British conservatives once looked down on the American right. Now they’re riding on Maga’s coat-tails |
An underappreciated element of how the “special relationship” between Britain and US emerged in the aftermath of the second world war is that early on, both parties saw themselves as the senior partner. The US’s clear military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority; however, there was also a strong strain within English conservatism at the time that saw itself as “Greeks in this American empire”, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan.
In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country they would quickly fall into ruin. As Christopher Hitchens would later describe, the post-imperial UK positioned itself as tutor to its young progeny and, in doing so, assumed the prefix of “Anglo” in “Anglo-American” reflected a subtle primacy of standing.
At the same time, another strain of the British right was seized by an outright hostility to the US. Self-appointed steward of English conservatism Enoch Powell, who in the 1950s and 1960s was seen as a prime-minister-in-waiting, before his fall into ignominy with the “rivers of blood” speech, openly disparaged the American project and considered it a great tragedy that Britain had ceded global control to its jumped-up former colony.
Powell especially loathed the US for the role it played in encouraging “self-determination” across the world and thereby accelerating the collapse of the British empire, a position shared by other conservatives at the time, such as Leo and Julian Amery and a collection of Tory MPs who styled themselves as the “Suez group”. Powell even considered the prospect of one day Britain deciding to declare “a war with our terrible enemy,........