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Enoch Powell, who died more than 20 years ago, is today best known as a pot-stirring populist whose inflammatory anti-migrant rhetoric descended into outright racism. Indeed Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 led Edward Heath, then leader of the opposition, to sack him from his post as defence spokesman in the shadow cabinet. Later, Powell became a Tory outcast, spending the last decade of his parliamentary career as an Ulster Unionist MP – estranged from the party that, under Heath, took Britain into the European Community.
While most politicians find that their ideas become obsolescent within, and occasionally well before, the end of their lifetimes, Powell’s blend of Euroscepticism and English nationalism is enjoying an influential afterlife in the era of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. Kenneth Clarke – himself a vivid example of the obsolete: a Europhile Tory – claimed in 2017 that Powell would have been amazed at the extent to which the post-referendum Conservatives, “Eurosceptic and mildly anti-immigrant”, had embraced his ideas.