Enoch Powell on Aneurin Bevan

“Those who heard Aneurin Bevan command the House of Commons, in his great days, with an eloquence surpassed, if at all, only by Churchill, are reminded by the biographer's quotations how strangely similar those two antagonistic orators were. Their marvellous and often unexpected vocabulary was that of the self-educated; their oratory often approached, and sometimes crossed, the bounds of intemperance; and they were capable of descent from flights of true imagination to depths of bathos. Bevan's style belonged, like Churchill's, to a more spacious parliamentary and political era, already past before he died.”

“He had a characteristic not common among politicians and perhaps especially unusual in the self-taught man: he was never satisfied with a debating argument or a particular train of reasoning unless he could relate it to some general principle and inform his contentions with the light which that general principle shed. For a series of years I took part in housing debates where Bevan intervened, and at times I broke a pygmy lance or two against his shield. ... The same thing was to be noticed in all Bevan's interventions: a subject had to be large, it had to have large bearings, it had (if necessary) to be given large bearings, before he could interest himself in it and feel at home with it.”