Enoch Powell's wife Pamela dies, aged 91.

She had been unwell for a lengthy period of time and died in her London home on Saturday. She is survived by two daughters, Susan and Jennifer.

Mrs Powell met the former Wolverhampton South West MP, who died in 1998 aged 85, while working at Conservative Central Office. They had married in 1952.

She had turned down his first proposal on the grounds that ‘my father would never allow me to marry a teetotaller’, but on his second attempt, she accepted.

The pair divided their time between their two homes in South Eaton Place and Wolverhampton.

As the children grew older, Mr Powell’s political career became ever more conspicuous and controversial.

When Mrs Powell was asked whether at any time she had ever thought she might move into Downing Street, she replied she never thought it likely.

Following his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 Mr Powell was sacked from his shadow cabinet job, and his subsequent visits to universities almost provoked riots.

Mrs Powell later said she would turn on the television each night he was away to check if he had survived the day.

When asked whether she thought it was unfair for her husband to put the family through such controversy, she said: “I didn’t feel it unfair, but I wished to God sometimes that it wasn’t happening.”

In private Mrs Powell was never afraid to express her opinion to, and sometimes her disagreement with, her husband.

In public she remained fiercely loyal, even when Mr Powell stood down from the Tory seat he had held from 1950 and urged the country to vote Labour in February 1974.

He saw this as the only way of getting the country out of the Common Market, membership of which Labour was then opposing.

But his departure from the Conservative Party was something which she found very hard to accept.

And Mr Powell’s mother-in-law gave him a very hard time for immersing her daughter in the politics of Northern Ireland, after he became a Unionist MP in 1974.

At home she made sure that her husband and children enjoyed a happy family life.

Every year on their wedding anniversary Mr Powell wrote his wife a poem and gave her a bunch of roses, adding an extra rose to the bunch for each year of their marriage.

Pamela Powell was born January 28, 1926. She died November 11, 2017.