by Alwyn Turner
This distrust of London began almost where the city’s borders ended. Michael Palin, visiting friends in Guildford in 1971, noted in his diary: ‘They talked about “London” as a descriptive term for all rather suspect, critical, left-wing, un-British opinions.’ This was very much Powell’s potential constituency. In this version of modern British history, society had moved too far, too fast, and the metropolitan elite, seduced by the post-war consensus in Westminster and Whitehall, had lost touch with the people it claimed to represent. Disillusionment with parties, with the very structures of politics, was growing apace and Powell was seen by millions to be the only hope, the man who expressed the rage of Caliban at not seeing his own face in the mirror.
In the 1970 election, Powell’s contribution was the subject of huge press coverage. With Heath widely expected to lose, there was little doubt among commentators that Powell was positioning himself for a leader ship challenge in the aftermath of defeat. His words were superficially supportive of the party, but his colleagues were not fooled as to their intent: ‘I hope and believe that Mr Enoch Powell will learn to support the policy of the Conservative Party,’ warned Quintin Hogg, ‘but the Conservative Party does not support Mr Powell.’ Meanwhile, so intense were the feelings that he stirred that he had a police guard mounted on his home, and at the local Conservative Association all the signs identifying the building were taken down: ‘Bolts are on the front door, and sticky tape criss-crosses all the ground-floor windows – to stop the glass shattering if bricks are thrown.’
Harold Wilson, well aware of the populist potential of Powell, instructed that Labour politicians should simply avoid all reference to him, in the hope that race would not become an issue in the campaign. But there was one man who was prepared to break the embargo, and who ensured front-page headlines both for himself and, more especially, for his target: AMAZING ATTACK ON ENOCH screamed the Sun; THE ENOCH PERIL warned the Daily Mirror, while the Daily Telegraph clarified the source of the outrage: ‘BELSEN FLAG’ JIBE BY BENN AT POWELL. ‘The most evil feature of Powell’s new Conservatism is the hatred it is stirring up,’ Tony Benn said in a speech that received saturation coverage. ‘It has started with an attack on Asians and blacks. But when hate is released it quickly gets out of control. Already Powell has spoken against the Irish. Anti-Semitism is waiting to be exploited as Mosley exploited it before. Every single religious or racial minority can be made the scapegoat for every problem we face.’ Invoking Mosley was bad enough, but Benn went further with a particularly personal attack that he regretted almost immediately: ‘The flag hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered over Dachau and Belsen.’
The severity of the charge, linking a former cabinet minister to the Holocaust, was without parallel in British politics and it ‘changed the whole emphasis of the Labour campaign’. Actual supporters of Powell were thin on the ground in the media, save in the self-proclaimed reactionary world of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column (which claimed that the metaphorical flag was ‘beginning to look, from some angles, uncannily like the Union Jack’), but the condemnation of Benn was close to universal: a ‘grotesque exaggeration’ said Sir Keith Joseph, ‘savage and senseless’ said the Mirror, ‘silly and extravagant’ said Sun columnist Jon Akass. Powell himself had the most authoritative response of all: ‘In 1939,’ he replied, with seething dignity, ‘I voluntarily returned from Australia to this country to serve as a private soldier against Germany and Nazism.’
With the benefit of hindsight, some of the responses to the Benn–Powell clash are rich in irony. ‘Mostly he talks about money,’ Akass wrote dismissively of Powell’s then unfashionable monetarist arguments. ‘He has an arid and austere gospel, a theory that the Labour Government is ruining the country by printing money. I do not think that this proposition will win many votes.’ Meanwhile the former BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and now Tory MP, Christopher Chataway, mocked Labour’s attempt to paint Powell as a future leader of the party: ‘It is nonsense, of course. It would make as much sense for us to try to threaten the nation with Michael Foot as leader of the Labour Party.’ Thirteen years later, Powell’s monetarist god-daughter was to trounce the Labour leader, Michael Foot, at the polls.
Beyond these diversions, Benn’s speech was one of the crucial events of the campaign. As the psephologists, in the wake of Wilson’s unexpected defeat, desperately attempted to explain what had happened, the Harris polling organization ‘reckoned that Benn made the biggest mistake of the campaign by attacking Powell, since immigration was almost the only issue on which the Tories had a better poll rating than Labour.’ For Powell as a constituency MP, the election was a triumphant vindication, despite the claims of commentators that ‘what he is saying will not swing votes among intelligent people.’ ENOCH DOUBLES HIS MAJORITY read the second-tier headline on the front page of the Sun’s post-election issue, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The power of his appeal was critical in swinging working-class votes to the Tories, thereby ensuring the success of his arch-enemy, Ted Heath, and guaranteeing that he, four years older than Heath, would be frozen out of the Conservative leadership. His popularity had effectively destroyed his own ambition. Unless, of course, the situation in the country degenerated to such an extent that he was called upon as a strongman figure, much as Colonel Monkton had been in Who Killed Enoch Powell? Which scenario was not far from his own thinking.
Effectively Powell was going into internal exile. In the early 1960s he had been compared to Robespierre, in tribute to his incorruptible intellectual certainty; now he was hoping that parallels might be found with another French figure, aiming at the model of Charles de Gaulle, who ostentatiously retired to his estate in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises in 1953, only to be recalled to become president when the Fourth Republic collapsed. Shades of de Gaulle were everywhere apparent in Powell’s position during the Heath years. In 1972 he visited Alan Clark, then a young right-wing Tory MP, who recorded in his diary that Powell ‘would not say how he hoped to attain power’; his only strategy appeared to be that ‘the Lord will provide.’ Another diarist, Tony Benn, noted in 1973: ‘At the Commons I saw John Biffen who told me, “Enoch Powell is waiting for the call.”’
That call never did come, but the image of the politician who wouldn’t be silenced, who spoke the truth at the expense of his career, proved remarkably resilient, even if it was almost exclusively associated with his arguments about race and immigration. In 1977, just as the Tories were moving towards the sound-money economics he had long preached, a spin-off novel from the TV series The Sweeney was demonstrating how his
name had already passed into the language. ‘Joe’s as straight as a die,’ says a long-distance trucker. ‘He’s also very right-wing, a right Enoch-Poweller. Me, I don’t mind the Pakis coming in to join their husbands and fathers. I agree with you it’s a crying shame to keep families apart – let one in, you’ve got to let them all in. But Joe won’t see it that way.’ Such followers seldom worried about the finer points of Powell’s intellectual rationalizations, instead invoking his name as a talisman to support primitive prejudice. In one of the Hazell novels by Gordon Williams and Terry Venables, a minicab driver dismisses the driving ability of ‘nig-nogs’: ‘Not their fault I suppose, they just ain’t got the brains for it. Enoch Powell, squire, he knows the score.’ His other reputation was as a great pontificator; in Coronation Street Ena Sharples once complained that Albert Tatlock was too opinionated: ‘You’re worse than Enoch Powell.’
The extensive references in the fiction of the period demonstrate that, despite his dry-as-a-bone faith in the capitalist market – except where it touched the free movement of labour – Powell had an appeal and a public recognition that reached into the unlikeliest of places.
The comedian Charlie Williams was born in Yorkshire in 1929, the son of a white woman and a Barbadian ex-soldier; at 14 he went to work as a miner, before spending twelve years as a professional footballer with Doncaster Rovers. He s
ubsequently turned to the club circuit, singing and telling jokes, the punch-lines of which he would invariably greet with a raucous cackle. ‘He had great energy,’ Lenny Henry wrote in a personal tribute on his death. ‘When he came on stage, you were swept away by his good will and his grown up-ness. He had been poor, he had been a part of this country, and he had seen and endured things that people in the audience would never know about because they hadn’t been in his skin.’ When in 1971 ITV picked up a handful of club comics and put them together on the show The Comedians, Williams became an instant star and probably the most recognizable black Englishman. As such, his attitude to Powell was ambivalent. ‘It sounds daft coming from me,’ he argued, ‘but in some ways you’ve got to go along with Enoch Powell. I reckon that immigration should be on a measured scale and under proper control.’ It was a different version of Powell, however, that featured regularly in Williams’s routines, one that was transformed into a nightmarish figure with a psychopathic hatred of Pakistanis:
Enoch Powell went to the prime minister and said: ‘After I’m dead, I’d like you to get 300 Pakistanis, and I want them all to stamp on my grave.’ Prime minister: ‘Are you sure, Enoch?’
Enoch: ‘I’m quite sure. In fact 400, if you can round them up.’ Prime minister: ‘Fair enough. Where do you want to be buried?’ Enoch: ‘At sea.’
Jos White, another black stand-up who broke out from working men’s clubs to make a name for himself on The Comedians, told gags in a similar vein:
Enoch Powell was seen crying on top of a cliff. Someone said: ‘Why are you crying?’
He said, ‘I just saw this bus load of Pakistanis go over the edge of the cliff.’
The other replied, ‘And you’re crying about it? Why?’
Enoch said, ‘There were two empty seats.’
While this public perception was developing, Powell himself was proving to be the gadfly of the Tory party, and, as Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion, once noted: ‘There is nothing weighty or authoritative about a gadfly, yet for all that its sting has sometimes so tickled or exasperated the noblest of the brutes that his plunging reactions have changed the very course of history.’ Powell voted against his own party on 115 occasions in the lifetime of the Heath government, more than any other MP, and kept a small but dedicated group of followers who, like him, hoped that his day might yet come. He also provided inspiration for the man who would become his greatest rival as a populist but controversial political figure, capable of attracting the most extreme of reactions from friend and foe alike. ‘Tony Benn,’ wrote Susan Crosland, ‘saw himself as the left-wing answer to Enoch Powell calling in the wilderness.’
Though he would sometimes appear on the same side of a political debate, Benn shared none of Powell’s principles, save those of courtesy, calmness and a fiercely proclaimed devotion to both Parliament and the power of reason. Characteristic of their differences was their attitude to Christianity: on the one side, Benn came from a Congregationalist background and found little problem in reconciling the message of the Gospels with a socialist interpretation of society; on the other, Powell was the most unorthodox of modern Anglicans, insisting that ‘I find it insuperably difficult to draw deductions from my Christian religion as to the choices which lie open to me in my political life.’
In his approach to seeking political influence, however, Benn drew heavily on Powell. Like him, he too was compared to Robespierre and sought instead the more comforting example of de Gaulle: ‘I should give serious and thoughtful lectures and try to get my message across that way,’ he wrote in his diary on New Year’s Eve, 1975. ‘That is the Colombey-les-deux-Eglises strategy of waiting and arguing because the media have made me out to be destructive and fanatical, just as they did Enoch Powell. Yet I have slogged it out and soldiered on. I am not what they make me out to be and truth will out . . .’
One other thing was shared by the two men: the sense of exasperation they inspired in their colleagues, who struggled to understand what it was that drove them to adopt so cheerfully the label of maverick. The Tory minister Ian Gilmour saw in Powell’s stance on immigration ‘some combination of ambition, frustration and lack of judgement’, a view echoed by Labour MP Austin Mitchell when he wrote of Benn: ‘Whether the motive was ambition, incompetently pursued, or a propensity to take intellectual enthusiasm to absurd conclusions, was never clear.’ As Michael Foot was later to point out: ‘Tony fell out with his colleagues in almost every group he ever worked with.’ In both cases, at a time when the choice of party leader was decided by sitting MPs, their ability to antagonize their immediate electorate did little to enhance their prospects of achieving the highest office.
A third-generation MP, Tony Benn came from a family of established radicalism and, having fought long and successfully to rid himself of the title of the 2nd Viscount Stansgate that he had inherited on his father’s death in 1960, he emerged as the very epitome of Harold Wilson’s technological socialism. As postmaster general and then as minister of technology, he flung himself into a series of initiatives that seemed to reflect his fascination for gadgetry of all kinds, from the Post Office Tower to Concorde, from colour television to the Giro Bank. Amongst his many contributions to the everyday life of the nation, commemorative stamps and postcodes were introduced, telephone numbers lost their three-letter area codes and pirate radio stations were outlawed.
Even during this period of office, however, Benn was beginning to feel the need to spread his wings. The election defeat offered him the opportunity so to do; he spent 1970–73 in the cocoon of opposition, entering it as a Wilsonian caterpillar espousing the virtues of efficiency and modernization, and emerging as a socialist butterfly. Determined to reforge the links between the party and the working class, he displayed a passionate espousal of workerism: ‘This is the way forward in industry. I have no doubts about it,’ he noted just before the 1970 election. ‘You have got to recognize that the shop stewards do now represent power in factories and you have to deal with them and give them higher status in your thinking than the customers or the shareholders because they are the guys that build the product.’ By 1973 he was firmly fixed on his future course: ‘The most significant development in my own thinking in the last three years,’ he told his diary, ‘has been a recognition that the trade union movement not only has to defend its own rights and should be supported by us but ought to have a joint programme with the party.’
During this period too, he became the chairman of the party, taking office in October 1971 and chairing the 1972 conference. His tenure coincided with a wave of discontent from the constituency members, following what was seen as the elitism of the Wilson government. ‘At present the upper reaches of this party seem to resemble a vast bed where the privileged indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation, while participation is by invitation only,’ said a delegate at the 1970 conference, adding hopefully: ‘The rest of us want to join in the fun.’ The response of Benn, who had already argued that ‘leadership does come from below’, was to launch a campaign known as Participation 1972, an early attempt to build what would later become known as a rainbow coalition, bringing in pressure groups, single-issue campaigners, churches and others to help debate the future of Labour politics. (‘Why not add Women’s Lib and the “gay” groups?’ a party official was heard to sneer, emphasizing how much work had yet to be done.)
Of these two strands in Benn’s thinking – the celebration of the working class and the embrace of new political forces – it was the former that was to attract the most suspicion in the ’70s, even within the labour movement, where his background was never entirely forgotten. ‘Benn has an aristocratic disdain for British workers which he skilfully camouflages with empty rhetoric,’ wrote Frank Chapple, leader of the electricians’ union. ‘He dismisses the views of the great bulk of workers and shop stewards and blames the media for brainwashing them.’ Chapple went on to say that ‘there was no one for whom I felt such a profound contempt over the years a
s I did for Benn.’ (Benn’s own feelings for Chapple were less combative: ‘I like him, in a curious way, though he’s a thug.’) Austin Mitchell similarly pointed to his origins, saying that Benn venerated ‘the working class, its traditions and institutions and particularly the trade unions, as only someone from a genuine upper-class background can’. And even those who had kinder words to say didn’t fail to mention class: ‘Tony’s weakness was his inordinate love of the working-class Party members, and they loved and adored him in return,’ noted Labour MP, Joe Ashton. ‘He had the natural charm of a polite public schoolboy.’ It was an image enhanced by a deceptively youthful complexion and by clear, teetotal eyes that seemed permanently widened in an attitude of frank amazement at the state of the world.
Aware of these charges that he was, in the phraseology of the 1930s, little more than a Bollinger Bolshevik, Benn underwent a personal as well as a political change in the early 1970s. In the words of Michael Foot, he ‘was transformed – the word is too weak; reincarnated might be better.’ He began with his name. He had never used the title Lord Stansgate, but through the 1950s and ’60s he had been known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, commonly abbreviated to Wedgie; now, as his move leftward became more pronounced, so too did his desire to divest himself of the clearly non-proletarian moniker. ‘Today I had the idea that I would resign my Privy Councillorship, my MA and all my honorary doctorates in order to strip myself of what the world had to offer,’ he wrote in 1972, ‘but whether this would be a good idea, I don’t know. But “Wedgie Benn” and “the Rt Honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn” and all that stuff is impossible. I have been Tony Benn in Bristol for a long time.’ He informed the BBC the following year that that was how he was to be referred to in future.