He said: "I have lived into an age in which my ideas are now part of common intuition, part of a common fashion. It has been a great experience, having given up so much to find that there is now this range of opinion in all classes, that an agreement with the EEC is totally incompatible with normal parliamentary government. ... The nation has returned to haunt us". When Labour won the 1997 general election, Powell told his wife, Pamela Wilson, "They have voted to break up the United Kingdom." She rejoined the Conservative Party the next day, but he did not. By then, Powell had been hospitalised several times as a result of a succession of falls.