Enoch Powell was not a racist
Ian Mcdiarmid tells Ben Lawrence why the politician doesn’t deserve to be demonised
When Ian Mcdiarmid was offered the chance to play Enoch Powell, his thoughts immediately turned to the famous “Rivers of blood” speech, which the MP for Wolverhampton South West presented to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968: “Oh God, I thought, that horrible racist.”
In the speech, Powell warned of uncontrolled immigration from the Commonwealth to the United Kingdom, spoke of seeing “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” and criticised the then-labour government’s Race Relations Bill, which made it illegal to refuse housing or employment to someone on the grounds of their colour or their race. It caused a political storm and the following day Edward Heath sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet.
But while Powell has become a totem for intolerance, the private man was infinitely more complex and surprising. These paradoxes have been worked into a play, What Shadows, by Chris Hannan, which received a critically admired premiere at Birmingham Rep last year and now returns for runs in Edinburgh and London.
Mcdiarmid, 73, and perhaps best known for playing Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars films, says that he had no idea how the play, and particularly that speech (much of which makes it into What Shadows verbatim), would go down in Birmingham. “There was a good ethnic mix there and people of all ages. They sat there open-mouthed, in fact. It was as if they could not believe what they were listening to.”
However, the after-show talks, in which Mcdiarmid participated, were rather more problematic. “One guy was very much in favour of Powell and rather disappointed by the fact that I wasn’t. Another person was appalled that we were even attempting to stage this in the 21st century.”
On the next leg, Mcdiarmid will play at the Park Theatre in north London, just minutes away from where, in June, one man was killed and several people injured when Darren Osborne drove a van into a group of predominantly Muslim people outside the Finsbury Park Mosque. “I am a little nervous about it,” he says. “But I have presented Powell as a rounded character, so whatever people’s pre-judged views are, they will hopefully see someone who is very much a human being.”
I meet Mcdiarmid during rehearsals at Camden’s Irish Centre in north London. He’s a fit and compact-looking man, with watery blue eyes and a slight Scottish east coast lilt. To imagine him as the tall, darkly charismatic Powell, who spoke with a certain adamantine curtness, is a stretch. “I think he was quite a bit taller than me, but he walked with a stoop and would then, on occasion, rise to his full height,” explains Mcdiarmid. “And with the voice, I have to do enough to identify him but, at the same time, avoid impersonation because then you’re moving into satire.”
Powell’s voice is key, partly because it gives resonance to the famous speech and partly because it provides a clue to his intellectualism. When interviewed, Powell would always ask the journalist to outline his terms, and approached each question as if it were on the Cambridge entrance exam. Mcdiarmid quotes one such interrogation with the Birmingham Post one month later, in which Powell was asked whether he believed himself to be a “racialist”.
“He said, ‘What I would take racialist to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief. So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is no – unless, perhaps, it is to be a racialist in reverse.’”
In that same interview, Powell professed that Indians were superior in many ways, intellectually, to white Europeans. “He loved India and it wasn’t a colonialist love,” says Mcdiarmid. “He thought that good could be done in terms of individual humanity.”
During his research, Mcdiarmid found himself drawn to Powell’s mass of contradictions. Firstly, there was his erudition: a brilliant classics scholar, Powell finished a three-hour Greek examination at Cambridge in half the time, during which he produced translations in the styles of Plato and Thucydides.
“He had a solitary life at Cambridge,” says Mcdiarmid. “He didn’t know what to do with himself. He got up very early each morning, put one bar on his electric fire and worked and worked and worked. There is a mystery to him, which provides such juice for an actor.
“He was a romantic nationalist, he was artistically inclined, he loved poetry. I have read the early poems and they’re not bad. They are intensely erotic and passionate and people say that some of them were addressed to a man [which might explain why Powell, who later married, was an early advocate of gay rights]. We don’t know that for certain, but they are a young man’s poems. One of his teachers at Cambridge was AE Housman – and you can see, therefore, why Powell’s poetry is about the land. He loved autumn and there’s a great line in the play: ‘The rooks are full of foreboding – it puts me at ease.’”
Powell’s romanticism often went into some dark corners of the psyche. “It’s terrible to read that Powell wished he had died in the Second World War,” says Mcdiarmid. “At a time when we thought we were going to lose the war, he assumed he was going to be killed and was disappointed when he survived.” This disappointment was linked to Powell’s sense that the old world order he loved was being replaced by something of little consequence. “He thought that the Commonwealth was a sham version of the British Empire. He didn’t see it as a real thing – he saw it as a construct.”
What Shadows portrays Powell both in 1968 and in 1992 when, aged 80, he is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Hannan imagines a confrontation between the ageing politician and a (fictional) smart young black Oxford academic, Rose Cruickshank, who takes him to task on the repercussions of what he said 24 years earlier. Does Mcdiarmid believe that Powell was, in fact, right in any sense?
“I suppose in terms of the numbers he was. For him, it was all about numbers. I think everyone accepts now that it [immigration] can’t go on in an unlimited way because the results, as he said, would be catastrophic. But in other ways he was wrong – revolts such as the Poll Tax riots were manifestations of [the civil unrest] he was talking about, but there hasn’t been the wholesale street revolution that Powell predicted.”
And was he a racist? “I no longer think so. He was certainly stirring things up in a way [with the Rivers of Blood speech], which we would now describe as incitement because of the impact of its language. He was surprised by that impact, but he wasn’t totally naive about it. He wanted to make his mark and knew how to speak to an England that was as divided then as it is now.”
This, of course, makes you think that Powell would have been in his element in the lead-up to the vote on Brexit. “He would be fascinated and delighted by Brexit,” says Mcdiarmid. “If he were around now, the speeches would be much better and he would have made a convincing case for it. He had an intellectual rigour and would have despised the political soundbite.”
Ironically, it is a political soundbite for which Powell will always be remembered.
‘He wanted to make his mark and knew how to speak to an England that was as divided then as it is now’