The Cotswold's plot against JD Vance

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Photo by Greg Balfour Evans / Alamy
For those new to political activism – not brave enough to risk arrest yet, unsure about the historical merits of toppling a statue (complicated, isn't it) – may I recommend a trip to the Cotswolds this afternoon? An hour on the train out of Paddington to Charlbury, and you will find yourself in Land Rover Defender Mecca, where the dogs are polite and the horses can't believe their luck; where men on the platform wear US Open baseball caps and the women – if I have identified the make and model correctly – $1,000 shoes; where the jewel-in-the-crown rural pub is Michelin-approved and full of women with hair like Princess Di in 1995; and where your £6 ale comes served with a perfectly seared £27 pork chop.
You will be protesting the arrival of the US vice-president JD Vance and his family, who are there to holiday and to make bland diplomatic gestures towards the special relationship. But there's no need to fret about the Yank invasion; the resistance is here! The spirit of Robespierre and the sans-culottes loom in the form of European Union bunting, a single Ukrainian flag limply hanging from the town hall, and a post on Charlbury's messaging forum that valiantly states: 'I think we need to let him know just because we're in the affluent Cotswolds we don't take kindly to him [sic].' Well viva la revolución, I say, Oxfordshire-style.
And so, for your itinerary. The Stop Trump Coalition will gather on Mill Lane at 1600 GMT. Commence the interviews with the press from 1630, with banner waving, 'chanting etc'. At 1730, you're off to the comparably downmarket Rose & Crown pub (this is like being the least expensive restaurant on the Golborne Road in Kensington) for a well-earned 'rest'. The brief, I understand, is 'very broad', focusing on 'Palestine, inequality, migrants, Ukraine, trade justice, women's rights, LGBTQ rights & climate'. It's a lot to fit on one sign. And within one hour.
Luckily, Charlbury is prepared for such civil disruption. I am sitting in the Bell (a pub apparently run by children but technically owned by the Daylesford estate) and talking to a gardener. How are they preparing for Vance? I ask. There's not much to do, he tells me. Charlbury is on constant alert for the great and good: David Cameron only lives up the road ('and he was actually prime minister'); Jeremy Clarkson's farm can't be more than a 25-minute drive away; the man beside me in a very serious watch is probably receiving the A-list treatment, too. If Charlbury is ready for anything, it's ready to serve a perfectly cooked onglet to the second-in-command of the world's erratic superpower. The protesters, I suspect, are not inclined to serious disobedience.
Perhaps it's the perfect location for such diplomatic overtures. Vance, along with Elon Musk and a coterie of the new American right, has been critical of Britain of late. They see a country in total discord, beset on one side by riots and ethnic tension, phone thieves and shoplifters, levels of immigration that are tearing at the fabric of the land. They also describe a country under the cosh of creeping and inchoate authoritarianism, downtrodden with post-imperial tristesse. This time last year, Musk looked upon the UK and declared civil war 'inevitable'. In February, the vice-president gave a temperamental speech at the Munich Security Conference, lamenting the UK's 'backslide away from conscience rights'. 'Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,' he added.
Whatever their perception of Britain is – a clichéd Orwellian nightmare or lawless bandit country – Vance will not find much of it here in Charlbury. Everyone is smiling. A bus drives past, with one passenger – there is not much need for public transit when everyone has their 4×4, newest model. The pale-yellow Cotswold stone – a type of limestone derived from the skeletal remains of marine organisms, or the Lib Dem-Tory coalition – looks good in the August light.
But this is not the real Cotswolds, a resident of Cirencester tells me with a blend of disembodied snobbery and intra-elite anxiety. It resembles something closer to a playground for the American and English urban elite. A taste of the countryside, without any of the toil.
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And so, I am sitting in the ambient Cameroonism of Charlbury: it is like a warm bath of Farrow & Ball, in which you will inevitably drown; where you will be laid to rest on a bed of the Telegraph's property supplement; or your ashes spread on a cricket crease, 'Jerusalem' humming in the background. It is green, it is pleasant, it is Potemkin. Vance will see through it all, and have a lovely time nonetheless. The protesters will be home in time for supper.
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