Apostolic succession

"This is not to suggest that there is really such a thing as Faragism. There is just Powellism warmed up. Farages gift was to refashion Enoch Powells rather extraterrestrial persona as down-to-earth bluff English blokeishness. Undoubtedly, however, this was a repackaging of old content: Powell’s twin hatreds of immigrants and the EU. Powell visited Dulwich College in 1982, when Farage was in his final year there. The young man was spellbound. As he later recalled, Powell "dazzled me for once into awestruck silence". A decade later, when the founder of UKIP, Alan Sked, was contesting a byelection in Berkshire, it was Farage, as a volunteer, who had the privilege of driving Powell to a rally. This was one of Powell’s last public speeches and one of Farage’s first party political acts. Though it would not have seemed so at the time, it feels in retrospect like a neat moment of apostolic succession. Farage, more than anyone else, reanimated Powell’s undead spirit."