The passion, virtue and romanticism of Powell

politics of Enoch Powell which have been filled with the most intensely

felt emotion, expressed in vivid and compelling language and sustained

by an energy and commitment which must excite the wonder of all who

contemplate it. For all that, the real wonder of Mr Cosgrave's book is

that its subject was, and in his 80s triumphantly remains, a politician

at all. He is certainly no ordinary one.

Mr Powell's origins are Welsh; and in that as well as his Protestant

religious background, similar to Margaret Thatcher's, are to be found

not just his passion and virtue but his romanticism. He is a

quintessentially romantic figure both in his isolation and his contempt

for mere regard, a strange quality in a politician in a democratic

society.

Powell himself wanted to be a poet (indeed he wrote and published

poetry). He had musical talents, playing the clarinet and wanting to

play it in a band as well as an orchestra, an early sign of the surging

exuberant quality which Cosgrave identifies in him. A professor at 25

(only a year behind Nietzsche) and a brigadier at 32 (rising from

private incidentally), Powell had a brilliant scholastic and military

career but switched to politics at the end of the war when he joined the

Conservative research department as part of the generation which

included figures like Reggie Maudling and Iain Macleod.

A classicist and linguist, he never lost his scholarly aspect. It was

said that he only proposed to his wife when he discovered she had a

passable command of Latin. His mother-in-law, on hearing of the

approach, felt her daughter would ''be going on a life-long university

course.''

He has always been the most cerebral politician of his time. When

opposed to UK entry to the Common Market, Powell took his opposition to

the cities of the EC and he was able to address his audiences, French,

German or Italian, in their own language. No other British political

figures could have done the same, though in his ''cabinet ombre'' (for

shadow cabinet) he maintained the spirit of English-French in the style

to which his less gifted peers have accustomed our neighbours.

Cosgrave successfully defends Powell from many of the excesses of his

enemies. Thus the notion that he advised the re-conquest of the Indian

Empire with 10 divisions is exposed as a fabrication of R. A. Butler.

The famous speech on immigration which led to Heath's sacking Powell

from the shadow cabinet in 1968 is shown to have been in almost complete

conformity with Tory policy at the time. His resignations (for he twice

ignored Asquith's famous dictum ''never resign'') are explained, as is

his advice to vote Labour, because of the Common Market, in 1974. He

emerges as austere, though not lacking in humour, but never devious or

conspiratorial.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he lacked the politician's

gifts all the same. His intelligence may have been a trap. For example,

reading Rommel's infantry manual led him seriously to underestimate that

soldier's leadership gifts (the opposite conclusion of most 8th Army

officers) because of the book's inadequacies. Iain Macleod, a friend and

colleague, spoke of Powell's ''excess of logic.''

Civil servants at the Ministry of Housing found him hard and

inflexible: and inflexibility was a common complaint, for once Powell's

mind was made up he was almost impossible to shift. He could change his

mind -- Cosgrave notices several examples -- and he never tried to

conceal the fact but his analytic and presentational skills were so

great that he could maintain his position with conviction. The trouble

was that he thought, and felt deeply, over the whole range of politics

and wanted to maintain his right to express himself freely. All

politicians have to bite their lips: Powell was not good at that, though

he did for long restrain his views on the irrelevance of the independent

nuclear deterrent: as early as 1949 he insisted ''the atom bomb cannot

be used.''

''Not a good colleague,'' thought many colleagues; ''not clubbable,''

he says himself. Never a team player at school, and a loner at

university, he was also something of a loner in the House of Commons

(and that is how Michael Foot identified him in an interesting essay).

A politician, however, has to appeal. Powell did appeal, but over the

heads of his immediate colleagues, and over the heads of Parliament to

the people directly. Yet he never sought to organise that appeal or make

it a challenge to the existing parties. He was always a party man, even

when he left the Tories (to return transmogrified as an Ulster Unionist)

and advised voting Labour.

Powell is a great original. He throws himself into everything.

Incandescent and volcanic are words commonly applied to him. Cosgrave

sees him as British Nationalist and applies this to Powell's views on

subjects as various as immigration, Ulster, the House of Lords and

parliamentary sovereignty (in relation to the EC).

He is successfully defended here from the charge of racialism but he

is not presented as either an easy or natural political figure, though

on a range of matters, from inflation through the market economy to

floating currencies, he always seems to have been more right than wrong.

The Lives of Enoch Powell by Patrick Cosgrave. Bodley Head, #16.