Enoch Powell (1912-1998)
This icon of the hard right is best known for two things: his observation that all political careers end in failure; and his notorious "rivers of blood speech", which ensured that his most certainly did.
Like many of the more exotic products of minor public schools (in Powell's case King Edward's in Birmingham), it's his contradictions that make him interesting. The stereotype of a swivel-eyed opponent of "coloured" immigration and Brussels is only a partial portrait of the man who, as a junior health minister, was partly responsible for employing the West Indian immigrants he later deplored.
The deep-seated Little Englander in him was ofset by his impressive intellectual credentials. At 25 he attempted to civilise Australia as a classics professor, was a brigadier within another ten years and went on to became one of the most incandescantly brilliant orators of the later 20th century.
Many obiturists stressed Powell's Romantic nature and, like many a public school man, he sought refuge from the crudeness of the world in an ideal: in this case an unreal vision of England. And like many Romantics with a sentimental streak (he once claimed his greatest regret was not getting killed in the war), he loved nothing more than a glorious defeat in support of the wrong cause.
Like many a public school smartarse, Powell's legacy is the reputation for getting things wrong. The racial war he prophesied (some would say tried to incite) hasn't happened, and the kind of High Toryism he espoused is now fashionable as the pox. For all his gifts and early promise, today he is a byword for the sort of backward-looking chauvinism one could only find in the worst type of boarding school.
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