Iain Norman Macleod, the fifty year old Minister of Information in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom might, in other circumstances, have assumed the premiership on Edward Heath’s tragic death in Washington a little over a month ago. A less noble or a less politically astute operator would have seized the opportunity without a second thought. But he’d known the time was wrong — at some time in the future it might be right — and more importantly, he hadn’t known if his premiership commanded the Chiefs of Staff of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the Army, or Her Majesty, the Queen’s, unqualified support. Without the backing of the three Chiefs of Staff and the Monarch no man, or woman, could rule in this sorely fractured land. Pragmatically, his sponsorship, counsel and public approbation of the new Prime Minister had guaranteed him what he’d been denied for much of the last year, a privileged seat within the inner circle of Government. He would settle for this for the time being and loyally fight battles like that ahead of him tonight, with every ounce of true blue gusto and zeal he could muster; no matter how much blood, sweat, tears and electoral collateral had to be spilled in the process. If tonight went badly wrong the Party in the country might split down sectional, ideological lines because if there was one man in England who had it in his hands to consign them all to political obscurity for a generation, it was the haunting figure peering one-eyed into the dark mass of his supporters.
In the next few minutes Airey Neave and Iain Macleod understood that they might glimpse the shape of things to come. The Minister of Information’s recent encounters with John Enoch Powell had been painful personally — to see his old friend so grievously injured and at one point at death’s door — and politically, because every inch of shared ground beneath their feet had evaporated since the October War. Partly, this had been because of the compromises every member of the initial United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had had to make to one, form the UKIEA in the first place; and two, to stop it falling to pieces every time something went wrong. Enoch Powell and compromise had always been uneasy bedfellows; and likewise, he and Ted Heath had never been natural confederates.
“We stand at a crossroads in the history of these Isles,” the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West declared in that oddly captivating, fascinating nasal way that was his and his alone. “Through tragedy and trial we now emerge into what we all hope will be what our last great leader, Winston Churchill, might have described as the ‘sunlit uplands’ of a future redolent with possibilities for the betterment of our people.”
Iain Macleod’s expression was fixed, his sombre smile painted rictus-like across his face; next to him in the front row Airey Neave groaned audibly. The Minister of Information reached for his cigarettes — one of the first boons of the new Anglo-American rapprochement was a flood of Virginia tobacco and US manufactured filter-tipped cigarettes — and lit up, suspecting this was going to be an even longer evening than he feared. He’d chain smoked most of his adult life and the enforced privations of the last year had turned him into a quarrelsome, agitated tartar at times. But then what was a man without his vices? It was a peculiarity of his career that he’d first caught the eye of eye of the then Prime Minister, poor dear, departed Winston Churchill, in 1952 when he’d given Aneurin Bevan — the darling of the Labour Party — a roasting in a debate on the National Health Service. Later, as Minister of Health, Iain Macleod had — in the face of vehement and angry protestations from the tobacco industry — announced the scientifically proven link between smoking and lung cancer. Nevertheless, he chain smoked because, and he knew it well, men were essentially contrary animals.
In post World War II British politics there had been few men as contrary as John Enoch Powell, and now that contrariness threatened to run amok at the worst possible time for the new Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
Airey Neave felt his blood pressure rising by the second. There was something about Enoch Powell that had always brought out the worst in him. The man’s observations on the elevation of his dear friend, Margaret Thatcher to the premiership, while outrageously beyond the pale were oddly in keeping with both the man, and the conduct of his life and career to date.
Fifty-one year old John Enoch Powell was the most brilliantly gifted prima donna, a man to whom everything came easily and as if by natural right. He came from a middle-class background, was educated at King’s Norton Grammar School and later, King Edward’s School in Birmingham. In 1930 he had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he encountered and had fallen a little under the thrall of the poet A.E. Houseman — then Professor of Latin at Trinity — and the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche. Not content with attaining a double starred first in Latin and Greek, the young tyro learned Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies in London; this latter because one day he intended to one day become Viceroy of India. At the time it was unclear whether this was youthful bravura or a genuine reflection of the man’s over-weaning ambition. Many of the stories about the young Enoch Powell were apocryphal of course and deserved to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The problem was that the man never did anything to disentangle fact from myth. Although Powell was fluent in Welsh, Portuguese, and later Russian; he never claimed he wanted to be Prince of Wales or to replace the dictator, Salazar, in Lisbon, less still to be the man to restore the Romanov’s to the throne.
“We live in strange and aberrant times, my friends,” the great man proclaimed. “We live in times in which the normal standards of political life and democratic accountability are held wilfully in abeyance by an unelected, unaccountable polity that nobody in this room was ever given the chance to vote for, or would, in my humble estimation, have voted for had they been given the opportunity.”
After winning a clutch of prestigious Classics prizes and graduating with a Double First, Powell had stayed on at Cambridge studying ancient manuscripts and churning out a plethora of academic papers. In 1937 at the age of twenty-five he had travelled to Australia to take up a professorship in Greek at the University of Sydney, publishing in 1938 his signature scholarly contribution to the Classical world, the Lexicon to Herodotus.
Like so many stars of post-Second World War British politics he had been appalled by the appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis in the later 1930s and the tardiness of British rearmament.
“Not only did the previous incumbent, Edward Heath, arbitrarily dismiss and for a short time imprison, good and true men who had served their country and this Party honourably all their lives,” the poison dripped from the twisted corners of the speaker’s mouth, “but he had the bare-faced gall to maintain that he did what he did for the national good!” The one, blazing eye settled on the two ministers, surrounded by their mixed cadre of Royal Marine and Special Branch bodyguards. “Earlier this evening we heard Missis Thatcher’s co-conspirators and apologists utter their weasel words in a pusillanimous defence of the indefensible!”
This prompted a low growling groundswell of anger. The objects of the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West’s ire — both thick-skinned and resilient old soldiers hardened by the experience of the last year — were comforted by the knowledge that not everybody in the hall was actually out for their blood. Just ninety percent of them.
Arriving home from Australia in September 1939, Enoch Powell had enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Only two men in the British Army enlisted as a private soldier and were promoted to Brigadier General by its close. The other man was Fitzroy Maclean. Unlike Fitzroy Maclean, a veteran of daring commando raids in the Western Desert who had later fought with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, Enoch Powell had never seen action. He had spent the war filling mainly intelligence and senior staff posts in England, Egypt and the Far East. Reputedly, he once so infuriated Orde Wingate, the legendary leader of the Chindits in Burma that that Wingate asked a friend to stop him if he ever looked like he was going to ‘beat Powell’s brains in’. Both Airey Neave and Iain Macleod would have gladly testified under oath that Enoch Powell was exactly the sort of comrade in arms who often moved those closest to him to want to ‘beat in his brains’.