Kenneth Widmerpool is a fictional character in Anthony Powell's novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, a 12-volume account of upper-class and bohemian life in Britain between 1920 and 1970.

Literary analysts have noted Widmerpool's defining characteristics as a lack of culture, small-mindedness, and a capacity for intrigue; generally, he is thought to embody many of the worst aspects of the British character.

In this respect he represents the meritocratic middle class's challenge to the declining power of the traditional "establishment" or ruling group, which is shown to be vulnerable to a determined assault from this source.

Among the more prominent names suggested as real-life models for Widmerpool have been Edward Heath, the British prime minister 1970–1974 and Reginald Manningham-Buller who was Britain's Attorney General in the 1950s.

[3] In a 1971 study of the novels the journalist and editor Dan McLeod summarised the theme of the sequence as that of a decaying establishment, confronted by "aggressive representatives from the middle classes elbowing their way up".

The latter are prepared to suffer any number of indignities in their pursuit of power but the establishment proves capable of resisting the advance of "all but the most thick-hided and persevering" of outsiders.

[6] During the long narrative, the focus changes frequently from one group to another; new faces appear while established characters are written out, sometimes reappearing after many volumes, sometimes not at all, though news of their doings may reach Jenkins, through one or other of his many acquaintances.

[7] Richard Jones, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, suggests that the novels may be regarded as "the dance of Kenneth Widmerpool, who is Jenkins's fall-guy, tormentor, and antithesis".

Widmerpool dogs Jenkins's career and life; in the opening pages of the first book at school, he is encountered running through the mists, in the vain hope of athletic glory.

[10] The family appears to have settled in either Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire; Widmerpool's father trades as a fertiliser manufacturer, a matter of extreme embarrassment to his son, who never mentions him.

[14] At the outbreak of war in 1939, in a badly cut army uniform, he resembles a music-hall burlesque of a military officer or else "a railway official of some obscure country".

[21] Many of Widmerpool's traits are evident quite early in his career: his pomposity, his aversion to all forms of culture ("the embodiment of thick-skinned, self-important philistinism" according to one commentator), his bureaucratic obsessions and his snobbishness.

[5][22] He is politically naïve and his contribution to the pre-war appeasement of Nazi Germany is to suggest that Hermann Göring be awarded the Order of the Garter and given a tour of Buckingham Palace.

[7] In his analysis of Powell's fiction, Nicholas Birns identifies an incident in The Acceptance World (the third volume of the series) as the point at which the assessment of Widmerpool by his contemporaries begins to change.

[27] In a review of the early novels in the sequence, Arthur Mizener wrote: "Powell makes his great egoists, for all their absurdity, something not essentially different from all the rest of us; even Widmerpool, the most extravagant of the lot, is not.

[28] At school (not identified but generally recognised as Eton from the description of wartime bomb damage tallies),[29] Widmerpool is undistinguished academically and athletically, a "gauche striver" in the words of one literary commentator.

[34] Just before the outbreak of war in September 1939, he oversees a scheme on behalf of Donners to corner the Turkish market in chromite and emerges unscathed when the project collapses.

[34] Just after the end of the war, Widmerpool surprises his acquaintances by marrying Stringham's niece, Pamela Flitton, an ATS driver, whose sex life is rumoured to be "gladiatorial".

[44] A few years later, Jenkins recalls how Widmerpool recoiled when touched gently on the arm by Berthe, a French girl encountered during the pair's summer sojourn at La Grenadière, shortly after leaving school.

[45] Widmerpool was still staring wildly at Gypsy Jones, apparently regarding her much as a doctor, suspecting a malignant growth, might examine a diseased organism under a microscope; although I found later that any such diagnosis of his attitude was far from the true one.

[36] Shortly afterwards, Widmerpool becomes obsessed by Gypsy Jones, a fiery street radical he meets by chance, who according to Jenkins resembles "a thoroughly ill-conditioned errand boy".

In his analysis of Powell's works, Nicholas Birns wrote: "What Widmerpool wants to do is to 'marry up', to make a marriage that will cement his upward social mobility, and he is willing to take an older woman with two teenage children in order to accomplish this.

[56] Norman Shrapnel, in his obituary of Powell, speculates whether the author ever regretted creating the "maddening, mysterious, apparently indestructible Widmerpool" and, like Ali, expresses disappointment with the manner of the character's death.

[57] Conversely, in a biographical sketch of Powell, Michael Barber believes that Widmerpool's demise accords with a principal theme of the novels, expressed in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (fifth book in the sequence), that "in the end most things in life—perhaps all things—turn out to be appropriate".

[58][59] Michael Gorra, reviewing Powell's autobiography To Keep the Ball Rolling, presents the view that, while the novels are built around Widmerpool, they are not essentially about him: "He is an organising principle, a means, not an end, and serves primarily to establish a system of judgement.

[65] According to Powell, Manningham-Buller was an unattractive figure at school; he was instrumental in the dismissal of a master who sent an inappropriate note to a junior boy, an action reflected in the novels when Widmerpool instigates the sacking of Akworth.

It is possible that the episodes relating to Widmerpool's spying career are drawn from the activities of Denis Nowell Pritt, a Labour MP who was expelled from the party for his pro-Soviet stance.

The part of Widmerpool was played—with, according to one listener "audible pomposity"—by Brian Hewlett, more generally known as a longstanding cast member of the BBC radio serial The Archers.

[77] Reviewing the reissue of the films in DVD in 2012, Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian describes Widmerpool as "one of fiction's most intriguing monsters" and likens Beale's portrayal to that of "a kind of grown-up Billy Bunter with the charm sucked out".

[78] Christopher Hitchens, writing in the New York Review of Books, criticised the production (though not Beale's performance), for depicting Widmerpool as "a hapless rather than a hateful figure".