Mr. Powell had announced that he would not run for re-election-not because he feared the Conservatives would lose, but because (as Mr. Lejeune suggests above) "the impossibility which I saw in front of myself was that in 1974 I should present myself to the same constituency advocating on most of the important issues the opposite to the policies for which I had invited them to vote four years before." (In the event, Labour's margin of victory was so narrow that a new election was called in October of that year; Mr. Powell run for election from Northern Ireland on the Unionist Party ticket and won.) The conversation focuses specifically on wage and price controls, more generally on inflation and the march of socialism; and on subjects such as these the eccentric Mr. Powell seems not at all eccentric: "The politician should never say that a trend is inevitable. It's his business to see to it that a trend, if he doesn't agree with it, is not inevitable. But I would be prepared to admit that if you wanted to make a case for the inevitability of a trend towards socialism, a very strong point that you could take up would be the fact that a Conservative government which came in in 1970 with a radical market philosophy ... within two years was introducing legislation which not merely re-echoed the legislation of the socialist party but exceeded their delighted dreams."