CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 10

CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS

No Easy Answers. By Enoch Powell. Sheldon Press, London. 135 pp. A House Divided. By James Callaghan. Collins. 202 pp. Index.

Enoch Powell is an unlikely figure to elicit comparison with Charles de Gaulle. But there was a Gaullist arrogance in his refusal to stand again for the Conservative Party at the last election, and in his withdrawal to an Olympian remoteness, presumably to await, as a rather junior French general did from 1946 until 1958, the call of a repentant country to become its saviour.

For Mr Powell, that call is less likely to come. But English politics will be the poorer if his sharp tongue is no longer heard. Many of his utterances were annoying or offensive, but on examination it was usually difficult to refute them. Appropriately enough, he cast himself as a new Cassandra, a prophet of dooms which more restrained colleagues refused - to see or acknowledge.

There are more sides to Mr Powell than this. The

scholarship boy from Birnpngham who became professor of Greek at Sydney University before he was 30 has, more recently, become a determined advocate of Christianity and the High Anglican Church. The faith he once dismissed as “untrue history” has, in middle age, become central to his being. As he told another notable scholar who rediscovered his faith late in life, Malcolm Muggeridge: “The religious side of my nature is sufficiently pronounced for me to be aware that I have to feed it, have to try to satisfy it. I am aware in relation to religion of a sensation which is like that of being hungry, as one can be aware of a similar sensation in relation to poetry or music.” In this book Mr Powell has selected 14 essays and interviews in which he discusses his attitude to Christianity and its relationship to the political world. The familiar, provocative Enoch is never far away: “We say ‘all men are equal in the sight of God.’ Note that this does not apply only to Commonwealth

citizens..” “Even martyrdom. is out of the question when one cannot get a visa.” “To love one’s neighbour as oneself is something which, by definition, is impossible: it is the denial of self-hood.” Public interest in Mr Powell’s religious convictions must decline after his self-imposed political eclipse; the views of Mr James Callaghan on Northern Ireland should gain a new significance since the British election. Mr Callaghan is back in the Cabinet. His recent book is a , highly personal account, written while in Opposition, of the period from 1967 to 1970 when, as Home Secretary in an earlier Labour Government, he was largely responsible for Britain’s response to the growing troubles in Northern Ireland. '

Inevitably, the book carries some taint of being “instant history,” as well as being a justification of Labour’s policies at the time. Northern Ireland is again the responsibility of a Labour Government. Although Mr Callaghan has moved on to even higher things as Foreign Secre-

tary his views on the “Irish Question” will, no doubt, still be important in Cabinet. His conclusion — that a united Ireland must come, but it must be an act of free choice of the people involved — he might not have spelt out so clearly had he known how soon his party would be back in power. But he would, no doubt, still stand by it today. This is a hope which many people might share, regardless of political persuasion; it is not a policy. In the meantime, Mr Callaghan has offered an important account of how and why decisions were made in London (and sometimes. in helicopters dragging the Prime Minister, Mr. Wilson, back from his holiday retreat in the Scilly Isles) about Northern Ireland in the critical period from 1968 to 1970 when the I.R.A. again became a force to reckon with and British troops had to be committed to that most thankless task — preserving order in cities against more than ' one group of mad and vicious killers.