IN his time, he was probably the most repulsive politician on the scene, first in British politics, when he accurately predicted the rise of racial tension but in terms that made the nastiest and most bone headed racist feel intellectually justified; later in the North, where he performed the same service for the Unionists. Like Conor Cruise O'Brien he never learned that absolute logic is the curse of politics or that compromise is the bedrock of real democracy.
Having nailed my colours to the mast, I must make it clear that Robert Shepherd's biography of Enoch Powell is one of the most riveting books about a British politician likely to be written for many a long day. Powell is notoriously not one of your homogenised, inflated gas bags that Yes Minister so successfully guyed, still less a dishonest, scheming conniver like the anti hero of The Politician's Wife. Quite the reverse, quite the reverse.
Powell was so strait laced that you wanted to kick him. His basilisk stare, his accent that defiantly placed him somewhat below the median on the English social scale, his academic achievement (professor of Greek at Sydney when he was 25), his meteoric climb from private to brigadier in the second World War, his inexorable rise to the Cabinet under Macmillan followed by his equally fated resignation on a matter of principle - the package is a formidable one, and the least likely reaction is indifference.
The curious thing about Powell is that for a man so blatantly self sufficient, so private, you would think, he wrestles so publicly with his soul. Molten emotion is held stoically in restraint by that inscrutable face. Who, having heard it, will forget that extraordinary interview in which, when asked how he would like to be remembered, he paused dramatically then replied with casual intensity "I should like to have been killed in the war"? Guilt at survival was commoner after the shared pain of the trenches in the first World War than the more open warfare of the second (and Powell, in any case, was basically a desk soldier).
How much is self image, though, carefully cultivated to the extent of self deception, by pushing a given situation to its logical and ultimate limit? To be a soldier is to die heroically - dulce et decorum est - and therefore not to die is an unbearable failure. Powell's early habit of writing poetry long abandoned - apart from an annual offering to his wile, is bookish and formalistic, reminiscent of a previous generation, more like a plaything than a vehicle for passionate feeling.
"I dreamt", he writes in a sonnet, "I saw with waking eyes the scene./So often in imagination wrought, /The flame wall in the night at Alamein ... It was not too late, he thought, he would join his friends who had gone before. But then I woke, and recollection came/That I for ever and alone remain/On this side of the separating flame.
Oddly, though, on the evidence of this book, Powell had no friends so intimate that their loss could have evoked this deep sense of inner desolation; perhaps he was expressing a generalised lacrimae rerum. His passionate love affair, one sided, some years later when he was a rising star in the Conservative Party back room has the same air of stylised detachment from reality. The same Heine-esque I dreamt, this time on a mountain crest As in the sheep cropped grass we lay, /The word that ever at my breast/Leap and are striving to be spoke/Suddenly I began to say . . When it was over, and the young lady married someone else, he sent her a gold cigarette case which, when opened, "revealed the head of a snarling fox". One cannot help feeling this was a more honest statement than any verse.
The theme running through all of Powell's life was of a painful process of arriving at conclusions - Mr Shepherd describes them as "theological certainties" - and then "to worry at any disagreement and to regard any concession as a major defeat". An early example of his ability to give himself heart and soul was his espousal of German as an offshoot of his classical scholarship. Having used the language as a vehicle for poetry and academic studies, and for his deep immersion in the philosophy of Nietzsche, he was utterly distraught at the rise of Hitler and his thugs which punctured the romantic dream.
Similarly with the free market theories of Friedrich von Hayek which marked Powell's break from the Tory Party of Macmillan, and would have made him, ironically, a pillar of the Thatcherite revolution, had he been younger and not already found other reasons to distance himself from the Conservative Party (in fact, he and Margaret Thatcher had a mutual distaste for each other). It is not difficult to see his extraordinary shift from the British midlands to South Down, where he was elected as Ulster Unionist MP in October 1974, as his final effort to nail down an illusion and bring it to reality.
As with the British referendum on EC membership in 1974, his involvement during the troublesome decade that ended with the signing of the Anglo Irish Agreement in 1985 was doomed to failure. Most unionists respected him, but many disagreed profoundly with his integrationist stance which logically connected with his imperialism after experience of India in the second World War, the issue that brought him into politics. So the wheel had turned full circle.
But he was always a loner, never a pack animal. My principal recollection of Powell, apart from a debate with him on German television in which he spoke fluent but old fashioned German, was of seeing him at the count when he was finally defeated in South Down in June 1987 by Eddie McGrady of the SDLR Seated on his own, withdrawn from the political turmoil swirling around him, ignored in his defeat by the local unionists, he was going at last into the long night of political oblivion.