SIMON HEFFER: The allegations against Enoch Powell are a monstrous lie and beyond contempt

By Simon Heffer
Daily Mail
March 29, 2015

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3017219/SIMON-HEFFER-allegations-against-Enoch-Powell-monstrous-lie-contempt.html

I never detected the slightest whiff of scandal about Powell, writes Simon Heffer

Enoch Powell, pictured making a speech in 1977, has been named in a Church of England review into historic sex abuse

The allegations are a monstrous lie. That the lie appears to have been retailed by a priest is beyond contempt, writes Simon Heffer

Four years before he died in 1998, Enoch Powell did me the honour of asking me to write his biography. I spoke to almost everyone alive who knew him. When he died, I had unique access to a vast collection of private papers, including numerous intimate letters. If there is anyone alive other than Enoch’s widow and daughters who knows more about him than I do, I’d like to meet him.

I never detected the slightest whiff of scandal about Powell. His probity in personal and financial matters was rock solid. When on Saturday evening a fellow journalist told me of the allegations made by the Church of England, my first instinct was to laugh: but that soon changed into utter outrage when I realised he was serious.

The Church has publicly accused Enoch of being involved in ritual satanic abuse on hearsay, without the slightest evidence. They might as well accuse him of having been a war criminal or an armed robber, for there would be as much truth in either allegation.

The appalling slurs are just like those made against 91-year-old Lord Bramall, a D-Day veteran and former chief of defence staff, whose homes in London and North Yorkshire were gratuitously raided by police recently on the back of an unspecified allegation of a sexual nature dating back to the 1970s.

It is not just that the bishops who have made these accusations are behaving in a remarkably un-Christian fashion by putting this smear into the public domain. But that they do not appear even to have engaged what passes for their brains, or consciences, before behaving in this grotesque and offensive fashion.

Their brains should have told them that a man of Enoch’s controversial reputation would never for a moment have got away with the type of behaviour they are alleging he indulged in during the 1980s. The Establishment turned against Enoch in 1968 after the so-called Rivers of Blood speech; it would never have protected him for a second had it detected the slightest whiff of scandal.

Their consciences should have told them that to make such an outrageous allegation about an enormously distinguished public figure who cannot defend himself, and which would cause the deepest distress to his family and friends, was the height of mischief and irresponsibility.

It is disgraceful and destabilising for clergy to behave in this way, and the Church needs to investigate those responsible for this smear and take action accordingly.

These post-Savile accusations bring to mind the hysteria surrounding allegations of satanic abuse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including notorious cases in Rochdale and the Orkneys that involved social workers and police forcibly removing children from their homes in dawn raids.

When the London School of Economics investigated 84 alleged cases, it found no convincing corroborative evidence of any abuse – yet families had been torn apart on the say-so of those who insisted action be taken.

For decades, Enoch Powell has long been a bug-bear of the liberal Establishment.

He has been demonised not least because to attack his memory is a quick and effective way for them to score points by setting out their own political correctness.

What better way for some mischievous Leftist priest to damage Enoch further than by linking him with the current rash of stories about child abuse?

In 1998, just after Enoch died, the BBC broadcast a programme in which they railed at Enoch for his hypocrisy. They said this scourge of mass immigration had visited the West Indies in 1953 to recruit black labour for the NHS. I was told of the story before the programme was broadcast and informed its researcher that Enoch had never been to the West Indies in his life. I was told, effectively, that I was lying, and it was broadcast.

A black clergywoman, then resident in London, talked at length of Enoch having recruited her as a nurse. The story was rubbish.

Detailed investigation by the BBC complaints department found that the woman had been recruited after a visit to her island by Jack Profumo, not Enoch Powell at all, and the Corporation was forced to make a grovelling on-air apology in peak time.

I have long dreamt of the day when ignorant politicians and Establishment figures would stop manipulating Enoch’s memory for their own advantage. But I never thought I would hear of bishops of the Church of England doing it.

The allegations are a monstrous lie. That the lie appears to have been retailed by a priest is beyond contempt.

There must be an investigation and, for all the distress this outrage has caused, there must be a reckoning.