204 Facts About Enoch Powell

John Enoch Powell was a British politician, scholar and writer.

Enoch Powell served as Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West for the Conservative Party from 1950 to February 1974 and as MP for South Down for the Ulster Unionist Party from October 1974 to 1987.

Enoch Powell was Minister of Health from 1960 to 1963 in the second Macmillan ministry and was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence from 1965 to 1968 in the Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath.

Enoch Powell is remembered particularly for his views on British immigration.

In 1968, Enoch Powell attracted attention nationwide for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, in which he criticised immigration to the UK, and especially rapid influx from the Commonwealth.

Enoch Powell opposed the anti-discrimination Race Relations Bill.

Enoch Powell turned his back on the Conservatives and endorsed a vote for the Labour Party, which returned as a minority government.

Enoch Powell was returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party MP for the Northern Ireland constituency of South Down.

Enoch Powell represented the constituency until he was defeated at the 1987 general election.

Enoch Powell died in 1998 aged 85, and remains a divisive figure in the UK.

John Enoch Powell was born in Stechford, within the city of Birmingham, on 16 June 1912, and was baptised at Newport, Shropshire, in St Nicholas's Church, where his parents had married in 1909.

Enoch Powell was the only child of Albert Enoch Powell, a primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary Ellen, who was the daughter of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his wife Eliza, who had been a teacher.

Enoch Powell's mother did not like his name, and as a child he was known as "Jack".

At the age of three, Enoch Powell was nicknamed "the Professor" because he used to stand on a chair and describe the stuffed birds that his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home.

In 1918, the family moved to Kings Norton, Birmingham, where Enoch Powell remained until he went up to Cambridge in 1930.

Enoch Powell's great-grandfather was a coal miner, and his grandfather had been in the iron trade.

Enoch Powell read avidly from a young age; as early as three, he could "read reasonably well".

Every Sunday, Enoch Powell would give lectures to his parents on the books that he had read, and he would conduct evensong and preach a sermon.

Once he was old enough to go out on his own, Enoch Powell would walk around rural Worcestershire with the aid of Ordnance Survey maps, which instilled in him a love for landscape and cartography.

Enoch Powell was then a pupil for three years at King's Norton Grammar School for Boys before he won a scholarship to King Edward's School in Birmingham in 1925, aged 13.

Enoch Powell formed the view that Britain and Germany would fight again.

Enoch Powell's mother began teaching him Greek in the two weeks of Christmas break in 1925.

Precociously, Enoch Powell won all three of the school's classics prizes and would win more later in his school career.

Enoch Powell entered the sixth form two years before his classmates, and was remembered as a hard-working student.

Enoch Powell won a medal in gymnastics and gained a proficiency in the clarinet.

Enoch Powell contemplated studying at the Royal Academy of Music but his parents persuaded him to try for a scholarship at Cambridge.

Enoch Powell was influenced by reading James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Aged 17 Enoch Powell sat the classics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge, and won the top award.

Enoch Powell became almost a recluse and devoted his time to studying.

Enoch Powell won the Craven scholarship at the beginning of his second term in 1931.

At Cambridge, Enoch Powell won a number of prizes, including the Percy Pemberton Prize, the Porson Prize, the Yeats Prize and the Lees Knowles, the Members' prize for Latin prose, the Browne Medal, the First Chancellor's Classical Medal, and the Cromer Greek essay prize of the British Academy.

Enoch Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language.

Enoch Powell went on to learn other languages, such as Welsh, modern Greek, and Portuguese.

Enoch Powell won the Craven travelling scholarship, which he used to fund travels to Italy, where he researched Greek manuscripts.

Enoch Powell was still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933: he told his father in 1934, "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war".

Enoch Powell suffered a spiritual crisis when he heard of the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934, which shattered his vision of German culture.

Enoch Powell spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates and worked on a lexicon of Herodotus.

Since 1932, Powell had been working on the Egyptian manuscripts of J Rendel Harris and his translation from Greek into English was published in 1937.

Enoch Powell was the youngest professor in the British Empire.

Enoch Powell revised Henry Stuart Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press in 1938.

Enoch Powell's most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus, published by Cambridge University Press the same year, which was well received by critics.

Enoch Powell informed the vice-chancellor that war would soon begin in Europe and that when it did, he would be heading home to enlist in the army.

At the outbreak of war, Enoch Powell immediately returned to the UK.

In October 1939, Enoch Powell enlisted as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

Enoch Powell had trouble enlisting, as during the "Phoney War" the War Office did not want men with no military training.

Enoch Powell was promoted from private to lance-corporal and completed officer training.

Enoch Powell told colleagues that he expected to be at least a major-general by the end of the war.

On 18 May 1940, Enoch Powell was commissioned as a second lieutenant onto the General List.

Enoch Powell was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and later promoted to captain, posted as GSO3 to the 1st Armoured Division.

In October 1941, Enoch Powell was posted to Cairo and then transferred back to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

Enoch Powell was promoted to major in May 1942 and then to lieutenant colonel in August 1942.

Enoch Powell wished to be assigned to the Chindits units operating in Burma.

Enoch Powell secured a posting to the British Indian Army in Delhi as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence in August 1943.

Enoch Powell was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Lord Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command, involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab.

Enoch Powell had an ambition of eventually becoming Viceroy of India, and when Mountbatten transferred his staff to Kandy, Ceylon, Powell chose to remain in Delhi.

Enoch Powell was promoted to full colonel at the end of March 1944, as assistant director of military intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of Field Marshall William Slim.

Enoch Powell ended the war as a brigadier, for a while, the youngest in the British Army.

Enoch Powell told a colleague that he expected to be head of all military intelligence in "the next war".

Enoch Powell never experienced combat and felt guilty for having survived, writing that soldiers who did so, carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave".

Enoch Powell voted for the Labour Party in their 1945 landslide victory because he wanted to punish the Conservative Party for the Munich Agreement.

Enoch Powell was so shocked by the change of policy that he spent the whole night after it was announced walking the streets of London.

Enoch Powell came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone, the whole empire should follow it.

On 16 March 1950, Enoch Powell made his maiden speech in the House of Commons.

On 3 March 1953, Enoch Powell spoke against the Royal Titles Bill in the House of Commons.

In mid-November 1953, Enoch Powell secured a place on the 1922 Committee's executive at the third attempt.

Enoch Powell was a member of the Suez Group of MPs who were against the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal, because such a move would demonstrate, Enoch Powell argued, that the UK could no longer maintain a position there, and that any claim to the Suez Canal would therefore be illogical.

However, after the troops had left in June 1956 and the Egyptians nationalised the Canal a month later, Enoch Powell opposed the attempt to retake the canal in the Suez Crisis because he thought the British no longer had the resources to be a world power.

On 21 December 1955, Enoch Powell was appointed parliamentary secretary to Duncan Sandys at the Ministry of Housing.

Enoch Powell spoke in support of the Slum Clearances Bill, which provided entitlement for full compensation for those who purchased a house after August 1939 and still occupied it in December 1955 if this property would be compulsorily purchased by the government if it was deemed unfit for human habitation.

In early 1956, Enoch Powell attended a subcommittee on immigration control as a housing minister and advocated immigration controls.

When Macmillan replaced Eden as Prime Minister, Enoch Powell was offered the office of Financial Secretary to the Treasury on 14 January 1957.

In January 1958 Enoch Powell resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest of government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch advocate of disinflation, or, in modern terms, a monetarist, and a believer in market forces.

The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which Enoch Powell believed to be the cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less.

Enoch Powell advocated the privatisation of the Post Office and the telephone network as early as 1964.

Enoch Powell both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the Conservative Party to become a modern business-like party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network" associations.

On 27 July 1959, Enoch Powell delivered a speech in the Commons about the Hola Camp in Kenya, where eleven Mau Mau were killed after refusing work in the camp.

Enoch Powell returned to the government in July 1960, when he was appointed Health minister, although he did not become a member of the Cabinet until the 1962 reshuffle.

Enoch Powell began a debate on the neglect of psychiatric institutions, calling for them to be replaced by wards in general hospitals.

In 1993 Enoch Powell stated that the criminally insane should have never been released and that the problem was one of funding.

Enoch Powell said the new way of caring for the mentally ill cost more, not less, than the old way because community care was decentralised and intimate as well as being "more human"; and his successors had not, Powell stated, provided the money for local authorities to spend on mental health care.

However, the Minister of Health was not responsible for recruitment Enoch Powell did welcome immigrant nurses and doctors, under the condition that they were to be temporary workers training in the UK and would then return to their native countries as qualified doctors or nurses.

Shortly after becoming Minister of Health, Enoch Powell asked Rab Butler if he could be appointed to a ministerial committee which monitored immigration.

Enoch Powell was worried about the strain caused by NHS immigrants, and papers show that he wanted a stronger restriction on Commonwealth immigration than that which was passed in 1961.

In October 1963, along with Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Lord Hailsham, Enoch Powell tried in vain to persuade Butler not to serve under the Earl of Home, in the belief that the latter would be unable to form a government.

Enoch Powell commented that they had given Butler a revolver, which he had refused to use in case it made a noise or hurt anyone.

Macleod and Enoch Powell refused to serve in Lord Home's Cabinet.

Also, Enoch Powell called into question Western military commitments East of Suez:.

The Daily Telegraph journalist David Howell remarked to Andrew Alexander that Enoch Powell had "just withdrawn us from East of Suez, and received an enormous ovation because no-one understood what he was talking about".

The New York Times said Enoch Powell's speech was "a potential declaration of independence from American policy".

Labour was returned with a large majority, and Enoch Powell was retained by Heath as Shadow Defence Secretary as he believed Enoch Powell "was too dangerous to leave out".

In 1967, Enoch Powell spoke of his opposition to the immigration of Kenyan Asians to the United Kingdom after the African country's leader Jomo Kenyatta's discriminatory policies led to the flight of Asians from that country.

Enoch Powell suggested that Heath did not mean it should be ended.

Enoch Powell asked whether Heath realised that the words Black Rod used went back to the 1307 Parliament of Carlisle and were ancient even then.

Enoch Powell was renowned for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature.

Enoch Powell had repeatedly refused applications from non-Whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a "racialist" outside her home and receiving "excreta" through her letterbox.

When Heath telephoned Margaret Thatcher to tell her that he was going to sack Enoch Powell, she responded: "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis".

Enoch Powell had expressed his opposition to the Race Relations legislation being put into place by the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson at the time.

Enoch Powell made a speech in Morecambe on 11 October 1968 on the economy, setting out alternative, radical free-market policies that would later be called the 'Morecambe Budget'.

At the press conference for its publication, Enoch Powell said if the government introduced a Bill to reform the Lords he would be its "resolute enemy".

Later in 1968, when the Labour government published its Bills for the new session, Enoch Powell was angry at Heath's acceptance of the plan drawn up by the Conservative Iain Macleod and Labour's Richard Crossman to reform the Lords, titled the Parliament Bill.

Enoch Powell said the reforms were "unnecessary and undesirable" and that there was no weight in the claim that the Lords could "check or frustrate the firm intentions" of the Commons.

Enoch Powell said that only election or nomination could replace the hereditary nature of the Lords.

Enoch Powell said the Lords derived their authority not from a strict hereditary system but from its prescriptive nature: "It has long been so, and it works".

Enoch Powell then added that there was not any widespread desire for reform: he indicated a recent survey of working-class voters that showed that only one-third of them wanted to reform or abolish the House of Lords, with another third believing the Lords were an "intrinsic part of the national traditions of Britain".

Wilson's statement was brief, with Enoch Powell intervening: "Don't eat them too quickly", which provoked much laughter in the House.

Later that day Enoch Powell said in a speech to the Primrose League:.

In 1969, when it was first suggested that the United Kingdom should join the European Economic Community, Enoch Powell spoke openly of his opposition to such a move.

Johnson believed it "beyond dispute" that Enoch Powell had attracted 2.5 million votes to the Conservatives, but the Conservative vote had increased by only 1.7 million since 1966.

Enoch Powell had voted against the Schuman Declaration in 1950 and had supported entry into the European Coal and Steel Community only because he believed that it was simply a means to secure free trade.

Enoch Powell voted against the government on every one of the 104 divisions in the course of the European Communities Bill.

Enoch Powell decided to remain in parliament and in the Conservative Party, and was expected to support the party in Wolverhampton at the snap general election of February 1974 called by Edward Heath.

However, on 23 February 1974, with the election only five days away, Enoch Powell dramatically turned his back on his party, giving as the reasons that it had taken the United Kingdom into the EEC without having a mandate to do so, and that it had abandoned other manifesto commitments, so that he could no longer support it at the election.

Enoch Powell had arranged for his friend Andrew Alexander to talk to Joe Haines, the press secretary of the Labour leader Harold Wilson, about the timing of Enoch Powell's speeches against Heath.

Enoch Powell had been talking to Wilson irregularly since June 1973 during chance meetings in the gentlemen's lavatories of the "aye" lobby in the House of Commons.

Enoch Powell gave this speech at the Mecca Dance Hall in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, to an audience of 1,500, with some press reports estimating that 7,000 more had to be turned away.

Enoch Powell said the issue of British membership of the EEC was one where "if there be a conflict between the call of country and that of party, the call of country must come first":.

Enoch Powell went on to criticise the Conservative government for obtaining British membership despite the party having promised at the general election of 1970 that it would "negotiate: no more, no less" and that "the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people" would be needed if the UK were to join.

Enoch Powell denounced Heath for accusing his political opponents of lacking respect for Parliament while being "the first Prime Minister in three hundred years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country".

Enoch Powell then advocated a vote for the Labour Party:.

In 1987, Enoch Powell said there was no contradiction between urging people to vote Labour while proclaiming to be a Tory: "Many Labour members are quite good Tories".

Enoch Powell later said: "I had had my revenge on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom".

Enoch Powell repeated his call to vote Labour because of their policy on the EEC.

Since 1968, Enoch Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint, he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom.

Enoch Powell strongly believed that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate completely with the United Kingdom by abandoning devolved rule in Northern Ireland.

Enoch Powell refused to join the Orange Order, the first Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member, and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist loyalism espoused by Ian Paisley and his supporters.

Enoch Powell said terrorism was a form of warfare that could not be prevented by laws and punishments but by the aggressor's certainty that the war was impossible to win.

When Heath called a leadership election at the end of 1974, Enoch Powell claimed they would have to find someone who was not a member of the Cabinet that "without a single resignation or public dissent, not merely swallowed but advocated every single reversal of election pledge or party principle".

Enoch Powell replied she was correct to exclude him: "In the first place I am not a member of the Conservative Party and secondly, until the Conservative Party has worked its passage a very long way it will not be rejoining me".

Enoch Powell attributed Thatcher's success to luck, saying that she was faced with "supremely unattractive opponents at the time".

Enoch Powell was one of the few prominent supporters of the 'No' camp, with Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and Barbara Castle.

Enoch Powell said that the only way to stop the Provisional IRA was for Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the United Kingdom, treated the same as any other of its constituent parts.

Enoch Powell said the ambiguous nature of the region's status, with its own parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the IRA that it could be detached from the rest of the UK:.

Nonetheless, in the 1987 general election that he lost, Enoch Powell campaigned in Bangor for Jim Kilfedder, the devolutionist North Down Popular Unionist Party MP, and against Bob McCartney, who was standing as a Real Unionist on a policy of integration and equal citizenship for Northern Ireland.

Enoch Powell had a copy of a State Department Policy Statement from 15 August 1950, in which the American government said that the "agitation" caused by partition in Ireland "lessens the usefulness of Ireland in international organisations and complicates strategic planning for Europe".

Enoch Powell presented a scenario of what he thought the last resort would be, namely that the Soviet Union would be ready to invade the UK and had used a nuclear weapon on somewhere such as Rockall to demonstrate their willingness to use it:.

Enoch Powell said that after years of consideration, he had come to the conclusion that there were no "rational grounds on which the deformation of our defence preparations in the United Kingdom by our determination to maintain a current independent nuclear deterrent can be justified".

Enoch Powell criticised those who believed it was "too late to do anything" and that "there lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only adequately be described as civil war".

Enoch Powell said that the solution was "a reduction in prospective numbers as would represent re-emigration hardly less massive than the immigration which occurred in the first place".

The Shadow Home Secretary, Labour MP Roy Hattersley, criticised Enoch Powell for using "Munich beer-hall language".

On 16 July 1981, Enoch Powell gave a speech in the Commons in which he said the riots could not be understood unless one takes into consideration the fact that in some large cities, between a quarter and a half of those under 25 were immigrants or descended from immigrants.

Enoch Powell read out a letter he had received from a member of the public about immigration that included the line: "As they continue to multiply and as we can't retreat further there must be conflict".

Enoch Powell predicted "inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectively be described as civil war", and Flannery intervened again to ask what Enoch Powell knew about inner cities.

Enoch Powell replied: "I am within the judgment of the House, as I am within the judgment of the people of this country, and I am content to stand before either tribunal".

Enoch Powell disagreed with Scarman, as the report stated that the black community was alienated because it was economically disadvantaged.

Enoch Powell instead argued that the black community was alienated because it was alien.

Enoch Powell said tensions would worsen because the non-white population was growing: whereas in Lambeth it was 25 per cent, of those of secondary school age it was 40 per cent.

Enoch Powell said that the government should be honest to the people by telling them that in thirty years' time, the black population of Lambeth would have doubled in size.

Enoch Powell had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism.

Enoch Powell criticised the United Nations Security Council's resolution calling for a "peaceful solution".

Enoch Powell further said that power-sharing was a negation of democracy.

Enoch Powell denounced the "manic exaltation of the American illusion" and compared it to the "American nightmare".

Enoch Powell disliked the American belief that "they are authorised, possibly by the deity, to intervene, openly or covertly, in the internal affairs of other countries anywhere in the world".

Enoch Powell claimed that angling was much crueller and that it was just as logical to ban the boiling of live lobsters or eating live oysters.

Enoch Powell said that war could not be banished because "War is implicit in the human condition".

In 1984, Enoch Powell alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency had murdered the Earl Mountbatten of Burma and that the assassinations of the MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford were carried out at the direction of elements in the Government of the United States of America with the strategic objective of preventing Neave's policy of integration of Northern Ireland fully into the United Kingdom.

In 1986, Enoch Powell stated that the Irish National Liberation Army had not killed Neave but that "MI6 and their friends" were responsible: Enoch Powell cited as his sources information that had been disclosed to him from within the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Enoch Powell later came into conflict with Thatcher in November 1985 over her support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

When Mallon enquired why, Enoch Powell said that he had misquoted Spinoza.

Enoch Powell said, "In the minds of the Russians the inevitable commitment of the United States in such a war would have come not directly or necessarily from the stationing of American marines in Germany, but, as it came in the previous two struggles, from the ultimate involvement of the United States in any war determining the future of Europe".

At the start of 1987 general election, Enoch Powell claimed the Conservatives' prospects did not look good: "I have the feeling of 1945".

However, Enoch Powell lost his seat in the election by 731 votes to the SDLP's Eddie McGrady, mainly because of demographic and boundary changes that resulted in there being many more Irish Nationalists in the constituency than before.

McGrady paid tribute to Enoch Powell, recognising the respect he was held in by both Unionists and Nationalists in the constituency.

Enoch Powell said, "For the rest of my life when I look back on the 13 years I shall be filled with affection for the Province and its people, and their fortunes will never be out of my heart".

Enoch Powell received a warm ovation from the mostly Nationalist audience and as he walked off the platform, he said the words Edmund Burke used on the death of candidate Richard Coombe: "What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue".

Enoch Powell was offered a life peerage, which was regarded as his right as a former Cabinet minister, but he declined it.

Enoch Powell argued that as he had opposed the Life Peerages Act 1958, it would be hypocritical for him to take one.

Enoch Powell was critical of the Special Air Service shootings of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in March 1988.

Enoch Powell claimed in an article for The Guardian on 7 December 1988 that the new Western-friendly foreign policy of Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev heralded "the death and burial of the American empire".

When he visited Russia, Enoch Powell went to the graves of 600,000 people who died during the Siege of Leningrad, saying that he could not believe a people who had suffered so much would willingly start another war.

Enoch Powell went to a veterans' parade and talked with Russian soldiers with the aid of an interpreter.

However, the programme was criticised by those who believed that Enoch Powell had dismissed the Soviet Union's threat to the West since 1945 and that he had been too impressed with Russia's sense of national identity.

When German reunification was on the agenda in mid-1989, Enoch Powell said that the UK urgently needed to create an alliance with the Soviet Union in view of Germany's effect on the balance of power in Europe.

When Heath criticised Thatcher's speech in May 1989, Enoch Powell called him "the old virtuoso of the U-turn".

Enoch Powell said that "Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex".

When Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine for the leadership of the Conservative Party during November 1990, Enoch Powell said he would rejoin the party, which he had left in February 1974 over the issue of Europe, if Thatcher won, and would urge the public to support both her and, in Enoch Powell's view, national independence.

Enoch Powell's downfall was due to having so few like-minded people on European integration amongst her colleagues, and as she had adopted a line that would improve her party's popularity, it was foolish of them to force her out.

In December 1991, Enoch Powell said that "Whether Yugoslavia dissolves into two states or half a dozen states or does not dissolve at all makes no difference to the safety and well being of the United Kingdom".

Enoch Powell praised Budgen for his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty and condemned the rest of the Conservative Party for supporting it.

In late 1992, aged 80, Enoch Powell was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

On 16 May 1994, Enoch Powell spoke at the Bruges Group and said Europe had "destroyed one Prime Minister and will destroy another Prime Minister yet" and demanded that powers surrendered to the European Court of Justice to be repatriated.

Enoch Powell turned down two invitations to stand for the party in elections, citing retirement.

Enoch Powell was one of those rare people who made a difference and whose moral compass led us in the right direction.

Canon Eric James, a former Trinity College chaplain, revealed in a letter to The Times on 10 February 1998 that in his old age Enoch Powell confessed to him that he had been in love with a fellow male undergraduate at Cambridge and that this infatuation had inspired love verses published in his First Poems.

Enoch Powell subsequently became a church warden of St Margaret's, Westminster.

On 2 January 1952, the 39-year-old Enoch Powell married 26-year-old Margaret Pamela Wilson, a former colleague from the Conservative Central Office.

In Robert Shepherd's biography of Enoch Powell, it is noted that General Walter Cawthorn "became almost a second father" to him.

Enoch Powell was an anti-Stratfordian who firmly believed that William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon was not the writer of the plays and poems of Shakespeare.

Enoch Powell wrote a biography of Joseph Chamberlain in 1977.

In March 2015, The Independent reported that Enoch Powell was one of the MPs whose activities had been investigated as part of Operation Fernbridge.

Enoch Powell's name had been passed to police by Paul Butler, the Bishop of Durham, after allegations of Powell's involvement in historic child abuse had been made by one individual in the 1980s to the then Bishop of Monmouth, Dominic Walker.

Enoch Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech on 20 April 1968.

Some in the Church of England, of which Enoch Powell was a member, took a different view.

Enoch Powell voted against the reinstitution of the death penalty several times between 1969 and 1987.

Enoch Powell accepted an invitation to appear on David Frost's evening television programme on 3 January 1969.

Frost asked Enoch Powell whether or not he was a racialist, to which Enoch Powell replied:.

Enoch Powell said his views were neither genetic nor eugenic, and that he never arranged his fellow men on a merit according to their origins.

Close friends recall that Enoch Powell took great pleasure in speaking Urdu when dining at Indian restaurants.

Enoch Powell was, like other politicians such as Keith Joseph, an intellectual in the true sense of the word.

Enoch Powell would follow the logic of an intellectual argument to its conclusion, regardless of how unpalatable that conclusion was, and then present it and often expect others to appreciate his process.

Enoch Powell is usually viewed as being a racist, but that is too simplistic.

Enoch Powell was interested in what he saw as being best for Britain.

Enoch Powell's speeches and TV interviews throughout his political life displayed a suspicion towards "the Establishment" in general, and by the 1980s there was a regular expectation that he would make some sort of speech or act in a way designed to upset the government and ensure he would not be offered a life peerage, which, some believe, he had no intention of accepting so long as Edward Heath sat in the Commons.

Enoch Powell sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait in clay.

Enoch Powell appears briefly as a character in James Graham's 2021 play Best of Enemies.