SO here’s a funny thing (thread).
Today the boss of Sky News, while defending News Corp against the Rudd/Turnbull assault, cited an old Enoch Powell quote:
(1/11)

Well hello. Do you really want to quote Enoch Powell while defending your company against accusations of being too right wing? The man famous for his hateful ‘Rivers of Blood’ anti-immigrant rant? But that’s not my point.

You see, I suspect it was an inside-the-beltway dig at Turnbull, who previously (and erroneously) attributed the quote to Churchill, as our excellent US corro, then a Canberra reporter, pointed out at the time.

But, just because I’m a pedant, I dug a bit deeper. The Churchill thing was a red flag. Misquotes and mis-attributions are all over the place, and get stuck in the public brain. Where did this quote really come from?

After some googling, which mainly turned up the usual plethora of unsourced assertions, I finally found a site that had done some homework. It referred me to the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

So I looked at the ODMQ, which (slight detour) told me Churchill, it turns out, has this to say about what I did.

And it also confirmed the quote…. [apologies, I bought it on Kindle] Game over? DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE MY PEDANTRY. Because I went to http://newspapers.com , and looked at the Guardian, December 3, 1984, and found this.

This

Yep, the quote was *misattributed* all this time. It wasn’t said by Enoch Powell. It was said by another Conservative politician, Julian Critchley. Whose obituary suggest he didn’t take politics too seriously, and would probably have been appalled at being mistaken for Powell

In fact, he was beign highly critical of a speech about NATO made by Powell, whom he called “too clever by half”. And his point about the press is a complaint about populist American media. Oh… irony.

I don’t think there’s a lesson here, except… careful who you quote. Thanks for your attention, as Winston Churchill once said.

Postscript… this is the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, with the official (mis)attribution to Powell: