It was when she faced the melancholy task of dealing with her late mother’s personal effects that Jenny Powell fully understood what a remarkable legacy her mother had left behind. 

Pam Powell had led a well-ordered life. She kept a precise record of everything. Both her daughters, Jenny and her older sister, Susan, had been aware of this all of their lives. They knew about the lists – indeed the lists of lists – upon which the smooth functioning of their family was founded, but it is only since Pam’s death just over year ago that her children have realised that her meticulous catalogue of everyday life amounted not only to a portrait of a marriage, but also an extraordinary behind the scenes snapshot of political life in the second half of the 20th century.

Rather like a curious chapter from an updated version of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – with politics thrown in for extra flavour. 

Pam was married to Enoch Powell. He may have been a controversial presence on the parliamentary stage for nearly 40 years, but as his biographer, Simon Heffer, puts it, Enoch found in Pam “a bridge to the real world”. Enoch himself acknowledged, in a letter to The Times in 1978: “No man can have owed more to his wife than I.”

And Pam, inimitably, records the importance of the point in a letter of condolence she wrote to Tony Benn after the death of his wife, Caroline, in 2001, three years after her own bereavement with Enoch’s death, aged 85. “Politics would be awful without a wonderful marriage,” she wrote to him. “I had it and so did you, so it’s all the more desolate when one’s friend and partner dies.”

That letter is to be found, with many others, in one of Pam’s last files. The family home, the beating heart of this story, was a four-bedroomed terraced, tall, thin “lighthouse” in South Eaton Place in Belgravia where they lived for 42 years.

It was sold when Pam moved to a flat in nearby Ebury Street. Sizing-down had necessarily imposed a reduction in the family filing, but she still took a lot with her and started new files and record books besides. It is all of these that her daughter Jenny, who runs her own consultancy business and lives in Chiswick, has been sorting since Pam’s death aged 91. 

She kept everything, blaming it on a wartime childhood. Jenny says: “She wrote shopping lists on the backs of Christmas cards – and there were drawers full of neatly folded wrapping paper to be used again.” She even had a book detailing her taxi rides, which gives the date, price and journey as well as the purpose of the trip (cinema, dentist, party etc) and the names of the cab drivers. She spent £432 on taxis between September 2004 and August 2005.

When she organised the headstone for Enoch’s grave, she made a note of the pleasing fact that the funeral director (“very helpful”) had a father who served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment (as had Enoch). Some files are marked with reference to others (“Also file, 2nd drawer, my desk”) and she had a Rolodex inventory of what was to be found where. 

One of the largest collections was of service sheets for funerals and memorial services she had attended. All neatly date-ordered and tidied with rubber bands into decades, they contained not only the published obituaries of the individuals, but also handwritten copies of letters she had written to the bereaved, and the replies she received. The contents looked like a social history of everyone who was anyone in the Conservative Party and many others from other parties and paths of life: a war hero, a dress designer, journalists and editors and artists and writers and soldiers.

“She was the life and soul of any party,” said Richard Ritchie, Enoch’s archivist who became a family friend. And as her papers show there were certainly plenty of parties: birthdays, wedding anniversaries and countless other celebrations. There are guest lists, menus, invitations to weddings and dinners and thank you letters – some from famous friends and others, less known. There are lists of presents, received and given, with tick-lists to indicate appropriate thanks sent. 

There are copies of her letters to journalists – James Naughtie, Huw Weldon – “it took at least 10 minutes to speak to a real person! at the BBC” to get the address, to John Major as prime minister and later to the then new Tory leader, David Cameron, chiding him about the need to give proper priority to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

One list reveals that someone gave her a book called You Look Awfully Like The Queen for her 80th birthday – and she did. “It was something my father always said,” says Jenny. “When he met the Queen, he said he had to remember ‘I’m talking to my monarch, not my wife’.”

The Powells had met and married through politics. Pam was a high-powered secretary who had worked at the War Cabinet Office and the United Nations in New York before working for the Conservative Party and being hired by Enoch. They fell in love during the 1951 election when she helped in his successful campaign and married the following year. 

In the early years, she had asked her husband if they ought to entertain more “to get on and be noticed”, but he wasn’t interested in doing so. They entertained because they wanted to do so. Pam recorded what she wore, the table flowers, the vintage of the wine and whether any guests had allergies. There are notes about the food and the conversation (“went v well”, “great success and fun”) and what time people went home. Michael and Jill Foot (“gt fun”) get coq au vin. Regular guests get their own codes of reference.

Some regular guests stopped coming after April 1968 and the “Birmingham speech” as the family came to refer to Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech on immigration, which led to him being sacked from the front bench. That day’s page for Pam’s diaries has been copied into her last “Personal” file, as the ramifications never really went away.

Pam didn’t think it unfair that the family was subjected to controversy, she told Ritchie once, but then she added, “but I wished to God sometimes that it wasn’t happening.” She came to learn to live with it, although she admits somewhere in a letter, dated 2001, to a friend in trouble: “I always wished I had a thicker skin.”

Others friends fell away after 1974 when Enoch sensationally urged the country to vote Labour, resigned his seat in Wolverhampton South West and was then elected as an Official Ulster Unionist MP in the October election that followed. There are frequent dinners for visiting Irish politicians from thereon.

But whatever the state of her father’s place in politics, it was always “a normal family home”, says Jenny who now has two children of her own. One fascinating list, dating from the mid-Seventies, has a complete inventory of the contents of the house: the books, the children’s diplomas, the press cuttings, the furniture and its value, the etchings of parliament, the sundry spoons (“see list n drawer”), Enoch’s “hunting stuff and boots”, his Army uniform in the Boiler Room, and the manuscript of the 1950 general election, which Pam took down on dictation from Winston Churchill.

Afterwards, the great man had helped her on with her coat (“American, rather smart mac”) and sent her home in his car. “How thrilled and proud I was,” she wrote.  

That detail is provided in the real legacy she has left her in one of her last letters. “My dear grandchildren,” it starts, “Perhaps you may have wondered what it was like being married to your grandfather and I will try and tell you...”