Disraeli’s Significant Influence on Enoch Powell’s Tory Conception of Nationhood

After serving as a brigadier within the British army in India for three years until 1946, Enoch Powell decided to start a political career and joined the Conservative Party. He was recruited in the CRD (Conservative Research Department) where he was trained to Conservatism in a Disraelian way. At the time, Powell acknowledged several times that the figure of Disraeli had inspired him. Despite being a founding member of the One Nation Group (ONG) in 1950, whose aim was to reappropriate the legacy and myth of Disraeli, Powell swiftly shifted to free market ideas in 1952 and took his distance from this source of inspiration on the economic level. What is striking is that when the key tenets of Powellism akin to Hayekian economic principles were visible in the mid-1960s, Powell had already developed his own concept of the ‘nation’ out of Disraeli’s fiction. This paper aims to analyse to what extent Powell used Disraeli’s ideas (put forward in his 1840s trilogy) in a selective way to develop his own understanding of the nation.