by Alwyn Turner
The album whence that single came was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which opened in appropriately apocalyptic manner with ‘Five Years’ (‘that’s all we got’), and went on to revive the spirit of Weimar cabaret reincarnated as rock & roll: ‘People stared at the make-up on his face,’ began ‘Lady Stardust’, adding that ‘femmes fatales emerged from shadows to watch this creature fair’ who ‘sang songs of darkness and disgrace’. The album never got higher than #5 in the charts, but it did spend two years in the top 50 and brought Bowie the stardom he had long craved. The title track of its sequel, Aladdin Sane (1973), added to its punning name a subtitle – ‘1913-1938-197?’ – that reiterated the pre-war implications of his work, while keeping alive the theme of celebration in the face of catastrophe (‘Battle cries and champagne, just in time for sunrise’). By the time of Diamond Dogs (1974), the sense of complete collapse had moved into the present, as the spoken introduction made clear: ‘And in the death, as the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare . . .’
Bowie’s success in 1972–74 was primarily based on his musical vision, but to a generation whose older brother was ‘back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’, he was also the first rock artist to speak directly of the chaos that was modern Britain, to admit the failure of post-war dreams of progress and to offer instead an escape into fantasy. ‘Bevan tried to change the nation,’ he shrugged, but ‘I could make a transformation as a rock & roll star.’
2
Rivals
‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us’
Apart from the wilder fringes, political extremism in Britain today is represented by Powellism and Baden-Powellism, with Mr Benn as Labour’s Boy Scout.
Terence Lancaster, Daily Mirror (1975)
I think our hope for the future is that England remains a moderate country. But moderates are easily taken advantage of by extremists. Enoch Powell is nuts, but it is evident that he’s nuts. Tony Benn is nuts, but appears dangerously sane.
Peter Hall, diary entry (1975)
In the case of two noteworthy contenders of our time, J Enoch Powell and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the reason for their failure to reach the top is surely obvious. They both look barmy.
Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)
Ever since 1964, when That Was the Week That Was had its third series cancelled because of the forthcoming general election, British broadcasters have been convinced that the country is particularly sensitive to the effects of television during campaigning, capable of having its votes switched by an unanswered argument. 1970 was no exception. As soon as the election was announced by Harold Wilson, ITV responded by saying that it would postpone its broadcast of ‘Amos Green Must Live’, the latest instalment of the thriller series Callan.
The episode in question starred Corin Redgrave as the eponymous Amos Green, ‘a politician who believes that coloured immigration is dangerous to Britain and must be stopped’. Smoothly persuasive, he is building a large following with his TV appearances: ‘The people in this country know what they want,’ he declares. ‘What they want is not statistics, not facts dressed up, they want action. They want themselves; no visitors, no immigrants.’ As a prospective parliamentary candidate, he finds himself under threat from a rogue member of a radical civil rights group known as Black Glove. ‘We do not as an organization believe in violence,’ insists Anna, the leader of the group (Nina Baden-Semper). ‘England is not yet America. But, one day if things don’t change and it comes to violence, to protect ourselves and our interests, we must be ready.’ One of the group’s adherents, however, believes that the time has indeed now come, and David Callan, the secret service agent portrayed by Edward Woodward, is sent in to protect Green from the would-be killer.
The reason for the programme’s ban during the campaign required little explanation in the press. The anti-immigration stance, the populist appeal, the Old Testament first name – no one could be in any doubt about the real-life model for Amos Green, nor of his significance. In that 1970 election, it was reported, the Press Association sent one correspondent to cover Harold Wilson and one for Edward Heath; Enoch Powell, on the other hand, was assigned two journalists just for him. That was how important Powell had become, though he held no position save that of backbench MP for a Wolverhampton seat: ‘Enoch has had more effect on the country than either party,’ said Tony Benn, in admiration rather than anger, as he assessed his own position after the government’s defeat.
The idea of a Powell figure being assassinated, and the official terror at the ramifications of such an event, was not confined to Callan; a fuller exploration of the same theme came in Arthur Wise’s 1970 novel Who Killed Enoch Powell? The story starts in a small, unnamed Yorkshire town where Powell’s speech in a village hall ends in tragedy when a bomb explodes beneath the platform, killing the MP outright and sparking a sense of panic in Westminster. ‘There are millions that think he’s given them an identity,’ argues the leader of the Labour opposition. ‘And there are nearly as many who think he’s a kind of Messiah.’ As word spreads of the assassination, despite an attempted news blackout by the government, large areas of the country witness spontaneous demonstrations that rapidly degenerate into rioting and violence, and the home secretary begins to wonder who might fill this vacuum: ‘What’s been the pattern of public life these past few years?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Student unrest – violence in every shape and form – near civil war in Ulster – this Glasgow business. The country’s sick of it. Sick of permissiveness, sick of teenage drug merchants, sick of youth-worship, sick of being “swinging”. You know what it wants? It wants a strong man – the iron fist.’
That strong man turns out to be Colonel Monkton (his name conflating those of the Commonwealth generals George Monck and Henry Ireton), a controversial war hero who is called out of retirement by the prime minister to take control of the situation. Unfortunately for his political masters, he is determined also to take advantage of the confusion caused by Powell’s death by broadening the issue: ‘His vision did not restrict the situation to the assassination of Enoch Powell and the nationwide unrest that it had triggered off. He saw deeper causes behind it. He saw a country losing its shape and coherence, a country in desperate need of discipline. He saw mass immigration as a principal cause of that lack of coherence – “this injection of foreign bodies” as he called it.’ Exploiting the racial tension, he sets about staging a military coup.
The fact that such a novel could be written, and be received so well, was testament not only to Wise’s skill as a writer, but to the very plausibility of the plot: ‘Frightening,’ said the Morning Telegraph, ‘all this could happen if EP was assassinated for real.’ The book was nominated for an Edgar Award as best novel of the year, but lost out to Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, the story of an assassination attempt on another controversial right-wing leader; it wasn’t the last time that Powell and General de Gaulle were to be linked.
The object of all this attention was perhaps the most extraordinary figure in post-war British politics. Dressed with severe correctness at all times, and in his trademark Homburg hat, Enoch Powell already looked in the mid-1960s like a throwback to an earlier era, evoking a formality that was slightly at odds with his educated Black Country accent; his most famous photo opportunity saw him in topcoat and hat bouncing on a pogo stick, an Edwardian bank clerk adrift in swinging London. As long ago as 1955, the Spectator journalist Henry Fairlie had correctly identified him as ‘old-fashioned’ and pinned down his eccentric political style: ‘He simply believes in Order and Authority and is always prepared to offer a half-brilliant, half-mad, intellectual defence of them.’ Even so, he was clearly one of the future Tory stars who emerged during the long period of Conservative rule in the ’50s, and despite resigning as a treasury minister in 1958 over the issue of increased public expenditure, he returned to the government, serving in the cabinet as health secretary in 1962–63. In the party’s l
eadership election of 1965 he unexpectedly stood as the standard-bearer of the right, and though he attracted a mere fifteen backers (Heath beat Reginald Maudling by 150 votes to 133), his support did include the likes of Nicholas Ridley and John Biffen, later to become cabinet ministers under Margaret Thatcher. His reward was the defence portfolio in the shadow cabinet, appropriately enough for a man who had enlisted as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1939 and had risen to become the youngest brigadier in the British Army by the end of the war.
This mostly steady advance through the party ranks was halted sensationally one Saturday lunchtime in April 1968, when he delivered the ‘rivers of blood’ speech that transformed him, literally overnight, into the most controversial politician in the country. The speech was not his first venture into the charged area of immigration, but it raised the stakes massively, representing a complete break from the established consensus on the subject. His essential argument was, he insisted, ‘the official policy of the Conservative Party’ – a reduction in the rate of future immigration and the encouragement of those immigrants already in Britain to return to their countries of origin – but the language he used was far removed from anything that the Tory leadership could possibly countenance. In particular, he cited a white constituent’s comment that ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man,’ and he quoted in full a letter that claimed to recount the experience of another constituent of his, an elderly white woman terrorized by her black neighbours: ‘Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist,” they chant.’
To these comments, reported by Powell without qualification or attribution, he added his own gift of oratory, derived in part from his status as a leading classical scholar. The speech was studded with phrases that would reverberate for years to come: ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad,’ he exclaimed, in wide-eyed, disbelieving wonder. ‘It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’ And he saved the best for last: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ In fact, he didn’t quite say that, since his quote from Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid was delivered in its original Latin (and thus passed over the heads of most of the local Tories gathered in Birmingham to hear him), but he helpfully translated the phrase in his press hand-outs to ensure maximum coverage in the media, and an adaptation of the phrase became the shorthand way to refer to Powell’s position: he was widely understood to have predicted ‘rivers of blood’ flowing through Britain’s streets as a result of racial conflict.
The reporting of the Birmingham speech in the Sunday newspapers sealed his immediate fate, while revealing how far the political elite had drifted from the population. Heath was horrified and sacked him from the Conservative front bench, to which he was never to return, saying that his words were ‘racialist in tone’, even as the first of tens of thousands of letters were being written in support of those words. In a subsequent speech, Powell claimed that there was a ‘gulf between the overwhelming majority of the country on the one side, and on the other side a tiny minority, with almost a monopoly hold upon the channels of communication’, and there was much truth in his assertion. A Gallup poll in the Daily Telegraph a fortnight after the ‘rivers of blood’ showed 74 per cent support for his views, with 69 per cent saying that Heath had been wrong to dismiss him; just before the speech, a poll asking who should become Tory leader in the event that Heath stepped down had given Powell just 1 per cent support, now he was the front-runner with 24 per cent. And to confirm the allegation of media bias came this testimony: ‘Television programmes deliberately underplayed the strength of racist feelings for years, out of the misguided but honourable feeling that inflammatory utterances could do damage,’ admitted Panorama producer Jeremy Isaacs in late 1968. ‘But the way feelings erupted after Enoch Powell’s speech this year was evidence to me that the feeling has been under-represented on television, and other media.’
The fallout from that single speech changed British politics entirely. There was a huge groundswell of support in the parts of the country most affected, with many believing that immigration had been forced through without consultation: ‘Surely only very clever people could fail to understand so simple a point,’ said Powell, conveniently forgetting his own position as the cleverest of all Tory MPs. This paradox was reflected in Arthur Wise’s novel, as a man in the crowd queuing to hear Powell’s speech complains about ‘bloody long-haired intellectuals’, and a journalist reflects: ‘Doesn’t that throw some light on something? Because here he is queuing to hear one of the purest intellectuals. And when he’s heard him he’ll clap and cheer with the rest. But will he be quite sure what it is he’s cheering? Or will it perhaps be something else he’s cheering, something that hasn’t been said?’ It was a prescient observation, for the response to the ‘rivers of blood’ also changed Powell himself; he was, wrote sometime Tory MP Matthew Parris, ‘a once-bisexual man, free-thinking and sensitive, seduced and finally trapped by the cheers of the mob: a free spirit cast in the role of populist bigot’. Meantime, he became the most famous politician in Britain, despite never achieving the final accolade of the times: ‘The one I really can’t do at all is Enoch Powell,’ admitted Mike Yarwood. ‘I put on a moustache and a Homburg but I can’t get the voice right.’
What is sometimes forgotten is the immediate context in which the speech was delivered. Powell had recently returned from a trip to America, where city after city was enduring race riots on a scale never experienced in Britain; indeed, less than three weeks earlier, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, sparking a new wave of unrest. These were the rivers of blood that Powell prophesied, as Callan’s boss, Hunter, made clear: ‘If Green dies, there’ll be a real mess-up. We’ll have a riot like Watts on our own back-door.’ In his election address to his Wolverhampton constituents in 1970, Powell emphasized the same point: continued immigration, he warned, ‘carries a threat of division, violence and bloodshed of American dimensions, and adds a powerful weapon to the armoury of anarchy’.
That haunting image from the other side of the Atlantic had been articulated in fiction even before Powell: ‘The government is a bit slow in linking the outrageous activities of the Black Muslims in America with the black threat at our own front door,’ notes the eponymous anti-hero of Robert Muller’s 1965 novel of future fascism The Lost Diaries of Albert Smith (later retitled After All, This Is England). Indeed, the storyline of that book has uncanny pre-echoes of Powell’s split with the Tories. ‘Sir Charles Crossmere, MP, that excellent speaker and VC, who has always struck me as a man of great common sense, courage and dignity, has left the Conservative Party,’ reports Smith. ‘This has been brewing for a long time, of course. Crossmere has been attacking the Tory leadership for its tepid opposition policies for as long as I can remember. I fancy he’s a man to be reckoned with now that he’s out in the political wilderness.’ Crossmere goes on to launch a new party whose seizure of power replicates the rise of the Nazis, a process that leads our narrator to become a clerk in a concentration camp on the south coast. As democracy is being systematically destroyed, the emergence of strong leadership is celebrated by the Daily Mirror: ‘We are lucky to have men in charge today who are determined to clamp down on wranglers and lead-swingers, on Edwardian fuddy-duddies, who have for far too long held on to office through the old-boy network, and on the professional “England-is-never-right” brigade.’
The coup against democracy had been a recurrent theme in popular literature for many years, but had reached a new level of paranoia in the late 1960s. At the start of that decade, Constantine Fitzgibbon’s When the Kissing Had to Stop had told of a left-wing takeover of Britain bac
ked by Moscow, a tale which had sufficient resonance to see the novel reissued in 1971 and 1978, key moments of trade union activity. But as the years wore on, the politics began to change, and Gillian Freeman’s The Leader (1965), Peter Van Greenaway’s The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing (1968) and Robin Cook’s A State of Denmark (1970) – amongst others in the genre – all concerned the rise of right-wing figures. Although the narrative tone was in general disapproving, the motivation was clearly spelt out and sympathetically understood: a sense that the country was slipping out of control, that the system itself had failed. ‘Britain today is a land without purpose, without hope, without a will of its own. The political system creating this state of affairs has much to answer for,’ wrote Van Greenaway, and the same note was struck in novel after novel of the period. ‘England was impotent now, but talkative, petulant, critical and, in decline, intellectually arrogant,’ argued James Barlow’s crime classic The Burden of Proof (filmed as Villain in 1970 with Richard Burton). ‘Nobody could do anything now without being accountable to the scorn of the liberal intellectuals in print or on television. England was too articulate at the top. Nobody, even in a Socialist liberal permissive society, had the slightest notion of the wishes of the people, out there beyond the great conversational shop of London.’
