by Tom Cutler
When he was a minister he was frequently attacked in the press. He took this with some aplomb but could never grasp why the tabloids, as well as criticising his opinions, wrote untrue things about him. Deliberate untruth seemed to mystify him. Interviewed by Dr Anthony Clare for BBC Radio 4’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, in 1995, he explained: ‘To begin with I didn’t quite understand why they should say such absurd things.’ The preference for plain truth and difficulty in accepting that people dissemble and lie is typical of Aspergers.
Though decently turned out in the Chamber and on television, Benn could sometimes look slightly odd, having a preference for pale brown shoes with a Velcro flap, the colour and folksy informality of which clashed with the propriety of the sober suits and jackets he favoured.
His tastes in food were faddish. He was an almost obsessive fan of tea, drinking pints of it throughout the day, and mentioning it frequently in interviews. He drank no alcohol, and in his forties became a vegetarian, having decided to avoid both booze and burgers on moral grounds. Lunch was almost always a pizza, a banana, and more tea. Along with the cluster of other intriguing traits, this amusing food and drink fad was suggestive.
Benn’s life was rigidly routine: he said that he went to bed at twenty-five to one every night and got up at five to seven. ‘I find it very difficult to go to bed if I haven’t done my diary,’ he explained. His diary keeping was as obsessive as his tea drinking.
Even as a child, structure, ritual, and routine had been important to him. He was obsessed with time and time keeping, and he kept account books of his pocket money. ‘Temperance, and tea, and accounts, and time have been very much a part of the framework of my life,’ he told Clare, ‘and in a way, once you’ve got all that straight you’re free to get on with your life … so it’s quite comforting to have a reasonable structure.’ This is something that any Asperger would understand.
He described himself as ‘a gregarious soul’, but his attitude to other people was odd. At the end of one short television interview he seemed discombobulated by the interviewer’s extended hand. The resulting handshake looked very weird.
The ability to process emotion and deal with it in a standard way eludes many Aspergers. Tony Benn was a highly emotional man, who was easily moved by the suffering of others and shed tears in the House of Commons. His elder brother was killed in the Second World War and he was permanently and deeply affected by this loss. He frequently mentioned this brother, and the bereavement seemed unusually fresh in his mind even towards the end of his long life.
As minister of technology, with a hi-tech remit, Benn was ideally cast. He was a technology nerd with what he called ‘a nostalgic love of steam’ and a fascination for gadgetry of all kinds, including digital watches that did all sorts of other things, and a series of his own string-and-sticky-tape inventions. He recorded all his media interviews on the latest equipment to check that what he said was accurately reported, and among his own mad-professor inventions were a car-mounted armchair, a plastic doohickey for holding a lot of pens in his pocket, and a briefcase that turned into a lectern for public speaking. This last device prefigured his most commercial contraption.
In 2010, at the age of eighty-five, Benn unveiled a suitcase he had invented with a fold-down canvas fisherman’s stool attached. Having first called it the Backbencher, the safest seat in parliament, he renamed it the Seatcase.
This demonstration of focus, mechanics, gadgetry, and sedulous attention to detail shows why, perhaps, autistic traits have not died out with natural selection. They are extremely useful.
In his Memoirs (1991) novelist Kingsley Amis remembered meeting Tony Benn and also Benn’s fellow MP Enoch Powell, of the Conservative Party. Amis thought he had discovered why neither had ever managed to lead his party, though each had come within a whisker of it: both men, he said, in typically rude style, ‘looked barmy’.
Enoch Powell (1912–1998) was a very strange politician, with a rich portfolio of characteristics that very clearly suggest Asperger’s syndrome.
A classicist, and languages expert, Powell was nicknamed ‘the professor’ as a child. One schoolfriend described him as ‘fiendishly clever’, intense and serious, and ‘a complete loner’.
Simon Heffer, in Like The Roman: the life of Enoch Powell (1999), notes the following traits: aloofness, attention to detail, brusqueness, concentration, courtesy, frugality, good with children, intellectual arrogance, lack of warmth, rarely smiles, reclusiveness, refusal to compromise, remorseless logic, repressed emotions, reserve, risk-taking, romanticism, sense of absolutes, and solitariness. This diagnostic checklist of Asperger traits is quoted by Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald in their 2005 book, Asperger Syndrome — A Gift or a Curse?
Tucked away in the list is a mention of Powell’s ability to get on with children. So formal and upright was his demeanour that this gift seemed unlikely to some. But to see him, in a television documentary, talking to a toddler, it is quite clear that he loved children. And they loved him.
According to his biographer, Robert Shepherd, Powell was himself a ‘serious minded and rather withdrawn child, who was happy always studying and seemed older than his years’. He was also the victim of what Shepherd called other children’s ‘mischief’, in other words, teasing. His parents appeared ‘rather remote’ and his father had interests in mathematics and ornithology. His mother was uncommonly bright, but strange, teaching herself Greek, and dressing in old-fashioned costumes.
An accomplished musician, Powell played the clarinet. He also won all the school prizes for Classics, his obsessive nitpicking resulting in him endlessly searching the Greek texts for errors.
Having admitted to broadcaster Michael Cockerell that as a schoolboy he had behaved delinquently on trains, he was asked to recall the details. With characteristic Asperger’s formality he immediately delivered the following perfectly formed, if overdressed, sentence: ‘I hesitate to remember the depredations which I helped to commit upon the rolling stock of the Midland Railway Company.’
After school Powell went to Cambridge University. ‘I had no social life as an undergraduate,’ he recalled, ‘I got up at five. I knew nothing else to do but to work …’ So averse to social situations was he that he refused to attend dinner with the Master of Trinity, the first time anyone had done this. ‘He did not seem to want to share his life,’ said a fellow student. There was ‘something lonely in him’, remembered one former colleague. Powell himself said, ‘I can never be lonely enough.’
He spoke very strangely in what was described as a ‘hypnotic, metallic voice’, and his gaze was stiff and peculiar. The sometime British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan disliked sitting opposite him, finding himself unable to bear ‘those mad eyes staring at me a moment longer’.
During the Second World War, Enoch Powell volunteered for the army and was rapidly promoted from the rank of private to brigadier. He loved the systematic structures and routines of the military but was regarded as very peculiar. In the heat of the African summer he always wore a shirt and tie, with long drill trousers and boots, and a tailored military jacket, which he claimed kept up his morale. Suggesting a stroll, a fellow soldier was astonished when Powell kept going for thirteen hours.
Hardy Amies, later the Queen’s dress designer, was a fellow intelligence officer cadet. Bright and cheerful, he was very different to the dour Powell, who nonetheless took Amies’ obvious homosexuality in his stride, seeing it as nothing more than a matter for playful teasing. The two remained lifelong friends. Openness to difference and lack of judgmentalism are two of the most admirable traits of people with Asperger’s syndrome.
Out of uniform Powell was always superbly dressed, in beautiful, dark three-piece suits, white pocket hankie, and gleaming black shoes. He wore a bristling military moustache from his youth until his death, and his hair was so efficiently primped that it sometimes looked solid. Intriguingly, his wif
e remarked that above all Powell hated his hair being washed. She described how his young daughters used to ‘queue up outside the door to hear his screams because he made such a performance’. His daughter Susan put it plainly: ‘He does not like water on his head.’ This heightened sensory reaction is just typical of Asperger’s syndrome.
Powell had a lifelong interest in languages. He studied Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies and was a professor of Ancient Greek by the age of twenty-five. He was an expert on, and expert in, several other languages, including Welsh and Portuguese. By the time of his death he was highly proficient in fourteen of them.
He was a Member of Parliament between 1950 and 1974, and Minister of Health between 1960 and 1963. His politics were of the Right but, like the self-determined radical Tony Benn, he was always the ‘odd man out’, as he put it, among fellow members of his party, promoting his own very strongly held but unusual political and moral views. He had almost no political friends.
Personal relationships are difficult enough, but the girlfriend and boyfriend business can be its own special torment for Aspergers. Reading aloud one of his own published poems, written for a young woman who had turned down his proposal of marriage, Powell could not quite make it through the verse, and began to weep. ‘You mustn’t put me in this situation in which I’m so overcome by emotion,’ he objected. He agreed that first love is the most intense, and, he added, ‘mysterious’. Even in old age this long-ago loss seemed excessively painful to him.
Powell was unlucky in love until well into middle age and it was not until he was thirty-nine that he married Pamela Wilson, a wonderfully upbeat, patient, and outgoing lady of great cheer, his opposite in many ways. She explained that half the time even she could not make out what was going on in his mind.
She noticed soon after their marriage that he had difficulty in recognising faces. Wonderfully direct and amused, she told Michael Cockerell that a month after their honeymoon she went to meet Powell in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons. She was astonished to see him going all the way round, looking for her amongst some other ladies, ‘wondering which one he’d married and been on a honeymoon with’.
While she was about it, Powell’s wife, who, like many partners of people with Asperger’s, seemed to have saintly endowments, reminded her husband, ‘You’ve always had trouble riding a bicycle.’ Difficulty with motor control is another typical Asperger trait.
Enoch Powell seemed to use his intellectual gifts to disguise some of his social ineptitude, but he was never able to crack the social code. Kingsley Amis remembered meeting him for the first time with a small group. He noticed that Powell spoke as though he were addressing a public meeting, but found him agreeable enough. At a second meeting, where guests were chatting around a dinner table, Amis recalled that Powell was paying attention but not contributing much. When he did say something Amis was puzzled by his reference to himself in the third person. But the end was not yet. Amis was making a point when he used the word ‘impingement’, at which moment, without addressing the subject Amis was discussing, Powell zeroed in pedantically on his use of the word, demanding the etymology. Amis, taken by surprise, tried to explain. ‘Alas no, Mr Amis,’ said Powell, as he gave him the true derivation, ‘I strike a blow,’ smacking his fist into his palm for emphasis, making Amis feel, he said, ‘a prat’.
At a final meeting Amis spotted Powell standing alone at a party looking baffled. He went up and announced his name. Pursing his lips, Powell said, ‘Who?’ Amis suggested that most people, if genuinely forgetting a face, would say something like, ‘Of course, my dear fellow, how very absurd of me not to have recognised you’, especially if they were in politics rather than the ‘truth-at-any-price’ business. Amis wondered finally what Powell was doing there if parties were so difficult for him.
These descriptions of seemingly rude and certainly baffling social behaviour can be explained when you realise that Enoch Powell was a classic embodiment of Asperger’s syndrome.
His lack of political friends and his provocative and frequently self-destructive political behaviour led to Enoch Powell’s final sidelining. Like many Aspergers, he was in the wrong job, though he did it as best he could, and sometimes brilliantly, using his supreme intellect to camouflage his gross social ineptitude and lack of political nous. He was probably better suited to the dry world of academe, where, rather than having his name execrated on all sides, as happened after his notorious 1968 Birmingham immigration speech, he would have shone in glory. Or perhaps he would have been happiest teaching young children, with whom he had such a knack; and reading, writing, and thinking in his spare time.
When he died, in 1998, the only Labour politician of significance to attend his funeral was Tony Benn. Despite their diametrically opposed political standpoints, and the instructive differences in the presentation of their autistic traits, these two autonomous politicians shared that essential Asperger’s characteristic: a strong, occasionally peculiar, unbendable moral code which led sometimes to professional disaster.
*
Outside Sarah’s window, life is going on. I look out at the scudding clouds over the escarpment of the distant Weald, away to the north. On a nearby lamppost a gull is squatting, a crust in its bill. The drain machine is doing its thing, the man in the corner shop is no doubt dressing down his shelves, and the lady in the station café has probably not yet cleaned the congealed brown ketchup from the top of the 1970s plastic-tomato dispenser that I noticed when I walked past earlier.
I’ve been answering questions and talking about myself for hours. My tea has gone cold. I feel that my answers have been telling a story and, despite the risk of pinning the tail on the wrong bit of the donkey, or even on the wrong donkey, I’m impelled in one direction. This crazy condition, Asperger’s syndrome, is making complete sense of the long non sequitur of my sometimes ludicrous, often lonely, and overridingly out-of-sync life.
Sarah puts the top neatly back on her pen and looks across at me.
‘Your eye contact today has been unusual,’ she says.
‘Unusual?’
‘Not much of it. Do you want to know what I think?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
There is a word in the dictionary to describe the kind of physique said to be associated with an introverted, shy, restrained, alert, sensitive, and intellectual temperament. The word is ‘cerebrotonic’ and the purported body type connected with it is ectomorphic (lean). Sherlock Holmes is of the cerebrotonic type, as am I.
Sarah draws in her breath. ‘I think you have Asperger’s syndrome,’ she says.
I nod in my cerebrotonic way. Somewhere I hear the low pulse of a water pumping station, or is it the throb of the blood in my ears? I feel tremendously at peace.
‘How did you work it out exactly?’
‘The tests you have done tell me. Our conversation tells me. My experience tells me.’
I nod again.
‘Your AQ score is well within the autistic range, and your answers to my questions are also indicative.’
‘I’m not arguing,’ I say. ‘You’re only confirming what I’d already decided for myself.’
Sarah smiles, like the Secretary of the Magic Circle having just admitted a new member to the exclusive club.
‘Most adults who seek diagnosis are correct in their guess,’ she says. ‘They’ve done all the legwork.’
‘So,’ I say, ‘Asperger’s syndrome. That explains everything.’ Sarah looks at me steadily. The crawling sunbeams have reached the junction of the floor and wall. Motes of dust hang in the still air.
‘Is there anything else that gave you a clue?’ I ask.
Sarah closes her file slowly and looks at me. ‘I need to be careful what I say. This process is standardised, the tests are all well established and properly approved, and I’m punctilious. We take great care to avoid over-assessing, over-diagnosing.’
> I nod for a third time.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’ve diagnosed six hundred people, and seen many more over the years. But sometimes you can just tell as soon as somebody walks through the door. You know the term “gaydar”, the word gay people have for the instinctive “gay radar” they use to identify other gay people? Well, I use the word “adar”. It’s radar for autism. You just spot it. I spotted it in several members of my immediate family.’
I’m still trying to get a grip on how Asperger’s syndrome fits into the whole autism picture, I tell her.
‘Asperger’s is part of autism,’ explains Sarah. ‘The different bit between classic autism and Asperger’s syndrome is intellectual capacity. What’s the same is the autism.’
‘But I know people who have told me they’ve got Asperger’s syndrome,’ I say, ‘and they seem different to me.’
‘When you overlay normal brain scans they all look pretty much the same,’ says Sarah. ‘When you overlay autistic brains things look different. There’s no such thing as a typical person with Asperger’s. For example, you have insight into your condition. Not everybody does.’
I can still hear the drain-sucking elephant doing its work further up the street. I wonder what the capacity of the tanker would look like in pictures. How many gallons of drain water? How many pints? How many teacupfuls?
I realise that Sarah is looking at me, expecting an answer to some question.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I got distracted by something — zoned out.’
‘It happens,’ she says. ‘I was asking about your family. Any signs there might be autism anywhere else?’
I stop to think. I have a son in his twenties, Jake, a solitary like me. I always knew I was a law unto myself, and he is the same. Possibly more so. He is a musician, a bright chap, and unusual. I have noticed his intense absorptions since childhood, first skateboarding and computer games, and then, lastingly, music. He spends all day practising. Of course many boys enjoy these things, but perhaps not in so focused and uncompanionable a way. Then there is his obsession with cold showers and cold-water swimming. I have also observed his flat indifference to things in which he is not interested, and his firm disinclination to fit in if he does not want to. He has a couple of good friends but not many, and some are twenty or thirty years older than him. In this he reminds me of myself.
