A Conservative candidate who said that Enoch Powell was right about immigration resigned yesterday, insisting that he had done nothing wrong.

Nigel Hastilow, a former newspaper editor and until yesterday the Tory candidate for the marginal seat of Halesowen in the West Midlands, quit after a meeting with Caroline Spelman, the party chairman.

He had been asked to apologise for an article he wrote for the Express and Star newspaper in Wolverhampton in which he invoked Mr Powell’s infamous “Rivers of blood” speech. “When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration,” he wrote. “Many insist: ‘Enoch Powell was right.’

“Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically.”

The candidate, the former editor of The Birmingham Post, was asked during the one-hour meeting at Ms Spelman’s home in Solihull to make a full public apology as a condition of staying a parliamentary candidate.

In the official statement announcing his resignation Mr Hastilow said that he was sorry if his article had “undermined the progress David Cameron has made on the issue of immigration” but he failed to retract his remarks. Afterwards, he said that he had been unable to “come to terms” with the Tory party chairman.

He said: “They wanted me to issue a statement apologising and I didn’t feel I had anything to apologise for,” he said. “If I had said sorry I could have stayed on, but I am not sorry.” He repeated that immigration was an important issue. “As far as I am concerned, there are too many people coming into the country and we cannot afford to accommodate them.”

He told The Times that he had been taken aback by the support that he had received. “I have had hundreds of e-mails from all over the country telling me to keep at it. I left a pile of them with Caroline.”

He added that he accepted that his political career was now at an end.

Mr Hastilow had received the support of his local party before meeting with Ms Spelman. Mary Docker, the chairman of the Halesowen and Rowley Regis Conservative Association, said: “He’s a very strong local candidate who’s got the Labour Party scared.”

After his resignation Jeffrey Hill, a local Tory councillor and member of Mr Hastilow’s campaign team, said: “I would have continued to support him as a local candidate. When he said that people were raising immigration as their primary concern on the doorstep he was telling the truth.”

However, Mr Hill conceded that the candidate had come to the seat with a reputation for being outspoken. Standing for the Tories in 2001 in Edgbaston, Mr Hastilow wrote that William Hague, then the party leader, was “struggling to reignite a party which seems to have lost the fire needed to do battle and lost the will to win”.

Although Mr Hastilow’s resignation spares Mr Cameron some embarrassment, senior politicians expressed disappointment that he had not been summarily dismissed like Patrick Mercer, sacked from the front bench for condoning racial abuse in the Armed Forces.

Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, said: “It is right that Mr Hastilow will not stand as a candidate but the real question is why did David Cameron dither for 24 hours over whether to sack him before Mr Hastilow resigned. David Cameron still has not condemned Mr Hastilow’s words and he must do so without any further dithering.”

‘We must be mad, literally mad . . . ’

These are extracts from Enoch Powell’s speech on April 20, 1968 to Conservatives in the West Midlands:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants who are for the most part the material of future growth of the immigrant-descended population.

“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.

“Indeed, it has all but come in numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.

“Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see and not to speak would be the greatest betrayal.”

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