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Points of View

Excellent piece - an alternative Enoch Powell takes a large part in the latter chapters of "The Longest Road" (volume nine of my "House of Stuart Sequence", with Tom for forthcoming publication)
 
Enoch Powell is one of the figures that can't be kept out of TLs set in the UK in the 1970s/1980s. I don't particularly object to that. He was, after all, a figure of some influence, and eminently quotable. His speeches also have a rhythm about them that makes his style very easy to emulate.

What annoys me are those TLs where the author clearly has just picked him because of the Rivers of Blood speech, and extrapolated from that without doing any research into other areas, and without having a clue about the man (once described as: High Intelligence, Low Wisdom). His ability to compromise was second to none. Correction, it was none.

I always get the impression that he was the sort of person who'd either manage to get to the top by being the right person for a difficult job, or would always end up blowing out and fading to the backbenches. I just can't see him managing to be 'senior minister across a long-lived government'.
 
Not willing to compromise would be a good starting point. If he felt logic to him to a certain position, he'd hold on to that position, come Hell or high water. When you look at his speeches, they are full of the logic of x follows y follows z, without regard for the shades of grey that normal human beings come with.

He could turn a phrase (his speech regarding Thatcher both before and after the Falklands was genuinely brilliant), and he knew his Classics, but compromising to win a consensus? Not a hope.

Unfortunately, getting to the top spot in anything pretty much requires the ability to be able to take account of alternate points of view. His getting to a top position would effectively require a bizarre set of circumstances eliminating all possible competition. By contrast, Thatcher was a veritable weather vane of shifting positions and sympathy with differences of opinion.
I have him 'cast' as Viceroy of India - this was apparently, and in OTL, one of his youthful ambitions and led him to learning Urdu in the late 1930's.
 
An interesting prompt for things to consider when writing a TL. Do you plan to go into this further, or is it a stand alone article?
 
It was his ambition, but then, when I was in my youth, it was my ambition to be a Hollywood star.

He might have wanted the job, but no-one was ever going to give it to him.

In any case, by the time he became a politician, India was an independent nation. Even if Britain could hold on to India to the extent that he became Viceroy, I think his uncompromising nature would result in bloodshed and he'd quickly be recalled after a "Powell Go Back" campaign.
 
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