For his summer vacation, JD Vance chose to go to the Cotswolds. And you thought Dan Quayle was a peculiar Veep. As nice as it is, the current American taste for that place (where Ellen DeGeneres lives) is a head-scratcher. Perhaps they believe that Britain’s 1 per cent hang out there. Just to clear this up: the London elites do keep second homes in a beautiful and nearby rural setting. It is called France.
His choice makes more sense as part of the wider Maga effort to influence Britain’s domestic life. Elon Musk has tormented Keir Starmer over immigration and crime. Donald Trump has bashed Sadiq Khan. Vance himself is upset about our free speech laws. The American influx into London — the accent now rivals the French and Arabic languages as the ambient sound in swish neighbourhoods — are not all liberal escapees from Trump. There is a right-wing tech presence too, with an active interest in the native politics.
Why? After all, we are a middling power quietly easing into our senescence. This century will be decided in other places. So it must be a language thing. Anglophones can follow British events more easily than German or Japanese ones. The result, for Britain, is a lot of unsolicited attention from strident and half-informed ideologues. Given their resources, the Maga crowd’s potential to warp public life is considerable. Look at Rupert Murdoch’s effect over the decades. Britain is one of the few European countries that isn’t the most powerful in the world that speaks its language. (You might cite Spain and Portugal but neither Mexico nor Brazil, its giant former possessions, are superpowers.) The nation is almost set up to be subverted from outside.