When The Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s ground-breaking chronicle of Stalinist atrocity, was reissued in the twilight of the Gorbachev era, its author (so the story—cooked up, apparently, by Kingsley Amis—goes) was asked whether he would like to give it a new title. He suggested “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”

Whatever Conquest may or may not have said, we can be sure that the British politician Enoch Powell (1912–1998), a rather less exuberant figure, would never have summed things up quite like that. The satisfaction that Powell derived—and, as he was not a modest man, there was certainly some—from so often being proved right (at least as he saw it) was tempered by the sadness that is frequently the lot of a prophet of doom. Amongst the Powell speeches reproduced in Enoch at 100, a new (and, as such works are, largely admiring) Gedenkschrift published to mark his centenary and edited by Lord Howard of Rising, there is one delivered to the (High Tory) Salisbury Group at a dinner held shortly after the 1987 election defeat that ended his parliamentary career.1

The speech was melancholy, even by the standards of Powell, a virtuoso of gloom. It was a dark, scornful lament for the manner in which the Britain he had idealized and, as incarnated in Parliament, idolized, had willed itself out of existence, leaving him behind, still bound by duty to that vanished country: “there [was] no way out.”

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