Kenneth Widmerpool - Real-life Models

Real-life Models

Many readers and literary analysts have assumed that Widmerpool was drawn from life. Powell was generally circumspect on this issue and would not confirm any of the candidates put forward. Among these was Powell's Eton contemporary Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (nicknamed "Bullying-Manner"), later ennobled as Lord Dilhorne, who served as attorney general and Lord Chancellor during the 1950s. According to Powell, Manningham-Buller was an unattractive figure at school; he was instrumental in the dismissal of a master who sent an inappropriate note to a junior boy, an action reflected in the novels when Widmerpool instigates the sacking of a fellow-pupil called Ackworth in similar circumstances. Powell's brother-in-law, the Socialist peer Lord Longford, said that he was the model for Widmerpool, a proposition that Powell specifically rejected; Longford had also claimed to be Erridge, another character from the novels. The Labour politician Denis Healey thought that Powell had based Widmerpool on Edward Heath, the British prime minister between 1970 and 1974. It is possible that the episodes relating to Widmerpool's spying career are drawn from the activities of Denis Nowell Pritt, a Labour MP who was expelled from the party for his pro-Soviet stance. Powell's biographer Michael Barber records that the literary critic Cyril Connolly declared his longstanding enemy, the art historian Douglas Cooper, to be a Widmerpool prototype; Cooper's companion John Richardson thought that this was a joke on Connolly's part.

Powell came close to endorsing a real-life model for Widmerpool in the person of Denis Capel-Dunn, a lawyer and wartime lieutenant colonel in the Intelligence Corps in which role he was briefly Powell's senior officer. Capel-Dunn, nicknamed "The Papal Bun" and derided by his subordinates for his appearance and demeanour, was described by his contemporaries as "a very fat, extremely boring, overwhelmingly ambitious arriviste. His conversations were hideously detailed and humourless". He was responsible, apparently through personal spite, for preventing Powell's promotion to the rank of major. When the historian Desmond Seward proposed Capel-Dunn as the original Widmerpool, Powell admitted that he "might be on to something", without giving specific confirmation.

Writing in the Catholic Herald, Alexander Lucie-Smith speculates on the composite nature of the character: "Everyone, it is said, has their own Widmerpool. I have to say that I have known several in my own not very long lifetime, people who have been impenetrable egomaniacs and who have nevertheless carried all before them. Quite a few of our politicians have been compared to Widmerpool. Some have thought Gordon Brown resembled him. One might point out that our current Prime Minister has certain shades of Widmerpool, and like him, went to Eton".