a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up." The separation between patriotism and racism and between nationalism and separatism remains of some controversy even today. Powell has remained a controversial and yet prominent figure and has been cited by Nigel Farage as his "political hero." Powell was renowned for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature. On 20 April 1968, he gave a speech in Birmingham in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked mass immigration from the Commonwealth to the UK. Above all, it is an allusion to the Roman poet Virgil towards the end of the speech which has been remembered, giving the speech its colloquial name: The Times declared it "an evil speech", stating, "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history." The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1968 (by the Labour Government at the time), which Powell found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing, where many local authorities had been refusing to provide houses for immigrant families until they had lived in the country for a certain number of years. One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton. The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last White person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from non-Whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a "racialist" outside her home and receiving "excreta" through her letterbox. When Heath telephoned Margaret Thatcher to tell her that he was going to sack Powell, she responded: "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis". Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow cabinet the day after the speech and he never held another senior political post again. Powell received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74 per cent of those asked agreed with his speech and only 15 per cent