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The word most people settled for in trying to describe Enoch Powell, who has died aged 85, was -leaving out the ruder ones - enigmatic. Scholar, soldier, statesman. arch-rebel, philosopher, poet, all crowded so glitteringly into so few early years. Here surely was something to wonder at, this neo-Renaissance figure with a Black Country accent. At the end of the story, the enigma had still not been solved. For we also had a monument of self-contradiction - a man of the hard right who could be a sensitive social reformer, a deeply committed Tory who could urge his colleagues to conspire with the enemy, a master of words who could use them with what many saw as gross irresponsibility, a devout loyalist who could lecture his queen, an atheist and a High Anglican.

At one time and another he was all these. Powell had little time for anything in between, the reasonable man's halfway house where most tolerable life is carried on. Listening to a Powell speech could be a fascinating, benumbing experience: he would use head-lines to dazzle, plain words to bemuse. The language, perhaps the human mind itself, was never made to bear such logic. He carried lucidity to the point of obfuscation, even beyond it to somewhere near dementia. His written prose, including many sensible reviews were more normal: but his verse, which shows some influence of AE Houseman who taught him at Cambridge, clearly indicates the romantic urge driving him.

Powell and Michael Foot. for years the two best speakers in the Commons, were poles apart politically but alike in their power to exert a mesmeric effect over- even a hard-boiled Commons audience. They had a mutual regard, and often joined forces in tactical skirmishing against what they both saw as the common enemy, the Common Market.

He was indeed a hard man to understand, and harder still to fit into current political categories. The contradiction clamoured: the imperialist who wanted to withdraw from the Far East, the apparently cold man who once burst into passionate tears in the Commons, the confirmed anti-planner who took on the essentially planning job of Minister of Health in 1960. Nevertheless he regarded himself -- and persuaded some admirers to regard him -- as a model of logical consistency. Rational and romantic were at war in him, and it was not always the romantic that won. Nor was there anything obviously romantic, though there might have been to the eye of a Balzac or an Arnold Bennett, about the appearance and manner of this tense, unsmiling man. He looked more like a member of some obscure town council than one of the most controversial politicians of his day. Provincialism was of his essence; and English Midland provincialism at that, than which there is none more introverted. But a Welsh ancestry fired his complex nature. His parents were teachers, and he seemed born to exert diligence and acquire merit. He shone at King Edward's School in his native Birmingham and was a highly successful prize-winning student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in the mid-1930s.

By the time he was 25, he was Professor of Greek at Sydney University, and a second world war brigadier not so long after. Characteristically he had rushed home from Australia to enlist as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and promotion came quickly -- as it did in all he put his hand and mind to, except his chosen career of politics.

He could have been distinguished in academic life; his work on Herodotus suggests that he could have made his mark as a classical scholar; but his excursions into English verse, collected, in 1990, from several slim volumes, hardly suggest that we lost a poet when we gained a politician. The echoes of Housman -- another classicist, controversialist and poet -- were too audible.

Powell worked for the Conservative Research Department, collaborating with Angus Maude on the pamphlet One Nation, and entered Parliament on the big Tory wave of 1950. Powell's Birmingham voice and Wolverhampton constituency soon provided a new English centre of gravity there. A third dominant characteristic, probably linked with his provincialism and his romanticism, made itself felt. This was the urge to make a gesture, to stand conspicuously apart, to pit himself against established orthodoxies in his own party. He started in a small way, brushing with his local Conservative Association. It was as though he was rehearsing for major rebellions.

The first came in 1958, when as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, he resigned with Peter (later Lord) Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Nigel Birch. the Economic Secretary, in protest against the Government's refusal to hold back public expenditure to a level acceptable to them -- the episode which Harold Macmiilan christened "a little local difficulty". The second was when he stood out against the king-making convulsions in the Conservative Party which led to Sir Alec Douglas Home's succession. The third, and by far the most sensational, gesture compelled Heath to sack him from the Shadow Cabinet in April 1968, because of the "rivers of blood" speech he made in Birmingham about immigration. It was made without consulting any of his colleagues, who criticised it more for the intemperance of its language than for its basic message. Those who had been patiently working for better race relations bitterly criticised that too.

Whether Powell was truly a racialist is a matter of semantics. (Ironically, his bravest and most passionate speech at Westminster had demanded the exposure of British maltreatment of Mau Mau suspects in Kenya, a decade earlier.) Whether or not he calculated the result of the Birmingham speech in advance -- there were few who believed he did not -- they were easily calculable and the outcome was ugly. He raised fears and hatreds to a state of tension overnight. A pro-Powell campaign reached a pitch of near-hysteria and there were some unpleasant incidents. On the best interpretation Powell, a man of strong imperialist sympathies, was ungenerous in treating the post- imperial human legacy with such cynical or at least selfish disregard. Many held that he was also cashing in on genuinely-felt social fears. Nor was logic on his side. In his temperamental war with emotion, reason lost. This episode also brought out his most alarming and sometimes absurd characteristic, the Cassandra complex coupled with a penchant for Delphic utterance. References to "the Tiber foaming with much blood" needed a sense of classical distancing easily missed in Wolverhampton's back streets .

Powell was not the first or the last politician to be caught between the concept and the act, the purity of the idea and the twist and turns of real life, but in his case the gift for abstraction was so advanced that the gap yawned wider than for most. This created in him a sense of danger, a tension that communicated; which was more than his argument always did. As a speaker in the Commons he often seemed to deploy a fiercely private logic, yet his carefully articulated, pedantic performances could make irrelevance sound prophetic. Few could always remember what he said, but they were always impressed by the intensity with which he said it.

One of his early posts on achieving junior office was at Housing (1955-57). Then came the Treasury post from which he resigned over government spending. Yet it was as head of a major spending department, Health, that he reached the Cabinet.

The next phase of his career was marked by some searing attacks on political hypocrisy. Though ostensibly over his bitter opposition to the European Community and our part in it, the abandonment, in 1974, of his Wolverhampton seat and the Conservative Party (over Europe) looked like self-punishment, almost a kind of self-mutilation for a man with his advanced sense of loyalty.

He was afraid that the credibility gap between parliament and people was growing all the time, as was the need "to match the person to the institution." His personal attempt to do this, as he explained with a flash of the charm he could deploy when he chose, was to change "the ugly accent compounded of Birming- ham, Staffordshire and Australia" for the "beautiful lilting language of Ulster.'' But it was a deeper change he really sought; it was the best, indeed the only, chance in sight of taking another stand against the demon of ambiguity and double talk.

As Ulster Unionist Member for South Down (1983-87) he lived in the world of absolutes, of jet blacks and shining whites. In that sense if in no other, he was at home. Asked in an unguarded moment during an interview how often he went to Ireland he replied coldly that he never went to Ireland but frequently went to Ulster. The continuing atrocities, in particular the Harrods bombing, he blamed on "double talk and double-dealing on the part of Britain which has kept the IRA and their fellow murderers in business these last dozen years." It was as MP for South Down that his private member's bill to ban research on human embryos failed to reach the statute books, but not before it had received considerable support. In December 1985 he resigned his seat in protest against the Angle-Irish Agreement, and was re-elected at the ensuing by-election -- but at the next general election, in 1987, he was out of Parliament and it would have taken a brave prime minister to send him to the Lords as a parting present. It never happened. His last book, The Evolution of the Gospel (1994), was typically challenging, raising questions about how Christ might have died. Powell never grew old gracefully. He is survived by his wife, Pamela, whom he married in 1952, and two daughters.