Loved and loathed with equal passion, Enoch Powell, who died yesterday, was without question one of the supreme parliamentarians of his generation. Baroness Thatcher led the tributes to him last night, as much of Tory Britain mourned the man widely regarded as the best Conservative leader and British prime minister neither party nor country would ever have.
His death is mourned in Northern Ireland too, by unionists who had turned to him - for his brilliant oratorical skills, his forensic mind, and his command of the parliamentary and national stage - at a time of crisis when they feared for their very survival as part of the United Kingdom.
But in the North, as in Britain, his legacy, and opinion of it, was and is inevitably divided. It could hardly be otherwise, nor would he have wished or expected it to be. Enoch Powell, the High Tory who famously resigned his party and urged the British people to vote Labour in 1974, was the arch-controversialist, independent-minded, highly-principled, uncompromising believer in causes who took no hostage in argument or debate, and who refused to yield to any passing political fashion.
His devoted wife, Pamela, announced his passing in his sleep yesterday at the age of 85 after a long battle with Parkinson's Disease. His death came nearly 30 years after he first indicated the viewpoint which ruined his political career.
In April 1968, at a political meeting in Birmingham, Mr Powell painted a nightmare vision of a strife-torn Britain alienated by the growth of its ethnic population. Calling for the reduction of immigration to "negligible proportions" and the urgent encouragement of re-immigration, Powell sealed his political fate with the startling declaration: "Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood."
He went on: "That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect."
He continued: "It has all but come in numerical terms. It will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it now. Whether there will be the public to demand and obtain that action I do not know. All I know is that to see and not to speak would be the greatest betrayal."
Horrified, the political establishment closed ranks against him; Edward Heath sacked him from the shadow cabinet; students from the London School of Economics marched in protest; but dockers and other trade unionists demonstrated in his favour.
While Powell would finally break with Heath's Conservative Party over Europe, his speech that day locked them into an enduring, bitter, and personal political battle. And last night, 30 years on, opinion remained divided about both his purpose and effect.
Lord Healey, the former Labour Chancellor, praised Powell's intellect while questioning his political judgment. However, he insisted "he was not a racist in any sense. . .he was an extreme nationalist." That view was echoed by Tara Mukherjee, of the Confederation of Indian Organisations UK, who spoke of his love of India and said: "Nationalism is an important prerequisite for the progress of a nation but blind adherence to nationalism as propagated by Mr Powell is a dangerous thing. In this age of spin doctors, Mr Powell will be remembered for his integrity and as a man who had the courage of his convictions."
However the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants said Powell had appealed to "the lowest common denominator" with his Birmingham speech, breaking the positive consensus then emerging that Commonwealth immigrants would be welcomed. Noting that history had proved him wrong, Mr Claude Moraes said: "Many of the groups that he targeted, such as West Indians and Ugandan Asians, were people who had served this country through a war, and whose second and third generations are contributing massively to the British economy and cultural life. He was someone who could have provided leadership to the higher ground of politics. Instead he appealed to the lowest common denominator."
Supporters insisted that Powell was anything but racist, noting, for example, his approval for interracial marriage. But critics persistently questioned how he could have failed to understand the impact of his words in cementing prejudiced public attitudes, or divorce himself from the consequences where these were intolerance, hostility or violence.
There was an echo of that, years later, during a violent period of loyalist opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which saw sustained attacks on the homes of RUC personnel. During a radio interview Powell, then the South Down MP, refused to condemn the attacks in terms sought by his interviewer, insisting that it was outrageous to put such a question to a member of a legislature.
Offended by the question he undoubtedly would have been. For Powell's greatest contribution to unionism was probably to invest it with discipline and constitutionalism during a very dangerous period in Northern Ireland affairs.
He was the original high priest of monetarism, blazing the trail for Mrs Thatcher and bolstering her during the early years when a majority in her own cabinet doubted her economic strategy. Ironically, Lord Molyneaux would later be accused of investing too heavily in the Powell/Thatcher relationship and in his certainty that salvation would be found in Westminster. As Lord Molyneaux and Mr David Trimble joined the tributes last night, they must have reflected on a political world utterly transformed, and on all old certainties now gone.