UK Edition
A play in Birmingham dramatises events around Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered there in April 1968. Powell asked me to write his biography and we spent hours discussing this episode, which ended his front-bench career but made him the best-known politician in Britain.
The play’s publicity asks whether it is right that anti-immigrant sentiments (of constituents, quoted by Powell) should be dramatised today. Powell was no racist: he simply believed that if uncontrolled immigration were to be permitted, the people should be consulted – which they were not. His view has an obvious resonance, and should remind us that Leave’s victory was in part Powell’s victory, even though he has been dead for nearly 20 years.
It is a shame that the play re-heats this one aspect of Powell’s thought when so much else should serve to remind us how visionary he was. He first spoke against our membership of what became the EU in 1969, and he resigned over the Macmillan government’s failure to implement a proper monetary policy – a policy Mrs Thatcher adopted in 1979 – in 1958.
He was the greatest man I have ever known, and history will be kind to him.
Fifa, whores and gangsters
It was refreshing that the Prime Minister should articulate the nation’s disgust at the attempt by Fifa to stop England footballers wearing poppies on their shirts in a World Cup qualifier next Friday.
Fifa is an organisation whose morals are a mixture of those of a whore and a mafioso. For it to object to the honouring of the Glorious Dead is monstrous. The poppy is not a “political symbol”: it is a symbol of sacrifice and of the debt of honour we owe to those who died fighting for our country in a century’s worth of wars, often against countries that are also Fifa members.
But more to the point, I cannot fathom why we wish to play in a World Cup in Russia, which was awarded corruptly, and whose country’s fans seemed in Marseille last summer to have set out not just to fight with, but to murder, England supporters.
Not just a sore loser but graceless too
Lord Bamford, chairman of JCB, gave £4 million to the Tory party under David Cameron’s leadership. He also provided endless photo opportunities for Mr Cameron whenever he wished to brag about British industry. Months ago, Lord Bamford was asked to Mr Cameron’s 50th birthday party, held in an Oxfordshire stately pile.
But he then committed the sin of donating £100,000 to the Leave campaign: and an outraged friend of his tells me he was telephoned and asked not to attend the party.
I can understand Mr Cameron being a sore loser, but such a lack of grace is indicative of something rather unwholesome.
Enoch Powell was the greatest man I have ever known, and history will be kind to him