Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell was born in Birmingham in 1912, the only child of two teachers. He studied classics at Cambridge, became a professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at 25, and rose from private to brigadier during the Second World War. He was elected Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West in 1950. In 1958 he resigned as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, with the Chancellor, in protest at plans for higher spending. As Minister of Health from 1960 he drew up the 1962 Hospital Plan. He stood unsuccessfully for the party leadership in 1965. On 20 April 1968 he gave a speech in Birmingham calling for immigration to be greatly limited and warning of violence, quoting a line from Virgil about the Tiber "foaming with much blood". Edward Heath dismissed him from the Shadow Cabinet. He left the Conservatives in February 1974 over the European Community, urged a vote for Labour, and sat for South Down as an Ulster Unionist until 1987.

Admirers regard Powell as one of the finest parliamentary orators of his era, a consistent defender of national sovereignty and an early advocate of the monetarist and free-market ideas later adopted by Margaret Thatcher. Critics, including many newspapers at the time, condemned the 1968 speech as racist and inflammatory. Powell denied being a racist, but the speech ended his prospects of high office. A poll after it found that 74 per cent of Britons agreed with his views on immigration. He never held senior political office again and remains one of the most divisive figures in modern British politics.