Enoch Powell.

'My time will come,' Powell assured one of his supporters in the course of his first entry into politics as unsuccessful Conservative candidate in the Normanton by-election of 1946. It never has. The reason is that whatever the ups and downs of British politics this century, the downs have never been so low as to tempt the nation to call such a prickly character forward as 'the man of the hour'. (One wonders which people of equivalent intellectual stature he could ever have chosen for his Cabinet colleagues, and how long they would have stuck it.) Of little avail, alas, those times…