Richard Coombe: "What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue". When a BBC reporter asked Powell to explain his defeat, he replied: "My opponent polled more votes than me". He was offered a life peerage, which was regarded as his right as a former cabinet minister, but declined it. He argued that as he had opposed the Life Peerages Act 1958, it would be hypocritical for him to take one, but even if he was willing to accept a hereditary peerage (which would have been extinct upon his death as he had no male heir), Thatcher was unwilling to court the controversy that might have arisen as a result. Post-parliamentary life 1987–1992 Powell was critical of the Special Air Service (SAS) shootings of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in March 1988. Powell claimed in an article for The Guardian on 7 December 1988 that the new Western-friendly foreign policy of Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev heralded "the death and burial of the American empire". Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany had decided to visit Moscow to negotiate German reunification, signalling to Powell that the last gasp of American power in Europe to be replaced by a new balance of power not resting on military force but on the "recognition of the restraints which the ultimate certainty of failure places upon the ambitions of the respective national states". In an interview for the Sunday People in December 1988, Powell said the Conservative Party was "rejoining Enoch" on the European Community but repeated his warning of civil war as the consequence of immigration: "I still cannot forsee how a country can be peaceably governed in which the composition of the population is progressively going to change. I am talking about violence on a scale which can only be described as civil war. I cannot see there can be any other outcome". It would not be a race war but "about people who revolt against being trapped in a situation where they feel at the mercy of a built-in racial majority, whatever its colour" and claimed that the government had made contingency plans for such an event. The solution, he said, was repatriation on a large scale and the cost of doing this in welfare payments and pensions was well worth paying. In early 1989, he made a programme (broadcast in July) on his visit to Russia and his impressions on that country.