Originally Posted by Fitzjames

He would have made a great British Prime Minister of sorts......possibly before the 1870s. Thereafter no sane person would have voted for him.

Powell had the ambition to be Viceroy of India and as that was the key position in the British Empire and the British Empire (like all Empires had a racist dimension) its reasonable enough to say he had racist views.
He never really got over India's independence.....so peculiarly he took the view that black migration to Britain was baaaaaaaad but his sitting as Viceroy of India was gooooooooooooood. Seems like a double standard.

To his credit the old bastard did actually see that giving 700 million children of the Great White Queen the right to live in Britain was ok prior to mass tansport systems and people actually taking up the offer..but was not sustainable when people actually took up the offer.

Like all hypocrites, Powell who was totally in favour of Empire but hated the whole idea of the Commonwealth of Nations.
Powells undoubted intelligence gave him a certain sway over (admittedly) very stupid people and theres no doubt that a man of his classical education would have been aware of the imagery that his words like "rivers of blood" and "the black man having the whip hand..." stirred up a kind of sub conscienious fear.
Do not forget please that Powells speech contained "quotes" from letters he had "received" from his constituents cataloguing anti social and criminal activity by black neighbours........"letters" which did not actually exist.

Ultimately Powell was too much of a maverick to be any kind of real party man (Conservative or Labour). He hated Margaret Thatcher but was a friend of Tony Benn.
And sadly (or maybe deservedly) in later years his intelligence deserted him and he succumbed to a form of dementia. He once claimed that Lord Mountbatten had been killed off by the Americans (not the kind of thing most sane people think). Although this is perfectly consistent with his view that USA is Britains biggest enemy.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the 40th anniversary of Rivers of Blood is the attempt to rehabilitate Powell as some kind of visionary.
The "visionary" aspect always appeals as he usually held different contradictory positions on most issues in his life (therefore like a stopped clocked we can show he was "right") .
Still Simon Heffer, Jon Gaunt and the men driving "white vans" will still say "good old Enoch". A whole new generation of the Smithfield meat porters who marched to support him in his heyday. "Enoch was right......its all political correctness gone maaaaaaaaaaaaad innit?"