He was influenced by reading James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche.

[77] Powell was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Lord Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command,[78] involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab.

[90][nb 27] In January 1958 Powell resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest of government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch advocate of disinflation, or, in modern terms, a monetarist, and a believer in market forces.

[104] Powell also refused to launch a public inquiry, and resisted calls to issue a warning against any left-over thalidomide pills that might remain in people's medicine cabinets (as US President John F. Kennedy had done).

[112] In October 1963, along with Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Lord Hailsham, Powell tried in vain to persuade Butler not to serve under the Earl of Home (soon to be known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home), in the belief that the latter would be unable to form a government.

[114] However, at the meeting at his house on the evening of 17 October, Powell, who still enjoyed a liberal reputation on racial issues after his Hola Massacre Speech, reportedly said of Lord Home: "How can I serve under a man whose views on Africa are positively Portuguese?

[149] Later that day Powell said in a speech to the Primrose League: There was an instinct, inarticulate but deep and sound, that the traditional, prescriptive House of Lords posed no threat and injured no interests, but might yet, for all its illogicalities and anomalies, make itself felt on occasion to useful purpose.

[85]: 454 Powell went on to criticise the Conservative government for obtaining British membership despite the party having promised at the general election of 1970 that it would "negotiate: no more, no less" and that "the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people" would be needed if the UK were to join.

[166] In a sudden general election in October 1974, Powell returned to Parliament as Ulster Unionist (UUP) MP for South Down, having rejected an offer to stand as a candidate for the far-right National Front, formed seven years earlier and fiercely opposed to non-white immigration.

[167] Since 1968, Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint, he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom.

He refused to join the Orange Order, the first Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member (and, to date, one of only four, the others being Ken Maginnis, Danny Kinahan and Lady Hermon), and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist loyalism espoused by Ian Paisley and his supporters.

[169] During February 1975, after winning the leadership election, Margaret Thatcher refused to offer Powell a Shadow Cabinet place because "he turned his back on his own people" by leaving the Conservative Party exactly 12 months earlier and telling the electorate to vote Labour.

[178] Following a riot in Bristol in 1980, Powell stated that the media were ignoring similar events in south London and Birmingham, and said: "Far less than the foreseeable New Commonwealth and Pakistan ethnic proportion would be sufficient to constitute a dominant political force in the United Kingdom able to extract from a government and the main parties terms calculated to render its influence still more impregnable.

[182] On 28 March 1981, Powell gave a speech to Ashton-under-Lyne Young Conservatives where he criticised the "conspiracy of silence" between the government and the opposition over the prospective growth through births of the immigration population, and added, "'We have seen nothing yet' is a phrase that we could with advantage repeat to ourselves whenever we try to form a picture of that future".

[187] John Casey records an exchange between Powell and Thatcher during a meeting of the Conservative Philosophy Group: Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons.

On 3 April, Powell said in the Commons that the time for inquests on the government's failure to protect the Falkland Islands would come later and that although it was right to put the issue before the United Nations, the UK should not wait upon that organisation to deliberate but use forceful action now.

It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?"

"[citation needed] Powell further stated that the continental nations held the nuclear weapon in such esteem that they had conventional forces "manifestly inadequate to impose more than brief delay upon an assault from the East.

That a nation staring ultimate military defeat in the face would choose self-extermination is unbelievable enough; but that the United States, separated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean, would regard the loss of the first pawn in the long game as necessitating harakiri is not describable by the ordinary resources of language".

[206] In 1985, race riots between the black community and the police broke out in London and in Birmingham, leading Powell to repeat his warning that ethnic civil conflict would be the ultimate outcome of foreign mass migration into the British Isles, and re-issue his call for a government sponsored programme of repatriation.

Thatcher's belief in the nuclear hypothesis "in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was 'inconceivable' that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States.

The boundary changes had arisen due to his own campaign for the number of MPs representing Northern Ireland to be increased to the equivalent proportion for the rest of the United Kingdom, as part of the steps towards greater integration.

[218] In an interview for the Sunday People in December 1988, Powell said the Conservative Party was "rejoining Enoch" on the European Community but repeated his warning of civil war as the consequence of immigration: "I still cannot forsee how a country can be peaceably governed in which the composition of the population is progressively going to change.

[219] When inflation crept up that year, he condemned Chancellor Nigel Lawson's policy of printing money so sterling would shadow the Deutsche Mark and said that it was for the UK to join the European Monetary System (EMS).

In a speech at Chatham House for the launch of the book on 6 September, he advised Thatcher to fight the next general election on a nationalist theme as many Eastern European nations previously under Russian rule were gaining their freedom.

[222] After Thatcher resisted further European integration at a meeting at Strasbourg in November, Powell asked her parliamentary private secretary, Mark Lennox-Boyd, to pass to her "my respectful congratulations on her stand ... she both spoke for Britain and gave a lead to Europe—in the line of succession of Winston Churchill and William Pitt.

In June 1994, he wrote an article for the Daily Mail, where he stated that "Britain is waking from the nightmare of being part of the continental bloc, to rediscover that these offshore islands belong to the outside world and lie open to its oceans".

[244] Other mourners at the service included socialist Labour MP Tony Benn, who, despite criticising the Rivers of Blood speech, maintained a close relationship with Powell, and when asked why he had attended the funeral, responded "he was my friend.

[262] Conservative commentator Bruce Anderson has claimed that the Rivers of Blood speech would have come as a complete surprise to anyone who had studied Powell's record: he had been a West Midlands MP for 18 years but had said hardly anything about immigration.

[265] In the late 1950s, when other Conservatives were advocating a campaign for immigration control following race riots, Powell declined to join them, remarking that it was no good discussing the details when the "real issue" of the citizenship laws had remained unchanged.