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.