Faber & Faber

Simon Heffer's 1998 biography Like the Roman is still, 10 years after original publication, considered to be the definitive study of Enoch Powell, one of the twentieth century's most controversial politicians. Here, in a short piece to herald this reissue, Simon Heffer explains the conditions under which the book could be written, and the unprecedented and unrestriced access he was given to write it.

In 1994 Enoch Powell, who was then 82 and had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, asked me if I would write his biography. Several others had attempted this task in the previous 25 years without his approval or endorsement, but the conditions he set for me meant that mine would be different.

I would be allowed unrestricted access to his private papers, including personal correspondence between him and his mother from the 1930s and 1940s that had not only never been seen by any other biographer, but had not been seen by Powell's wife or daughters. Powell would also grant me interviews - in the end about 20 hours' worth - where nothing was off-limits: previously he had refused this to all other biographers, agreeing only to read their manuscripts in order to correct any errors of fact.

The quid pro quo for this was that nothing would be published until Powell was dead. He wanted the story to be complete: but he also wanted it to be impossible for him to be questioned on some of the more intimate personal matters revealed in the private letters, which I was not to be allowed to see until after his death.

The story that emerged was in some regards already well-known, but in others revelatory. Powell was easily caricatured by his opponents, whether as a racist, a Little Englander, austere in his economics and bleak in conversation. My researches into his life, not just in his own papers but through extensive interviews with scores of his contemporaries, revealed a man of deep humanity, romanticism, sensitivity and immense intelligence.

Like the Roman does not merely concentrate on Powell's political life. It gives weight to his other lives as a professor of Greek and a Brigadier, both of them achievements that he rated above any political accomplishment. It also describes in great detail Powell's public life, not merely his epic tussle with Edward Heath between 1965 and 1974, but his earlier resignation for the Treasury in 1958 and his refusal to serve under Alec Douglas-Home in 1963.

It describes his quixotic decision to leave the Commons and then to come back as an Ulster member. Finally, it shows a man returning to his first intellectual principles in a retirement he had not sought, after he lost his parliamentary seat in 1987, when he continued for as long as he could to pursue the ideal of British nationalism, but also engaged upon translations of the gospels from the Greek.

Powell emerges from the book not as the man who, as the caricature would have it, divided Britain on the question of race, but who was the founding father of Thatcherism; and man whose refusal to compromise cost him office on several occasions but who, even a decade after his death, continues to exert an influence unmatched by many who have spent years around the cabinet table.

I am not sure how far Powell would have liked the book I produced: but it is an absolutely honest portrait of him, and of the difficult political times in which he lived.