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Who Killed Enoch Powell?
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 11, 2025
Even though I read this a over a week ago, I still find my thoughts returning to it. Who could have guessed that an almost wholly obscure british novel from 1970 would be so uncannily topical, so disquetingly relevant here in the states almost 50 years later. On this side of the Atlantic Powell himself has been all but forgotten - a conservative MP of the time, Powell amassed a fanatical populist following among middle/working class white Britishers with an explicitly racialist and nationalist brand of demagoguery that assured his followers the main thing keeping Britain from being great again was the country's influx of immigrants, and the permissive society that allowed this (most infamously represented by the 'Rivers of Blood' speech); essentially, he was not terribly unlike our current Id Monster, albeit with a posh accent and much better vocabulary. In Wise's novel, a speculative sociological investigation in the form of a thriller, Powell is killed by a bomb during a speaking tour, and from his assassination a perfect storm of events ensue, seeming to lead with terrible inevitability to the creation of a police state. Historical and cultural factors aside, the novel possesses a startling relevancy, achieved by Wise's ability to get enter and articulate the disparate minds of its cast: there is the complacent, politics-playing PM who hands off the investigation to an old-school reactionary of the 'law and order' type, who in turn is using the case as an excuse to bring about a real rain that'll wash all the undesirables off the nation, as well as the leader of a radical fringe group (today we would call them 'alt-right terrorists') creating crises for his own benefit; meanwhile, ignorant mobs in search of scapegoats rampage through non-white neighborhoods and Will-to-Power obsessed loners stockpile weapons and make bombs in preparation for their day of glory. Against this welter of machinations and bloodshed, what chance does a single ordinary police inspector have in navigating the webs of chaos to uncover the truth before all hell breaks loose? Well, since this is ultimately still fiction, there is, if not a happy ending, then at least one which sees the lid placed back upon Pandora's box; whether we shall be fortunate enough to see life conform to art one cannot yet say, but in any event, this is a thought-provoking little novel deserves to be exhumed from obscurity, for both what it says about the past, and what we can learn (and do) about our present.
"He lost interest in the proletariat, if indeed he'd ever had an interest in it. What replaced his earlier beliefs was a conviction that that the real political mainspring was self-esteem. "Give the proles riches," he used to say, "and rob them of self-esteem, and you've a revolt on your hands. But give them self-esteem - a sense of distinction - and you can treat them like dogs!" . . .You could tell them that they were already distinguished, and that the reason they failed to feel that distinction was because of the masses of non-British people who had become identified with them and who were stealing their distinction from them. "Distinction," he used to say, "increases in direct proportion to the degree of undistinction that a group can project on nonmembers. He had, he felt, discovered a fundamental political law."
"'British justice!' said Kerick, as if the articulation of the words caused him real effort. . ."You know - we hear about it everywhere. This *fairness*. This *gentlemanly* system. This being innocent until proved guilty. You know who I blame? Me! Myself! For even believing it." He swallowed. Emotion caused him to tremble. "That man," he said. "The accusations, the suggestions, the dirty innuendos! Not only me - my wife, my daughter, my friends, everyone I've touched. He hated me! I'd never seen him before in the whole of my life - but he hated me. You know why? Because I was born in Warsaw. The greater part of my life I've lived here, in this town. But no - nothing, it means nothing. I was born in Warsaw and that damns me."
"'Where's the empire that gave a Briton distinction in the eyes of the world? Gone! And what is there to replace it? Nothing! We have sagged from world eminence into this gray mediocrity, And the nobility of war - what of this? Outrages against it at the Cenotaph, and the medals of heroes on sale to callow adolescents in the back streets of Soho! This is the philosophical vacuum that the erosion of empire has caused and this is the vacuum we must fill!'"
"The country, he thought, had gone mad. No sense of purpose any longer. Nowhere to go. No identification with anything, A massive blindness, somehow. And all the time a massive bursting vitality beneath the surface, trying to get out into some creative channel that didn't exist any more."
"Normality of a kind was beginning to return, though behind it still hung a suspicion. Taylor wondered if the earlier normality, the normality they had all taken for granted, would ever quite return. It seemed that some previous confidence had been permanently shaken, some previous image permanently soiled."
"He lost interest in the proletariat, if indeed he'd ever had an interest in it. What replaced his earlier beliefs was a conviction that that the real political mainspring was self-esteem. "Give the proles riches," he used to say, "and rob them of self-esteem, and you've a revolt on your hands. But give them self-esteem - a sense of distinction - and you can treat them like dogs!" . . .You could tell them that they were already distinguished, and that the reason they failed to feel that distinction was because of the masses of non-British people who had become identified with them and who were stealing their distinction from them. "Distinction," he used to say, "increases in direct proportion to the degree of undistinction that a group can project on nonmembers. He had, he felt, discovered a fundamental political law."
"'British justice!' said Kerick, as if the articulation of the words caused him real effort. . ."You know - we hear about it everywhere. This *fairness*. This *gentlemanly* system. This being innocent until proved guilty. You know who I blame? Me! Myself! For even believing it." He swallowed. Emotion caused him to tremble. "That man," he said. "The accusations, the suggestions, the dirty innuendos! Not only me - my wife, my daughter, my friends, everyone I've touched. He hated me! I'd never seen him before in the whole of my life - but he hated me. You know why? Because I was born in Warsaw. The greater part of my life I've lived here, in this town. But no - nothing, it means nothing. I was born in Warsaw and that damns me."
"'Where's the empire that gave a Briton distinction in the eyes of the world? Gone! And what is there to replace it? Nothing! We have sagged from world eminence into this gray mediocrity, And the nobility of war - what of this? Outrages against it at the Cenotaph, and the medals of heroes on sale to callow adolescents in the back streets of Soho! This is the philosophical vacuum that the erosion of empire has caused and this is the vacuum we must fill!'"
"The country, he thought, had gone mad. No sense of purpose any longer. Nowhere to go. No identification with anything, A massive blindness, somehow. And all the time a massive bursting vitality beneath the surface, trying to get out into some creative channel that didn't exist any more."
"Normality of a kind was beginning to return, though behind it still hung a suspicion. Taylor wondered if the earlier normality, the normality they had all taken for granted, would ever quite return. It seemed that some previous confidence had been permanently shaken, some previous image permanently soiled."
January 28, 2022
Surprisingly sticky for such a trashy artefact. Incredibly insightful to the hole caused by the collapse of empire, not wholly concerned with any of the consequences. It doesn't absolve Powell in the narrative, but it does elide most of the poisonous stuff Powell actually said in his speeches which makes the the vague lib "he's offering a voice to the voiceless" handwaving come off as weak. Still some effective savage thriller writing in here.
January 13, 2026
commits the original sin of trash thrillers in that none of the more interesting spectacles of the book actually have much of a role in the progress or the conclusion of the novel, which mostly suggests that politics is the work of individuals with machinations, and normalcy is the work of the heroic lengths others go to stop them.
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January 29, 2019Synopsis: this is a different one. Controversial MP Powell served in Parliament for decades; in this fiction, he dies in a bomb attack.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews