Enoch Powell: The lonesome leader

Abstract

IntroductionBy all accounts Enoch Powell was not someone you would warm to, but his personal awkwardness was offset by his enduring popular appeal - a charisma that enabled support for his political causes to cross class boundaries and party affiliations. Despite his education and erudition - or perhaps because of it - he appealed to the working classes and Labour voters, and appeared as a man speaking truth unto power, unafraid to break the political taboos of the day and thereby appealing to individuals who similarly felt silenced by political developments. Therefore his mass appeal lay in his projection of himself as an outsider: the middle-class parvenu surrounded by Tory grandees; the spokesman for the oppressed white majority; the lone voice against Europe in the Conservative Party; the defender of Protestant Ulster's freedom. Support for such causes may have been the death knell for his leadership ambitions, as he was unable to make the enduring connections necessary for such a role; however, his leadership existed in a less formal sense than through a political party or government. Powell's political appeal lay in the fact that he was a selfconsciously lonesome leader.We can view Powell as both an exemplar and an articulator of a post -imperial English nationalism, but one deeply rooted in the experience of empire. Here, then, is what Jonathan Hearn has referred to as the 'ecology' of Powell's national identity and indeed his nationalism. Hearn argues that 'the relationship between categorical and personal identities will always be mediated by intervening forms of social organisation'.1 For Powell, these social categories meditating his sense of national self were empire, state and locality. But here we run into a difficulty in examining English nationalism through a biographical approach to Enoch Powell: Powell not only identified strongly with England, but he also expressed it for others. To paraphrase Hearn, he fused his individual agency with the larger agency of the nation.2 But this was not merely an individual quest for power within one's life. Powell sought to mobilise the English and British nation for political ends at a distinct moment in political time when previous national narratives were in flux. Powell self-consciously moved 'against the historical flow', talking of England as a nation nearing the end of its natural life and crucially under threat. But he also cast himself 'against the flow' of other social categories, notably party, in order to increase his popular appeal. Thus, his political charisma - in distinct contrast with his personal charisma - lay in an ambivalent relationship to the 'ecology' in which he operated: strongly influenced by a brief experience of empire, a deep veneration of the English state, but breaking free of the confines of party and living the life of a political loner in order to speak for the nation.The Myth of PowellOn 25 February 1974, John Enoch Powell rose to address an audience in Saltaire in Yorkshire. On this occasion he commanded an audience of an estimated 1000 people with another 1000 having been turned away. One older member of the audience claimed to have walked six miles to see Powell speak.3 This was a large audience for someone who was formally outside politics, having stood down as MP for Wolverhampton South-West at the beginning of the month. But in the previous six years, Powell had become one of the best-known and most controversial political figures in British politics. The audience cheered him and chanted his name as he rose to speak for the second time in a week on his decision to oppose the party he had been a member of only weeks before. The issue was Britain's membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), the advent of which Powell could not reconcile in his conscience. This was the issue that led to his decision not to stand for re-election and indeed to advocate voting for the Labour opposition on polling day. …