I would like to thank Stéphanie Prévost for her suggestions on this paper.
1Disraeli was ‘a statesman, political novelist, party leader, prime minister, . . . a Romantic “Young England” Tory, . . . a pragmatic manager-tactician. . . . He gave his political ideas fictional and non-fictional form’ (Fawcett 85‒86). Edmund Fawcett also highlights that there are disagreements among historians on the extent to which Disraeli ‘earned his contrasting labels of social reformer, People’s Democrat, and One-Nation Tory’ (Fawcett 87). In that respect, Nick Pearce offers an overview of historiographical debates on Disraeli studies in a 2024 paper, showing that the complexity of his ideas had fuelled a plethora of studies in various turns, making him ‘the nineteenth political figure most discussed by historians’ (Pearce 1). He notices that since the 1990s, scholars have focused on ‘Disraeli’s early career and literary works, generating a revisionist literature which examined his youthful romanticism, the impact of Continental thought on his ideas and politics, and his Jewishness’ (Pearce 1). He adds that ‘his cultural significance and his iconic status in popular culture were explored, locating him in debates on antisemitism, race and empire’ (Pearce 1). Moreover, Disraeli is still typically associated with social and democratic reforms, which has led scholars to reconsider the ‘myth of One Nation Conservatism’ (Marshall & Porion). As Pearce also puts it, ‘due to the cultural and imperial turn’ in Disraeli studies, ‘there has been a body of research and new insights into Disraeli’s political life and literary works, and his posthumous influence on politics and culture’ (Pearce 1). This paper aims to analyse Disraeli’s ‘afterlives’ in Enoch Powell’s thinking, particularly the way the latter set out to conceive his idea of nationhood, as he had undoubtedly been influenced by Disraeli’s 1840s novels and ideas on race and nation.
- 1 Powell’s job was to prepare memos and briefs for ministers or members of the Conservative Party.
- 2 In Butler’s views, these young ambitious people were ready to work hard in the CRD before coming in (...)
2At first glance, Powell’s political life is imbued with references to Disraeli. As early as 1946, when he started his political career in the Conservative Research Department (CRD),1 Powell’s mind was trained in a Disraelian vein when he became one of Rab Butler’s ‘backroom boys’2 (Butler 140). He acknowledged that at the time he devoured Disraeli’s novels over meals at the Junior Carlton Club (Powell 1987, 9). Like other members within the CRD, Powell thought that the Conservatives should turn to Disraeli as ‘a sacred flame’ to reconsider post-war British Conservatism (Gash et al. 125). Then, Powell joined the One Nation Group (ONG) in 1950 to promote Disraeli’s legacy and influence the revamping of Conservatism. He depicted post-war Britain as ‘a springtime [for the memory of Disraeli] among young aspirants in the Tory ranks, whose novels had supplemented the more august writings of Edmund Burke, giving flesh and blood to the Tory tradition in Britain and British politics’ (Collings 361). Disraeli’s legacy, ideas and statecraft were thus of paramount importance in Conservative debates. As Douglas Hurd and Edward Young underscore in their biography on Disraeli, Powell ‘spoke admiringly of Disraeli’s second Government in one of his first speeches to the Commons’ (Hurd & Young 12). In 1954, Powell also privately wrote:
Those who had scarcely known [Disraeli], or to whom he was solely a character of history, found in his writings—the novels, the speeches, the essays, especially those of his earlier and middle years—a deposit of pure instruction and delight; and a hitherto hidden consistency and connection of principles and practice, reflection and art, came to light. Like Joshua, he appeared as both prophet and captain. (Powell January 1954)
3Undoubtedly, Powell intended from the very start, and then throughout his political life, to draw some of his ideas from Disraeli’s novels and brand of Conservatism.
4Upon closer inspection, Powell’s relationship with Disraeli was far more complex than it might seem. Although Powell was trained in the Disraelian tradition at the beginning of his political career, he quickly detached himself from his socio-economic ideas. It was in 1952 within the ONG that Powell reconsidered One Nation Conservatism in looser terms, playing with the plasticity of the term to give it a free-market ideological flavour (Porion 2023) that he had begun to develop at the end of the 1940s when Diana Spearman introduced him to the works of Friedrich Hayek (Porion 2019, 13). Powell vindicated again that ideological shift at the end of life:
One Nation rediscovered the market and the evil consequences of destroying it. That, indeed was the subject of Change is Our Ally (1954). Misery and deprivation might actually be inflicted or prolonged by refusal to let society’s mechanism operate. Then there was the problem of identifying and locating these ills which no market system can alleviate. (Collings 362)
5When ‘Powellism’ was first coined and used in the press by the Economist in 1965, it was mainly depicted as a refreshed gospel of capitalism (The Economist 17 July 1965, 217). Powell was called ‘a Gladstonian liberal’—a political label he dismissed. In a 1967 biographical article attempting to highlight Powell’s political singularity, Iain Hamilton aptly stated: ‘He blends the bluntness of a Gladstonian Liberal with that of an older-fashioned Tory who had read and digested Burke’ (Hamilton 1967). In a 1964 radio interview, Powell had already rejected the idea that ‘[He was] a Gladstone man rather than a Disraeli one’ (Powell 1964a, 3).
6Yet, by then, not only had Powell officially turned away from Disraeli’s One Nation brand of Conservatism, and it was also in the 1960s that Powell expounded on his own ideas of nationhood, epitomized at its climax by the 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Until now, there have been no studies showing that Powell returned to Disraeli as a source of inspiration to develop his own nationalist ideas. It thus seems that Powell was very selective in which aspects of Disraeli’s political thought he chose to adopt. Powell was also said to be opportunistic, playing the immigration card to win the leadership of the Conservative Party. As his biographer Robert Shepherd put it: ‘Was it ambition, racism, or his duty as an MP to voice the concerns of his Wolverhampton constituents? Or was there something else preying on his mind?’ (Shepherd 2008, 16). In 2008, Peter Brooke shed fresh light on this moot point, studying the influence that the experience of India in the 1940s had on Powell some twenty years later to find a new origin for his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (Brooke 207). Robert Shepherd also explored the origins of the ‘Rivers of Blood’ to figure out both Powell’s refusal for Britain to become a multicultural society and his advocacy for a ‘homogeneous nation’ and argued that it resulted from Powell’s fear of Indian ‘communalism’ and his views on the US race riots (Shepherd 2008, 16).
7This paper aims to analyse why Powell claimed that Disraeli’s influence on the Conservative party should be grasped in the following way: ‘Here was the evidence that the heirs of Toryism, with their rooted belief in the nation as a homogeneous organic phenomenon of nature, could recognise concern for all its members as an essential mark of society—and Tory society, mark you, not socialist society’ (Collings 362). This study will be based on E. H. H. Green’s methodological approach designed to write an intellectual history of the Conservative Party and will focus on Powell’s intellectual and selective appropriation of some of Disraeli’s ideas. To do so, it uses Powell’s papers and his published writings and Disraeli’s novels and ideas, studying Powell’s own Tory concept of the nation inherited from Disraeli.
8The nation has always been a crucial idea in Conservative thought. Going back to Edmund Burke first, the nation should be viewed as more than ‘an aggregate of the people who happened to be living and governing within a particular area of territory at a particular moment’ (Gilmour 63). According to Burke, ‘a nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers in space’ (quoted in Gilmour 62). Burke thus put forward the idea of ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (quoted in Gilmour 62‒63). The Burkean nation was also a hierarchical community. Philip Lynch argued that ‘a coherent conservative concept of the nation was first systematically developed by Burke, fusing Whig and Tory themes in its account of British history, identity and political structure’ (Lynch 20). In that respect, the nation could be broken down in several ways:
The nation provides a sense of solidarity and belonging: it is an integrative community binding together those who share the same ‘second nature’, traditions and values. Instead of being defined in ethnic or racial terms, conservative accounts of the nation focus allegiance to common institutions, a shared history and a political culture which fosters common values. Patriotism is a natural and moral disposition, providing a sense of unity, solidarity and identity. (Lynch 5)
9In the nineteenth century, Disraeli played a crucial role in appropriating the politics of nationhood against Gladstone’s Liberal party. In his 1872 Crystal Palace speech he turned the Conservative party into the patriotic party that defended national institutions, the Union, the British Empire, and the constitutional settlement. According to Samuel Earle, Disraeli ‘wove a captivating story of a Tory Party and a Tory nation, together as one’ (Earle 105) when he declared: ‘By the Conservative cause, I mean the splendour of the Crown, the lustre of the Peerage, the privileges of the Commons, the rights of the poor. I mean the harmonious union, the magnificent concord of all interests, of all classes, on which our national greatness depends’ (quoted in Mclean 72). In post-war Britain, the view of the Tory nation had to be reconsidered due to the processes of decolonisation and post-war immigration:
The Tory Nation is a vision of Britain, a culture, character and history—an entire nation—shaped and defined along Conservative lines, deeming who is ‘electable’ and what type of politics is ‘possible’. In this telling, Britain is marked out across the world by an essential and exceptional stability, a unique absence of historical upheaval, an unrivalled continuity of its institutions, an unusually wise and open-minded ruling class, and a sage and stoic people who instinctively prefer tradition and common sense to the abstract promises of the left. (Earle 9‒10)
10After World War II though, Powell blended the idea of the free British nation in its Empire by means of a ‘transcending element’ in the shape of British sovereignty:
If we examine what this idea of the nation connoted to the combatants who were British subjects . . . it usually contained an element transcending that local unit of the King’s dominions to which the particular individual belonged . . . What the inhabitants of these islands feared and were determined to prevent was that Germany should reduce them to a simple unit divested of its world-wide possessions, connexions, and power. It was in fact the nation in its widest extension, coincident with British sovereignty and subjecthood, which operated upon their minds. (Powell January‒June 1954)
11Powell thus intended to preserve the organic unity of the British Empire whose backbone was India, because Powell’s imperialism was nourished with his special and romantic reactions to this country. Yet, as will be shown hereinafter, it was only possible for Powell to develop his own politics of nationhood in 1954, when he decided to turn the British Empire into a myth and broke with Disraeli’s objective to maintain the Empire.
12Before turning his attention to the concept of the nation, Powell had been a staunch champion of imperialism due to his political training in the Disraelian tradition within the CRD. Under Butler’s influence, the Conservatives working within the CRD had to draw intellectually on the tutelary figures of the past, such as Bolingbroke, Burke, and Disraeli, in order to recast Conservative ideas (Butler 154). Powell recalled that in the aftermath of the 1945 Conservative defeat, ‘the Conservative Party turned to the source of its own history and of English history, to Disraeli, to Burke, to Bolingbroke and even beyond that’ (Roth 50). Robert Blake, the official historian of the party, highlights that Disraeli was simultaneously elevated to the status of prophet, high priest, and philosopher within the Conservative Party (Blake 3). In the late 1940s, Powell remembered Disraeli’s eloquent words in his 1872 Crystal Palace speech in defence of the British Empire—the cornerstone of Britain’s prestige—as he intended to continue to promote an imperialist stance:
I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great Country, and wish to maintain its greatness—that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial Country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, their Empire—that they believe on the whole, that the greatness and empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of the land. (quoted in Ball & Seldon 38)
13As a matter of fact, Powell submitted a report to Churchill in 1946 to account for all reasons why the Conservative Party should oppose Labour’s policy on India’s independence (Powell 16 May 1946 & 3 December 1946). Yet, Churchill dismissed Powell’s plan as ‘crazy and unrealistic’ while at the same time Attlee felt that the imperialist wing of the Conservative party had no realistic plan for an alternative to a withdrawal (Heffer 109). Powell had decided to start his political career in 1946 to become Viceroy of India and acknowledged that he had naturally joined the Conservative Party for its pro-Empire stance (Collings 53). In his view, there was a natural connection between India and Britain that should be preserved at all costs: ‘The British are married to India as Venice was married to the sea’ (Powell 1974, 11, O’Regan 23, Shepherd 1997, 52). Powell went back to the imperial theme in his maiden speech on 16 March 1950, taking up the defence of the Empire (Collings 193‒94) and his 1951 election address also laid emphasis on the imperial theme, claiming ‘I believe in the British Empire. Without the Empire, Britain would be like a head without a body’ (Powell 1951).
- 3 The Suez Group of Conservative MPs was created to maintain the Commonwealth as a political and mili (...)
14The 1953 Royal Titles Bill was a first blow to Powell who thought that it would result in disintegrating the organic unity of the British Empire. The following year, he undertook a personal revolution in his thinking on the question of British imperialism in 1954—regarded as his annus horribilis. By July of that year, once Britain had reached an agreement with Egypt over the Suez Canal military base, Powell had completed his intellectual journey, and the redeployment of British forces to the Middle East sealed his disinterest in the question of British Empire. Powell thus withdrew from the Suez Group3 and answered the question of one of his colleagues on how to fight next for the Empire: ‘I don’t know what you mean. It’s over’ (Heffer 193). From that moment onwards, Powell started to appreciate the importance of myths in politics:
It may be that self-deception is part of being a nation, that a great deal of self-deception has to be fed into national feeling and national consciousness. This was true for the British, who have the aptitude for deceiving themselves, and the creation of a Commonwealth with the Queen as head of it was a means of self-deception. We can make it a reality of it here in our country, the others don’t have to do anything, we can do it ourselves. We can pretend—let’s go in a corner and pretend. (Shepherd 1997, 115)
15Powell thus decided to use the role of myth-making in politics to elevate the idea of the British Empire to the rank of a myth and to focus on the British nation. Roy Lewis explains Powell’s refocusing on the British nation as a way of filling a gap in his thinking:
No epigram has so reverberated in British thinking as Dean Acheson’s ‘Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role’. Powell’s career turns upon the need to find that new role, or new equipoise, for the nation, disencumbered of obsolete fixations, of overcostly and irrelevant overheads. (Lewis 73)
16Anna-Marie Smith contends that ‘Powell’s representation of the Empire as an accidental irrelevance amounts to a strategic suppression of the trauma’ (Smith 129, 132). Powell had thus become a ‘Little Englander’ (Foot 11) and a fervent nationalist, but his Marxist detractor Tom Nairn viewed this ideological shift as ‘irreconcilable, incoherent, not to say opportunistic’ (Nairn 261).
17From 1954 onwards, Powell thus regarded the British Empire as a relic of a glorious past and undertook a ‘demolition job’ (Lewis 78), couched in emotional terms, to make it thought-provoking and urge popular imagination to conceive the Empire as ‘a myth’ (Wood 137), a mirage, and a ‘historical accident’ (Powell 1954, 52‒53). He started to focus on the nation in 1955, when he decided to write a book with Angus Maude entitled Biography of a Nation, to lay the foundations of what a nation represented to him: ‘Self-consciousness . . . is the essence of nationhood . . . The sense of unity implies the relationship of parts to the whole . . . National consciousness is also a sense of difference from the rest of the world, of having something in common which is not shared beyond the limits of the nation’ (Powell & Maude 7‒8).
18At the end of his life, Powell claimed that ‘the Conservative Party [was] the nationalist party par excellence’ (quoted in Ritchie 126). To figure out what the Conservative Party stood for, Powell reasserted the idea that one had to look at Disraeli’s legacy: ‘Disraeli cast what he had to suggest into romantic shape in his 1840s novels’, which were in his eyes ‘interspersed with didactic passages by way of political commentary. . . . In allegoric form, the plots expressed Disraeli’s answer to the question: What is the Conservative Party for?’ (Powell 1980, 2). Powell acknowledged in his writings and in interviews that Disraeli had unexpectedly acted as a catalyst in the intellectual process that had led him to dwell upon the concept of nationhood as early as 1954 and that reading Disraeli’s works had enabled him to express and develop his deep nationalist instincts (Powell 1987, 8).
19In 1834, Disraeli had written a poem in which he ‘articulated the idea of the supremacy of the imagination that would become central to his conception of leadership’ (Clarke et al. 96). According to Robert Saunders:
Disraeli was confident that the great institutions of Tory England—the Church, the Crown and the House of Lords—could capture the imagination and command the affections of the people; if they only had the wit to try. This was as much a matter of rhetoric as of policy; ‘With words’, he wrote, ‘we govern men’. (Clarke et al. 97)
20The same author also highlights that ‘it was Disraeli’s achievement, as he put it in 1870, to recognise that “imagination in the government of nations” was “a quality not less important than reason”’ (Clarke et al. 109).
21Utley used Lord Blake’s biography of Disraeli to describe the latter’s concept of the English nation:
[Disraeli] saw the English nation as an entity forged by history, an entity which had generated and still sustained common sentiments and affections, even, up to a point, common moral ideas; but an entity which was seriously threatened from within by the divisive forces of modernity, and from without by the ambitions and envy of other powers. (Utley 8‒9)
22Disraeli’s vision of the English nation, which was based on history, patriotism, and sentiments, through the power of imagination, paved the way for Powell to continue his ‘demolition job’ of the myth of the Empire and focus on the English nation. Powell had grasped the importance of ‘the power of imagination’ used by Disraeli, and viewed it as a key to defining the nation:
The life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived in the imagination . . . All history is a myth. It is a pattern which men weave out of the materials of the past. The moment a fact enters into history it becomes mythical, because it has been taken and fitted into its place in a set of ordered relationships . . . A nation lives by its myths. What those myths are, matters immensely to its happiness or unhappiness, success or failure. The greatest task of the statesman therefore is to offer his people good myths and to save them from harmful myths . . . Britain was once a great imperial power, which built up a mighty empire over generations and then, in the lifetime of most of us, lost or gave it up . . . Britain was once the workshop of the world, superior in industrial efficiency and inventiveness to all other nations . . .Taken together, these two great myths add up to a conviction of national decline, the more pervasive for being accepted as self-evident and based upon undisputed facts. (Powell 13 November 1964, 1, 3, 5)
- 4 Powell refers here to England as the cement of the United Kingdom. What mattered to him above all w (...)
23Powell was determined to rekindle British patriotism and to rethink the organic representation of the nation as ‘an oak tree’ in poetic terms. He now gave a very simple definition of the nation as ‘the ultimate political reality’ which ‘cannot be determined scientifically, nor measured’ (Shepherd 1997, 122). He resorted to the feeling of belonging to refine his definition of the nation: ‘People belong together, in the political structure called a nation, because they feel they belong together. This feeling cannot exist without the dimension of time . . . In short, it needs a story’ (Powell 1965). In his 1961 speech to the Royal Society of St George, Powell aimed to offer such a narrative and set out all the themes that were going to fuel his nationalism from 1963 until the end of his life. Kobena Mercer has analysed Powell’s rhetorical strategy in the speech: ‘Its goal is not for the English to cast a nostalgic backward-looking gaze into past history for its own sake, but to discover through a narrative regression into the past, and through myth-poetic comparisons with other empires, the essence of English identity in the present’ (Mercer 165). In Powell’s view, patriotism was a very important feature of the Conservative politics of nationhood, as it had been for Burke and Disraeli. Englishness was also a significant part of the foundation of the nation4 in so far as it represented values and a state of mind. He glorified the love of England through a poetics of nationhood: ‘That power and glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the Imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead—in the eye of history, no doubt as inevitably as “Nineveh and Tyre”, as Rome and Spain’ (Heffer 336). Powell raved about the longevity of the nation and the continuing bond between the country and its people: ‘Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English, generations before the “expansion of England”, who felt no country but this to be their own’ (Heffer 337). He completed his poetic presentation of the nation in 1964 with a reference to his classical culture to inscribe the idea of the organic unity in his conservative thinking:
Herodotus related how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by the Persian army, were astonished to find in the midst of the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country, alive and flourishing. So we today at the heart of a vanished empire, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself. (Lewis 88‒89)
24By creating a semantic link between ‘the original symbol of their country’ and ‘the olive trees’ that had grown in English soil, Powell drew from the rich organic metaphorical seme already used in the past (Mercer 166), so that the people could reappropriate their English heritage in a language akin to pastoral poetry (Rutherford 124‒25).
- 5 Disraeli’s conception is at odds with Darwin—the Jewish race is presented as the closest to the Cr (...)
25When Disraeli was a member of the ‘Young England’ movement in the 1840s, he wrote a trilogy, which offers an underlying reflection on the idea of the nation, almost half a century before Renan’s 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne on the same theme. Disraeli had conceived the British nation as ‘Anglo-Semitic’, and claimed that the Jews were a superior race, who were both expounded and symbolised by the character of Sidonia in chapters 9 and 10 in Coningsby (1844)—the first novel in his political trilogy. It is worth recalling that Sidonia is not a historical figure, but Disraeli used references to historical events to give a sense of verisimilitude to the Anglo-Semitic dimension of the British nation. Sidonia divides men into five broad categories, likened to ‘races’ in the novel, placing both Jews and Britons in the ‘Caucasian’ category, which at the time was very surprising since Britons were generally presented as Teutons.5 Simone Beate Borgstede accounts for Disraeli’s view of the Jews as being a superior race. According to her, this served Disraeli’s ambition to find his way in British politics: ‘It is certainly an important factor that the notion of a “superior race” made it much easier for him to present himself as socially equal to his aristocratic colleagues in the Tory Party or to the hierarchical English society of his day’ (Beate Borgstede 58). That was also a first step to justify British imperialism that viewed the English race at the end of the nineteenth century as superior which had a mission to fulfil—to bring the 3 Cs (Culture, Christianity, and Commerce) to African tribes seen as inferior:
Disraeli developed his conception of the Jews as a ‘superior race’ from a reading of their history, in the context of the race discourses of the period. Born in defence of the Jewish people against antisemitic discrimination, Disraeli’s stress on race played its distinct part in the increasing influence of racist concepts for mapping the world and hierarchizing the peoples in mid-Victorian times. (Beate Borgstede 68)
26As for Powell, he did not subscribe to Disraeli’s ethnic classification in Coningsby and thought that Disraeli was ‘a provocative pre-Darwinian’ (Powell 1987, 5) insofar as the latter had put forward the idea of some superior races. Indeed, Disraeli had ‘united Jews, English and Celts not only into one nation, but [he had presented] them also as one imperial race’ (Beate Borgstede 9). Powell thus considered that Disraeli had given a depiction of the English nation that needed to be completely reconsidered to reflect the reality of the nations in the second half of the twentieth century. Powell thus argued:
Disraeli belonged to an age in which anthropological and sociological ideas were very primitive. The result of this is there is something remotely outdated about his ethnic identification of a nation, an identification which is, quite apart from the consequences of a century’s scientific and philosophical thinking, unhelpful in analysing the present state of the national self-consciousness of the people of the UK. (Powell 1987, 5‒6)
27Powell found it necessary to go further than Disraeli’s nationalist conception because he thought there had been no tangible threat to the nation in the 1840s and 1850s. He felt that Napoleon III’s France had not challenged national identities in the way that American and European interference in British politics had since 1950 (Powell 1987, 5). Moreover, Britain also benefited from Pax Britannica in the late nineteenth century, which protected the nation from external threats.
28For Powell, the term nation was thus ‘a social or political term, not a biological term’ (Collings 154) and he considered that Disraeli had not explored the organic idea of the nation because his time did not demand that the terms of the debate be stated in that way (Powell 1987, 7). This is somewhat true, as Disraeli used the term ‘organic’ only once in Tancred (1847) (Disraeli 1904b, 20), although the idea is ubiquitous. Powell came to reflect on the way Disraeli had attributed an Anglo-Semitic essence to the nation and the link he had made in his fiction between the idea of ‘nation’ and that of ‘race’ (Powell 1980, 4), so that he could promote the idea of ‘the national instinct of a homogeneous people’ in Powellism (Powell 1980, 6). According to Powell, several of Disraeli’s fictional characters (in particular Coningsby, Egremont, Lothair, Tancred, and Sidonia) were allegories that young Conservative MPs had to try to figure out in order to understand the concept of nationhood: ‘They will recognise the nation as the be-all and end-all of politics, and yet seek in vain for a tenable definition of it’ (Powell 1980, 11).
29There is one passage in particular in Coningsby that is quite illuminating: when Sidonia explains to Coningsby how his people survived the anti-Semitic atrocities thanks to the ‘purity of their race’ and that only ‘the [sufficiently] pure Caucasian races’—the Saxons, the Arab tribes and the Greeks (or at least their aristocratic component) (Disraeli 1904a, 303‒04)—can hope to successfully repel enemy attacks. Sidonia says to Coningsby:
Your race is sufficiently pure. You come from the shores of the Northern Sea, land of the blue eye, and the golden hair, and the frank brow: ’tis a famous breed, with whom we Arabs have contended long; from whom we have suffered much: but these Goths, and Saxons, and Normans were doubtless great men. (Disraeli 1904a, 233)
30Although Powell conceded that ‘Disraeli had grasped the underlying nature of the British nation’ and that ‘his own political acts were guided by faith that he perceived aright the laws of the nation’s being’ (Powell January 1954), he had to reject Disraeli’s concept of the Anglo-Semitic race and nation.
31He did so in 1973, describing the use of the idea of ‘race’ as dangerous and misleading outside the context of American political language (Collings 152‒53). Referring to the conversation between Sidonia and Coningsby about the parallel between the English and Jewish ‘races’ guided by their ‘instinct’ on the path to their respective destinies, Powell attempted to shed his own light on the significance Disraeli attributed to the concept of ‘race’ in the light of the excesses and exactions of the Nazis and their defence of a pure Aryan race:
It all sounds to us fanciful and rather Hitlerian, but only if we fail to see that the desire to produce a parallel between Britain and Judah had led Disraeli to say ‘race’ where we should say ‘nation’, and, incidentally, that ‘race’ has overtones for us which it had not for our grandfathers. ‘Instinct’, too, is the word we should use; for biology and anthropology have given us new categories of thought and language. Disraeli claimed to be ‘on the side of angels’; but when he talked about ‘relying on the instincts of the race’, he was actually dealing with the ideas of evolution. (Powell January 1954)
32Powell claimed that ‘the basis of [his] conviction [was] neither genetic nor eugenic; it [was] not racial, because [he] [could] never discover what “race” [meant] and [he] [had] never arranged [his] fellow men on a scale of merit according to their origins. The basis [was] political’ (Powell 1977, 5).
33Powell recognised the key role that Disraeli had played in emphasising the importance of the ‘national character’ and contended that ‘it is not in the increased feebleness of its institutions that I see the peril of England: it is in the decline of its character as a community’ (Powell 1980, 5). Like Disraeli, he felt he should continue to urge the British to protect their own nation: ‘In words such as those lies perhaps the one political mission to which the kaleidoscopic and enigmatical character Benjamin Disraeli genuinely felt himself called: to teach the English their nationhood. It was a Jew that the mission had been assigned to him’ (Powell 1980, 5).
34Powell was therefore not interested in the issues of racial purity or ethnic nationalism, but in the essence of a ‘homogeneous’ nation, which, in his view, had to accept not only a single ruler and a single system, but above all, a particular relationship between the part and the whole: ‘All that every part of it thinks that the whole is more important than the parts’ (Collings 35). As a matter of fact, a nation could not accept foreign elements if they did not share this attachment to the whole and its components. Powell thus rejected the integration of large-scale migratory flows, because immigrants would not be able to achieve such a goal:
It is my misfortune that I foresaw sooner than most that there is portended by what exists today, that there is portended an England in which up to one-third of some of the main cities, including inner London, will be inhabited by those who, for no fault of their own . . . will not, because I believe they cannot, have the same relationship to the nation, that relationship of part to the whole, to which all, in the last resort must be sacrificed, as the rest. (Collings 35)
35It is therefore possible to understand the rejection of a multicultural society in Powell’s thinking, which was based on arguments reminiscent of cultural racism:
If by a multi-racial society you mean a society which is deliberately and indeed artificially compounded by bringing together masses of people from different backgrounds, different cultures, and implanting them in a nation with a long and continuous history, a nation probably as homogeneous as any there is in the world in its feeling . . . then I believe that the idea is a mischievous and a dangerous one. (Powell 1973, 91)
36Powell continued to define himself as a ‘High Tory’ in 1968 (Cowling 292‒93). Yet, despite a tumultuous political life, Enoch Powell transcended his own contradictions, his excesses of logic, and his occasional about-turns, by complying throughout his life with a single recurring principle, which he stated with determination in July 1968 : ‘I was born a Tory, I have lived a Tory, I will die a Tory’ (Powell 1976). Despite the controversy triggered by the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which led Edward Heath to dismiss him from the Shadow Cabinet in April 1968, Powell had no intention of leaving the Conservative Party, saying in July 1968: ‘I am firmly in the framework of the Tory Party. I am a Tory—I prefer that to Conservative—I am a Tory for keeps’ (Collings 448). But he eventually did so in 1974.
37In his biography, Robert Shepherd points out that Powell’s deliberate choice of the term ‘Tory’ implies more than a party label (Shepherd 1997, 3). Indeed, Powell explained: ‘Some people use “Tory” as a four-letter word, and therefore handy for “Conservative”. Others use it in a specific sense, but the specific senses tend to vary. I am a Church-and-Queen Tory’ (Collings 22). In this vein, Powell reaffirmed that the ultimate goal of a Tory was to defend political institutions: ‘To me a Tory is a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions—that’s a carefully honed definition . . . A Tory therefore reposes the ultimate authority in institutions—he is an example of collective man’ (Attallah 354‒55.). He believed that a Tory is someone who thinks that political institutions are wiser than those who run them and that it is better to have trust in history—and particularly in institutions that are rooted in a historical past—than in the reasoning of individuals.
38Enoch Powell considered that, in the twentieth century, being a Tory did not necessarily mean belonging to the Conservative Party but having a particular vision of the individual and his or her relationship with society and institutions within the nation. His stance may seem even more peculiar as there were apparently no Tories outside the Conservative Party, and this distinction had been smoothed out since the nineteenth century, leading to the use of the terms ‘Tory’ and ‘Conservative’ as virtually synonymous and interchangeable (Coleman 63). Anthony Seldon points out that, after the great electoral reform of 1832, almost no one of the Conservative Party called himself ‘a Tory’ (Seldon 2). In that vein, Patrick Cosgrave questioned the relevance of this terminological distinction and asked Powell to justify it. Powell again referred to Disraeli and the protection of political institutions to justify his Tory position: ‘A Tory is a person who stands for a phrase in Disraeli’s novels “the throne, the altar and the cottage” or to put it more philosophically, I believe that the important things about human society are those which are inherited and instinctual, that authority is immanent in society, that institutions are the crucial facts’ (Powell 1976). Therefore, Powell’s Tory vision was based on an instinct, tradition, and historical heritage, acknowledging the wisdom of institutions, the importance of hierarchy and the primacy of the organic organisation of society. Powell paid tribute to Disraeli who, in his view, had developed this Tory strand in British Conservatism:
Still the fact remains that it was extremely exciting to be presented with someone (Disraeli) who differentiated so clearly the Tory strand in Conservatism from what you unfairly call the strand which Liberal Unionism had overemphasised and represented. Disraeli wrote ‘the Throne, the Altar and the Cottage’ . . . All this was excitingly portrayed for us in novelistic and challenging ways. (Powell 1987, 2‒3)
39Powell thus extolled the main principles that Disraeli had set down in his 1872 Crystal palace speech—to defend British institutions which were the pillars and identity of the nation. He thus lamented the decision of his party to join the EEC in a speech he delivered in January 1971 in Londonderry in Ulster: ‘I do not understand how a nation which is in the throes of rescuing its identity from the delusions and the deceits of a vanished empire and Commonwealth can at the same time undertake to merge that identity again in half the continent of Europe’ (Lewis 181). Another example of this defence of institutions was Powell’s strong opposition to the Labour Government’s proposal to reform the House of Lords in the late 1950s and 1960s (Porion 2019).
40Robert Behrens who interviewed Powell in 1987 believed that his opposition to Edward Heath’s decision to take Britain into the EEC in 1972 was reminiscent of the disagreement between Peel and Disraeli—which had led to the split of the Conservative Party, particularly when he used phrases and criticisms in the Disraelian vein (Powell 1987, 4). In Powell’s view, the Conservative Prime Minister had betrayed the sacrosanct principle of the supremacy of British institutions, which Disraeli reasserted in his 1872 speech, in favour of the European super-Parliament. Powell felt, however, that Robert Behrens’s linking him to Disraeli was purely rhetorical. Powell did not reject this idea but wished to put the conflict between Disraeli and Peel into context. He suggested that one should remember above all Disraeli’s wordiness, then an ambitious and cynical young MP, who had not spared Robert Peel in the parliamentary debates of 1845‒1846 on the question of the corn laws and in Coningsby, particularly on the question of the Tamworth Manifesto. By then, Powell had no ambition, unlike Disraeli, and only aimed to denounce a historic decision that would undermine British parliamentary sovereignty.
- 6 This is the title that Powell gave to the book he wrote in 1965.
41Distancing himself from Disraeli’s cynicism towards Peel, Powell nevertheless insisted on the ‘chivalric’ aspect of the quarrel between the two great men, thus clearly referring to the ‘Young England’ movement and the ideals it intended to preserve. Powell wanted to be a Tory, not a Conservative and felt to some extent he was part of the ‘Young England’ movement, as he disputed certain developments in Conservatism in the 1970s. He thus felt able (or compelled) to leave the Conservative Party in 1974 to join the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland, who were fully committed to maintaining the Union (United Kingdom); hence a defence of the existing national institution and an implacable opposition to the (re-)creation of a united Irish Republic which would mean abolishing Northern Ireland. Powell obviously disagreed with Peel regarding the political doctrine—because he was a ‘High Tory’ in political and institutional matters—but he did not condemn him, since he shared his free-market ideas from an economic standpoint. He thought that Disraeli was one of those who sought to find out what it meant to be a Conservative in the 1840s, i.e. promoting ‘the reunification of the nation around its historic institutions’ and the defence of its ‘national character’ (Powell 1980, 2, 6) without, however, proposing definite answers. In the 1970s though, Powell could not imagine that Britain’s future lay in the European dream. Unlike Disraeli, he considered that he had to offer a Tory alternative to Britain’s future—outside the EEC, Britain remaining ‘a nation not afraid’,6 not in fictional terms, but through speeches and political books (Powell 1971, Powell 1972, Powell 1973a, Powell 1973b).
42Throughout his political career, Powell was inspired by Disraeli’s ideas and romance. In 1963, Powell wrote a paper in which he imagined himself having a conversation with Dizzy. Powell used Disraeli’s words to pay tribute to his influence on Powell’s own ideas:
I made my career into a romance, consciously, deliberately, artistically; and not only my own career, but everything that came its way: English political history . . . Above all, I made a romance of the nation itself. That was what I wanted. That is what a nation does want from its politicians, who after all are its priests, its hierophants, its witch-doctors. I gave it them; and they have rewarded me by remembering me . . . Precisely, ‘the throne, the altar and the cottage’: the simple essentials of every national existence—loyalty to its institutions, faith in its God, love of its homes. I only gave these things a concrete, a visible, above all a romantic expression. (Collings 295)
43Although Powell had quickly decided to turn away from Disraeli’s approach on socio-economic issues and the Empire in his political life, he always owed him allegiance for the Tory outlook he had nurtured—particularly towards institutions and the monarchy. Even though Powell argued in 1955 that ‘there is no objective definition of what constitutes a nation’ and ‘the phenomenon of national consciousness in mankind remains almost as mysterious as that of the life of the individual organism’ (Powell & Maude 7‒8), he later found inspiration in Disraeli’s novels and ‘Young England’ movement to develop his own conception of the nation as being ‘homogeneous’. Indeed, while the Thatcher government was about to pass the Nationality Act in 1981, Powell declared: ‘There are many generations of younger politicians who will recognize in the novels of Benjamin Disraeli . . . the nation as the be-all and end-all of politics, and yet seek in vain for a tenable definition’ (Powell 1980, 6). It was after studying Sidonia in Coningsby that Powell could claim: ‘Disraeli sounds the authentic Tory note of faith in instinct—not instinct disembodied and abstract but the national instinct of a homogeneous people’ (Powell 1980, 11). As Ben Wellings noted:
Powell had a lasting impact on the emergence of contemporary English nationalism through his deployment of race and xenophobia, his blending of High Tory veneration of England’s institutions and his populism. Powell sought to articulate a new vision of England based on race and eventually resistance to European integration. What was common to these themes was the preservation of the sovereignty—both local and national—of the United Kingdom and the English. (Wellings 103)
44It would be interesting to compare Powell and Disraeli as ‘populist figures’ in further research, though the term ‘populist’ should be reconsidered and defined in Britain’s second half of the nineteenth century.