Who was Enoch Powell? With his evocative name again electrifying headlines, this basic question needs examining. Why was Powell – why is Powell – so controversial? And what does his lasting infamy say about today’s politics?

Raw facts first. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) was a member of Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet in 1968 when he made a speech about immigration. It became known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech because it concluded with Powell comparing himself to a figure in Latin poetry who saw ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

He feared that high immigration would lead to violence in our society.

Powell was instantly sacked by Heath. Quintin Hogg, then shadow home secretary, accused his former colleague Powell of ‘demagogy, not leadership’. Demagogy is what we might nowadays call populism. Powell would later leave the Conservative Party in disagreement over Heath’s pro-Europeanism.

His name still sparks vehement accusations of racism. ‘Enoch’ is all you need say for people to contract a little. Like oysters squirted by lemon juice, they will recoil and become warier. They will not like it.

On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer announced changes to immigration rules, including tighter demands that immigrants should speak English.

In his Downing Street speech he said there was a danger that recent high immigration could turn Britain into ‘an island of strangers’. Sir Keir’s circle, including the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, claimed that this was simply about the future of English as our common tongue. If incomers could not speak our language, barriers would be created.

What Sir Keir may or may not have known is that his ‘island of strangers’ remark chimed with the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

Enoch Powell was a member of Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet in 1968 when he made his Rivers of Blood speech about immigration

Supporters of the divisive MP clash with police in Whitehall, London. The name Enoch Powell still sparks accusations of racism

Powell feared that members of the ‘existing population’ of Britain (at that time largely white) might find themselves ‘made strangers in their own country’ by anti-discrimination laws. They might struggle to obtain hospital beds and school places and might find ‘neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated’.

So ran the passage that Sir Keir is now accused of echoing. It was not, we can see, an exact quotation. But the charge of knowing resonance has been made with enough asperity on the Left – one Scottish newspaper even doing a photo montage in which Powell’s face morphs into that of Sir Keir – that it has put the Prime Minister on the defensive.

Some wonder if Sir Keir, or at least his speechwriter, was seeking to piggyback on Powell. Younger voters on TikTok and other social media outlets have been particularly vexed by Sir Keir’s speech, wondering whether this Labour prime minister has ‘turned into Enoch Powell’.

Again, we can ask if that was the intention all along. Might Reform-leaning ‘Red Wall’ voters, hearing all this, believe that lifelong immigration-supporter Sir Keir has changed his views?

Now 62, I was five years old at the time of the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. To TikTokkers, Powell must be someone from the distant mists, a prehistoric figure raising his bony finger at a violent horizon that, mercifully, has not quite materialised.

Since 1968, Britain has had a few race-related riots, not least last summer’s trouble after the Southport killings, but they have not resulted in the Thames, Severn, Mersey, Tyne or Clyde exactly foaming in blood.

Having lived some years in the US, I am proud of British tolerance and racial harmony.

Even after lockdown we are still, compared to many societies, a decent and happy country. Just about.

Mr Powell later defended his beliefs in front of students at Reading University 

The MP, even by the standards of 1968, was unlike his colleagues

Yet I admit that when I hear the name ‘Enoch’ I do that squirted-oyster thing. Why? Because I feel uneasy about the distress that Powell’s speech caused among immigrants.

In the loo of my boyhood home we had a West Indian joke book which had variations on the gag about Enoch reaching Heaven’s pearly gates only to find that St Peter was black. That Afro-Caribbean humour was the right response to an undeniable hurt.

Powell’s speech recited a Wolverhampton constituent’s story about an elderly white widow having excreta shoved through her letterbox in a street recently occupied by black immigrants. What with that and other phrases, you can see why the speech still causes offence.

But Powell was not alone. He quoted, at length, a Labour MP, John Stonehouse, who had criticised Sikh communities for seeking ‘special communal rights’. Stonehouse, whose career later came a cropper in a peculiar Reggie Perrin-style disappearing act in Miami, called communalism a ‘canker’.

Communalism, like demagogy, is a word that has fallen from fashion. It means placing one’s loyalty to a community or ethnic group as opposed to embracing the wider idea of your country.

Communalism, which accentuates tribalism, was rebadged under Tony Blair as multiculturalism. And, however well intentioned, multiculturalism has done more to fan racial tensions than Enoch Powell ever did.

Multiculturalism has led to two-tier policing and two-tier justice. Multiculturalism has sucked millions of pounds of public money to groups defined by race. Yet Enoch Powell has become a byword for racism – and multiculturalism is still feted by our Left-leaning Establishment.

There are three reasons for Powell’s enduring presence in political discussion. The first is low politics, in which you define yourself by your enemies. Edward Heath decapitated Powell because he suddenly had an opportunity to do so. It allowed him to strengthen his grip on the Conservative Party.

Likewise, by continuing to talk about Powell, the Left defends its territory and makes it harder for anyone to criticise multiculturalism, which has been a source of influence and jobs for its supporters.

The second reason concerns personality. Powell, even by 1968 standards, was hypnotically different from other MPs.

He had mesmerising, pale eyes. I met him only once, late in life, but cannot forget that blazing gaze or the horse-whisperer voice. He had a bus inspector’s moustache, a scholar’s vocabulary and a gift for memorable phrases that Sir Keir Starmer entirely lacks.

That is why the ‘island of strangers’ line was so noticeable. It simply did not sound like our dullard PM.

The Old Testament name was perfect for Powell. The Bible’s Enoch is a patriarch of the ‘antediluvian’ era before Noah’s flood. He lived for 365 years. Does this mean the House of Commons, if it lasts, will still be obsessing about him in the 24th century? Good grief. Maybe it does.

The third reason Powell’s 1968 speech continues to grip us is this: it spoke one inconvenient truth, which is that politicians should not suppress opinions among their electors. Powell said he ‘did not have the right’ to ignore constituents. He was pre-empting Hogg’s ‘demagogy, not leadership’ criticism and he was right, but today’s political class really, really hates this point.

Political leadership should be about finding technocratic solutions to satisfy popular demands. Hogg and Heath, and more recently the Heseltines and Cleggs and Mays and Milibands of this world, plus the whole heavenly host of Whitehall, see politics as something that is done to the people, not by them.

I suspect Sir Keir Starmer, despite his unconvincing ‘island of strangers’ line, remains firmly in that camp.