The lack of 'ainicitia' of Enoch Powell
Patrick Cosgrave
It is sad, and it should be unnecessary, to have to engage in a dispute of detail with Mr Enoch Powell. Nonetheless, to such a dispute I must devote my space this week.
Let me say at once why I made my opening remark in that way. Often — and most notably in a piece published on this page in the issue of May 25, 1974 — I have praised Mr Powell as a man of large, and perhaps indispensable, imagination. He is also, as we all know, a man who pays great, and even finicky, attention to detail. This detail is very often right; sometimes wrong; and frequently — given Mr Powell's attribution of importance to it — of a nature which impedes cooperation between himself and those in the Conservative Party who ought to be his allies.
In our issue of February 15 last, in the second of two articles, I criticised Mr Powell's attacks on Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph. In essence Mr Powell had said that Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith were corrupt, and unworthy of loyalty, in that they had attacked or criticised the economic record of the Heath government only after it had fallen from power, while they had not the courage to attack it while they were still members of it. This he called "recantation without penalty." I applied the same phrase of judgement to Mr Powell's decision to oppose our membership of the Common Market only after he had been dismissed by Mr Heath from the Shadow Cabinet. Mr Powell has written to me on the matter, thus: Dear Patrick, You have mistaken what I have been saying. 1 have not said that a politician or a minister may not honourably change his mind, and even change it again: I have said that he cannot honourably break, or concur in breaking, the terms on which he sought and holds his seat or his office at the time.
In remaining a member of Macmillan's government, when it applied to join the EEC, I broke no promise, personal or party. In concluding, between 1963 and 1969, that the EEC could not, as I had supposed, be turned into a free trade area, I broke no promise, personal or party. In promising in 1970 that I would do all in my power to prevent. Britain being a member of the EEC, I did nothing that I was not authorised to do by my party leader's express declaration of liberty of decision on this subject for individual Conservative members. I kept my promise and am keeping it still.
Yours ever, Enoch Now, there is clearly a difference between Mr Powell's judgement and my own. But the context of Mr Powell's letter and that of my article of February 15 are quite different, and I should observe first that Mr Powell's context is much narrower than my own (see the excessive attention to detail I mentioned earlier) and, second, that my context is far more encompassing of all the problems that our country now faces than is that of Mr Powell.
As to the detail of Mr Powell's letter, I will mention only rather narrow facts. Mr Powell says that he was "concluding, between 1963 and 1969" that the EEC could not be made into a free trade area and thus, by implication, concluding that he could not support it (i.e. as a federalist organisation). However, he does not, as he should have been able to do, dispute the accuracy of my account of a meeting with him at Cambridge in 1966 (given in my article of February 15) when, 1 having argued that the EEC was federalist by its nature, he said that he was convinced that joining was the right thing to do. When he refers to his (then) party leader's "express declaration of liberty of decision on this subject for individual Conservative members" he presumably refers to the free vote allowed Conservative Members of Parliament in the famous October 1971 free vote on the EEC. He cannot — and it is interesting that he does not — refer to Mr Heath's famous pledge, made in Opposition, that Britain would not enter the Communities without the full-hearted consent of the people. (That pledge, Mr Powell and I would agree, was grossly violated; though the manner and character of its violation could be a matter of honourable dispute.) Possibly, however, Mr Powell is referring to an assurance, couched in almost the same words he uses in his letter to me, given by Mr Heath to Conservative candidates in a (reasonably) private document in 1970. Mr Heath did not observe the terms of that assurance. But we Cannot, surely, reasonably assume that it was Mr Heath's bullying that drove Mr Powell from Conservative politics. And all the evidence is that Mrs Thatcher will honourably observe a promise she did not make — in other words, there will be no bullying of conscientious Tory anti-Marketeers under the new Conservative leadership.
There is some more narrow detail. In his letter Mr Powell wholly avoids my criticism of his view that Tory anti-Marketeers who stood as Conservative candidates in February 1975 were corrupt. I said, in polite words, that it was a silly criticism, for it would have left the Conservative Party in Parliament bereft of anti-Marketeers. Now, some of us read the Treaty of Rome a long time ago; and concluded that it was federalist. Mr Powell tells me that it took him from 1963 to 1969 to arrive at the same conclusion. I cannot believe that his own judgement of his mental processes does justice to their quality, to his own powers of intellectual analysis, or to the view his admirers take of his capacity for making decisions. And it is very nearly incredible that anybody of intelligence could have thought that the EEC might have become a free trade area after the failure of Mr Maudling's negotiations to that end. Further, leaving aside the individual tactics employed by certain of Mr Heath's henchmen, there was no going back in principle on the part of the Conservative Party from that declaration in favour of freedom of conscience to Tory members to which Mr Powell refers in his letter — if, indeed, he is referring to Mr Heath's 1970 undertaking. I could go on for pages arguing with Mr Powell about the central matter of his letter and of my article — the relationship between his sense of his own consistency and his attacks on the consistency of others, notably Mrs Thatcher's and Sir Keith Joseph's — but it would be a pointless effort on both our parts. believe Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith to be nn more and no less honourable than Mr Powell; and, on the evidence of his own letter, they took rather less time to make up their minds on crucial matters (in their case matters of economic policy) than he did. What Mr Powell appears to resent about their record is that it lacks a gesture — neither resigned in 1972, when Mr Heath adopted an incomes policy. It might equally be said that Mr Powell has resigned too often.
What I find both disturbing and offensive about Mr Powell's behaviour in recent weeks — and I have never before used so harsh a word about the member for South Down — is his imputation of dishonesty and dishonour to the new leader of what was once his party; and to one of her closest allies. Mr Powell has, indeed, gone out of his way to be offensive to Mrs Thatcher. Not only did he impugn her honour while she was mounting her challenge to Mr Heath; but in an interview in the Daily Mail the day after her election he repeated his accusations; and in a subsequent speech he repeated them yet again. Neither his honour nor his logic required such behaviour; and the tone of cool and clear consistency of argument which appears in Mr Powell's letter to me finds no echo in what I described in my article of February 15 as "the endless elaboration of his own scorn." Mr Powell's behaviour has been sad and regrettable: it may be unforgivable. .
I have only one or two other points to make. In his Birmingham speech during the campaign of February last year Mr Powell said that the engine of 'British democracy was party. But parties cannot exist unless people can work together, and want to work together. Again, Mr Powell observed in the same campaign that the Tory who regarded Britain's exit from the EEC as vital need have no problems about voting Labour, because the domestic economic policy of the then Conservative leadership was more collectivist than that announced by the Labour Party. The same argument was used in The Spectator's election leader, and supported by Mr Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times, and by myself and Sir Robin Williams in BBC's Midweek programme on the night of Mr Powell's Birmingham speech. A serious dileM.ma would arise, Mr Powell continued, only if the Conservative Party had a genuinely anti-socialist programme and leadership. That dilemma has now arisen; and it has arisen, moreover, under a Conservative leader wba has made it clear that under her there will be no persecution of dissent such as has disfigured Tory politics for some years. Mr Henry Fairlie judged that what counted Mr Powell out of British politics in the long run was his inability to practise amicitia, the Roman virtue of getting on with like-naindect colleagues. I would never have believed it until now. Churchill once observed that he would happily have served in a Chamberlain government: he was not asked, and he was lucky not to have been asked, but he would have served. Mr Powell denies himself the luxury of the compromises of a greater man. And he denies himself in the most emphatic way possible, with the maximum offence to those who might have been his friends. He is, alas, more concerned with himself than with party, the engine of our democracy, or, as I believe, with. country. It Is not only, sad, as I said at the beginning, but tiresome.
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