Enoch Powell, RIP.

ENOCH Powell was a member of the House of Commons for nearly 37 years, a Cabinet minister for 15 months, and prime minister never. Yet, in the history of twentieth-century British conservatism, he ranks with Winston Churchill as an orator and Margaret Thatcher as an ideological force.

There has been no other political figure remotely like him. He was a rigorous scholar -- professor of Greek at the age of 25 --relentlessly, even gleefully, following the logic of an argument to its often uncomfortable conclusion. He was a speaker whose every sentence emerged lucid, grammatically and syntactically correct, and yet powered by an almost mystical zeal. He could make an audience of seaside landladies enjoy a lecture on monetarism. And he was a man of the strictest principle, repeatedly damaging his own career by refusing to fudge or compromise.

Such a man was never likely to prosper within the system. As an editorial in the London Telegraph observed, "He suffered among his political contemporaries as a man with perfect pitch suffers among the tone-deaf."

His governmental prospects were ended by a single speech delivered in 1968, when he warned of social disaster if the flood of Afro-Caribbean immigration continued. "Like the Roman," he said, quoting Virgil, "I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood."' Liberal opinion was outraged, and Edward Heath promptly sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet. Simultaneously, a considerable section of the non-intellectual British public, seeing him as the first politician to articulate their own fears, made him a hero. But what became known, misleadingly, as "the rivers-of-blood speech" distracted attention from everything else he said.

Logic led him into curious positions. A romantic imperialist, he was deeply saddened by Britain's loss of India, a country he loved: but, once it had taken place, he wanted a complete withdrawal from east of Suez. A romantic soldier (the youngest brigadier in the wartime British army), he denied the value of a nuclear deterrent which no one believed would really be used. A romantic patriot, he argued against subservience to American policy no less than against subservience to Europe.

But in one field at least, his ideas have triumphed. There was "Powellism" before there was "Thatcherism." He tirelessly preached the virtues of a free market; that fixed exchange rates are madness; that an "income policy" is absurd; that inflation is a government-caused monetary phenomenon; that high taxation can be avoided only when governments stop doing things which they ought not to be doing. Margaret Thatcher learned much of her economic philosophy from Powell, and the message has been partly absorbed even by Tony Blair's "New Labor."

"All political careers," Powell once said, "end in failure." His own was manifestly unfulfilled: but the words of the Prophet Enoch will be read, recalled, and discussed long after his more conventionally successful opponents have dwindled into footnotes in a PhD thesis.