Can't we talk about it?(Enoch Powell)

NEARLY NINETY, "Bill" Deedes, simply carries on with his career as England's most interesting journalist. Along the way he has managed, just incidentally, a stint as an honourable as well as an Honourable MP and cabinet minister, and to win an unobtrusive Military Cross in the Second World War. Now in the House of Lords, he remains what he has always been--his own man, and a thoughtful and lucid one into the bargain. A recent issue of the Spectator (18th August) published the latest product of a lively pen still at work, all the better for the vast experience which drives it.

His piece is entitled "The Real Trouble with Enoch", and of course it is about Enoch Powell, stirrer and stormy petrel of British politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Deedes makes no reference to Australia. Yet so much of his thrust relates to our present-day circumstances that I am surprised no local paper seems to have republished it. (They frequently do reprint Spectator material. Was this one too near the knuckle?)

Enoch Powell himself lived briefly in Australia when, at age twenty-five, he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. (I have been told that one of his students was Gough Whitlam.)

Some years ago Gwyn James, my honoured predecessor as head of Melbourne University Press, who had taught history, told me of his own recollections of Enoch Powell when they were both at Sydney. "Powell set the Sydney campus on fire," said James. "Just think, he was only in his twenties, but he was a most commanding personality, quite apart from his outstanding scholarship."

On the day the Second World War was declared (James went on) Powell announced: "I am finished with Greek"; on his study door he posted a notice: "GONE TO SERVE MY COUNTRY". He wangled a quick passage to England on one of the old Empire flying-boats, and was obliged to travel without luggage. In his pockets were a toothbrush and a beginner's Russian grammar--a more useful language just then, reasoned Powell, than classical Greek was likely to be.

Arrived in England, he joined the Warwickshires ("I understand their dialect") as a private soldier. By war's end he was a brigadier. It was, by any measurement, a remarkable career, even up to that point.

Then he went into politics, as a Conservative Party member in the House of Commons. He had three cardinal disqualifications for high achievement in the snake-pit of party politics: his towering intellect, his total integrity, and his courageous (not to say ferocious) powers of articulation. And indeed his path in politics was not smooth, nor did it lead to success.