In 1974 Powell’s ‘vote Labour’ appeal was at least delivered so as to leave a little more time for it to sink in, and there was certainly something very odd that happened at the end of the campaign to Conservative expectations, particularly in the West Midlands. But there was a mismatch between Powell’s power and his objective. His power sprang from the populist nature of his views on immigration. But he could not in his right mind have wished to shift votes to Labour on that issue. Heath might be bad from this point of view, but Wilson was worse. What made him want to move votes was the European issue, where his conviction was passionate but based on abstract and highly intellectualized views about sovereignty and the nature of national identity.
Inevitably there was some difficulty about using the shovel for a task different from the purpose for which it had been made. In any event he was markedly unsuccessful a year later in persuading Tories to vote ‘no’ in the European referendum. I find it difficult to believe that they had found it easier a year earlier to accept his still more jolting advice to vote Labour on the issue.
The paradox of Cosgrave’s book is that he is better on Enoch Powell as an extraordinary and interesting man than he is upon him as a politician. It is a paradox because the author is a devout political follower who is prepared to defend even the most perverse of his subject’s swoops as being yet another example of his ‘logic and honour’, while he appears to find some of his personal idiosyncrasies as mysterious as do others.
Even so, the book is not at all bad politically until it comes to the last hundred pages, when for some inexplicable reason (unless it be the dead hand of Ulster) it goes to pieces. It then becomes inaccurate (a whole constitutional theory is created upon Barbara Castle’s attempt to reform industrial relations in 1967, a year in which she was still Minister of Transport, and even the month of the European referendum is wrongly stated), without sense of proportion (there are pages on an allegedly plot-sustaining academic interview given by some obscure official in the Northern Ireland Office), inconsequential, and cloying. ‘Look upon him. Learn from him. You will not see his like again,’ as the concluding passage of the book is the language of monuments, not of rational biography of someone who happily is still alive.
Three-quarters of the book, however, is much better than this. It is very well written in a measured yet gripping tone with a perfectly acceptable degree of partisanship which avoids both shrillness and the need to decry the hero’s opponents. Occasionally a fairly breathtaking statement is slipped in, as when he says that there have been only two occasions when politicians have spoken with a full moral authority this century: the first was Churchill in 1940 and the second was Powell in 1970, this second authority stemming, as far as I can follow the argument, from the popular response to the Birmingham ‘River Tiber foaming with much blood’ speech in 1968. This is odd, for while there are some things in this book and outside it that have made me think more highly of Enoch Powell than I did twenty years ago, that speech still seems to me a tawdry affair, stuffed with cheap sentiment and demagogic intent.
Yet, as Powell has always been such a contradictory figure, that has not been incompatible with fastidious scholarship and noble actions. The meticulousness of his scholarship, the range of his knowledge, and the (maybe somewhat mechanical) quality of his linguistic skill all leave me gasping with a mixture of admiration and intimidation. So do his self-sufficiency and harsh self-discipline. When Powell went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930 he worked, mostly shut up in his rooms, from 5.30 in the morning until 9.30 at night, and refused an invitation to dine from the Master’s wife on the ground that he was too busy. He took an hour off for a walk each day, but did it unvaryingly to the station and back because that was the right distance.
In personal relations I find him as unpredictable as did Lady Thomson of Trinity (for it was the great J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and the presiding genius who made the Cavendish Laboratory the world centre of experimental physics, who was then Master). I assume Powell has mostly deeply disapproved of me. But when I published a rather light biographical essay on Baldwin, he wrote a review that was not only very friendly but also the most perceptive of what I was trying to do. Equally at the Cambridge union in 1984, after I had been ill for a couple of months, he suddenly launched into a public tribute that was way beyond the call of politeness. I was rather moved and thought it an appropriate peg on which to improve relations, for we had previously stalked past each other without acknowledgement in the corridors of the House of Commons. On the next occasion I made to speak. He stalked even more rigidly than usual.