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From Socialist Worker, No. 101, 14 December 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
‘THE SMALL-TIME bum who has been allowed by our rulers to become a big-time bum deserves no place of honour in the annals either of bumming or of history.’
Brecht said it of Hitler; but the attitude to our own home-grown bum,Uncle Enoch, the people’s friend, is no less a matter of historical hyperbole.
If the Panorama rags-to-riches’ epic of the Rise of Powell (Monday December 2) set out with any firm purpose, it was to attempt to fill out the baggy suit of this sad little man into some sort of shape.
For which Ace Reporter Robert MacNeill needed a pretty sizeable bladder. He found it in his own mealy-mouthed interrogation.
With Robin Day, we might have had a fight on our hands. But although Mr. MacNeill put all the wishy-washy points (do you think you might be exacerbating racial tension, Mr. Powell, please, Sir?) he allowed Powell’s ‘I’m the greatest safety valve this country has got’ to go by without so much as a murmur.
The only bite against Powell was provided in the dubious shape of Ray Gunter, who, although he expressed one or two doubts about the ’safety valve’ theory, did claim magnanimously that our Enoch is ‘a man of great principles,a man of great honour’.
Mr. MacNeill, in his turn, began his exhibition of aggressive interviewing with the deathless stipulation: ‘Let’s leave aside your evidence, Mr. Powell ...’ He even admitted that the pollsters commissioned had expressed doubts about the representativeness of their sample. This, plus the odd student demo and a lonely Indian’s comment,was the sum total of the Other Side that the BBC graced us with.
But on Powell’s side, we had the big battalions.
From a contented cradle, we followed this man,old school-friend by old school-friend, through King Edward’s Birmingham to Cambridge, to a professorship in Australia, a meteoric rise in the army and into politics; ladled out with liberal helpings of the Powell ‘self-help’ philosophy of ‘so be it’.
Eager, we hear, to pursue the career of a concert clarinettist at school, when a Cambridge scholarship beckoned, Powell philosophised: ‘If this is the way up, so be it.’
While keen to enter the diplomatic service, a fellowship presented itself: ‘If I can take off the shelf a fellowship at Trinity, then so be it’.
And when, having resigned from Macmillan’s Cabinet, he was re-offered the Ministry of Health (himself a life-long opponent of the Health Service), Powell cuts his losses. ‘Life goes on,’ he muses. ‘One makes one’s point, and life goes on.’
The man who went from Army Private to Brigadier in five years ‘enjoyed best of all being a private soldier’.
Even this gem didn’t raise so much as a flicker in Mr. MacNeill’s somnambulent eyebrow.
And when at the end of this orgy of self-publicity we are told that Mr. Powell ‘lays himself open to the accusation of demagoguery’,we feel that perhaps Mr. MacNeill has gone too far.
Interesting to compare MacNeill’s impotent interviewing of this media-man with 24 Hours’ Michael Barrett’s barrage at half a dozen AEF militants from Girlings.
Sarcasm (’you’re all members of the happy brotherhood of the trades union movement’) was combined with droll punnery (before the discussion he’d amusingly refer to them as ‘turning the screw’) to make a reasoned case from the workers impossible.
It seems a bit odd that trendy BBC Current Affairs should so barrack a group of television amateurs, while touching their forelocks so deferentially to an expert.
Perhaps they reckon that although we’ve got the numbers, they’ve got the big bums.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020