Lodge, Mrs F. R. Leavis, Lilian von Versen, R. L. Travers, R. T. M. Lindsay. Beverley Woodroffe, Geoffrey Birch, Rev Edmund ilogu, Elizabeth Ferguson, Ronald W. Clark.
Sir: So Mr Hogg 'wishes well' to Mr Powell (27 September). One wouldn't wish Mr Powell to fall under a bus: but if Mr Hogg would care to know why a very great number of the English shrink and squirm when they allow themselves to regard the top brass of his party, a small part of the answer is that any of them can be expected to write so coy and smiling an article as Mr Hogg's about Mr Powell.
This talk of loving Enoch Powell's eccen- tricities and limitations means that Mr Hogg loathes his belly, his walk, his stalk, his opinions, and wishes that such a foolish em- barrassment could be sent out next Wednesday to govern the Falkland Islands for ever. But he hasn't the nerve or virtue to say so. If he said, 'I consider Enoch Powell an ass with malign opinions, and I detest him politically, and dis- own him,' one would think better of political Toryism. Instead he wraps a reproof in the verbiage of senior common rooms; and one re- members one semi-Tory crawling round the backside of the Labour party for a peerage (and arguing to himself that he was doing nothing of the kind)—and another Tory hurriedly divesting himself of a peerage in the hope of snatching office as Prime Minister.
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