Roger Carey — A Letter from The English Cotswolds: JD Vance v Chipping Norton

I deeply appreciate the writings of my longtime 

English friend Roger Carey. Excellent! 

— Molly

A Letter from The English Cotswolds

JD Vance v Chipping Norton

By Roger Carey

The news that Trump had been granted a second State visit to the UK was met here with a ripple of disgust and a snort of derision. He'd already had one state visit, and had subsequently worked hard to prove he didn't deserve even that one.

The more recent news that JD Vance has invited himself here for a family summer vacation is both puzzling and depressing. And much more alarming than any visit by the doddering dimwit Trump. 'JDV to holiday in the Cotswolds!', said the media. With an invisible question mark of incredulity. Cotswolds are English. Very. Rolling farmland, stone walls, lush woodland, green pastures, seas of yellow corn (no, not that kind. We use corn as a catchall name for wheat, oats, barley. What you call corn, we call maize, and we'd sooner die than eat it). The Cotswolds have been at the heart of English agriculture since before medieval days. They are defined by small villages of stone houses, country manors, tall churches built on farmers' money, bubbling streams, nascent rivers. The Cotswolds lie between London and Bristol, England's own little equivalent of a Silk Route, along which merchants' money travelled in both directions, and plenty of it stuck along the way in its affluent market towns. Chipping Norton is one of those towns.

We tend not to have so many wealthy merchants these days. Old money has been frittered away. New money from technology, the City, from property developers, investors, hedge fund hooligans, media monkeys, bankers. The magnetism of money leads always to herding. The rich folk gather together, for preservation of the egos, or fear of missing out, for fear of Not Being Noticed.

Three or four decades ago, the English rich all vacationed in Provence. There, in a quiet and yesterday-ish bit of southern France, they could snap up farmhouses, little vineyards, small estates, for little money. Owning a bit of Provence was what one did. What they all did.

But Provence got popular, and the rich Brits became unpopular. They sent property prices through the roof, displaced the local people, drank the place dry in summer, and left it to wither every winter.

The rich have short attention spans, and before long, to the relief of the Provencale, they migrated to Italy. Specifically to Tuscany. There, so many rich Brits turned up, and displaced so many Italians, Tuscany became known as Chiantishire.

And then, again, the novelty wore off. The locals became inexplicably ungrateful. So the money moved again. Like migrating buffalo seeking new pastures, the great grey-green greasy herd of Rich Brits moved – to the Cotswolds. So much easier to get to, darling. You can jump in the Range Rover in Kensington, and be 'down to the country' in a couple of hours.

And so there they now are. They're known as the Chipping Norton Set. In their converted barns, their stone farmhouses, their done-up manor houses. And, even, their farms. A working farm is a good hedge against tax. So the richest of the rich have snapped-up farms, big farms. They inflated the price of land, farmhouses, agricultural machinery, but not wages. Some indigent farmers have taken the money and run. Others despair at the impossibility of growing their existing holdings.

And the locals hate it. Celebrities attract followers, and the Cotswolds are regularly smothered in sightseers, day-trippers, and retired Americans. Jamming the country lanes, booking all the tables, grabbing all the best seats. Many natives would rather be poor and uncrowded than paid-off by sharp-elbowed incomers, and tourists.

Into this artificially-quintissentially-English place arrives JD Vance. The Veep with the Eyeliner. The man with some groundbreakingly weird ideas about faith, family, women, gender, free speech and fuck-all grasp of even the basics of 21st century geopolitics.

And no manners. Vance has plumbed new depths of good old-fashioned rudery to the United Kingdom. He's publicly belittled the UK as 'a random country that hasn't fought a war for thirty or forty years'. As if fighting wars was some kind of credibility necessity, and anyway, he's only right if you exclude the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Falklands War and the 79 other UK military engagements since 1949. He says the UK is 'a truly Islamist country' — which it patently is not, and he fails to explain why, even if it was, that would make the UK a lesser place than a Christian one. He has insisted, in the teeth of plain facts, that 'the UK has banned silent prayer in private homes'. You have to ask exactly which paedophile pizza-parlour-dwelling lizards are running the deep state dark swamp that is Vance's own brain.

Which means we have to ask, not what the hell have we done to deserve the spoiling of the Cotswolds by some big swinging political dickhead from whatever the hell holler he crept out of (although plenty of people are asking just that question), but rather, why does he want to come here? Given his view that the UK's state of ruination has rendered it an utterly pointless and nasty place, where all he sees is failure, oppression, decay, a country that's a worthless parasite on the US economy, and a tedious distraction from making America Great Again, wouldn't he be more likely to prefer Gaza for his family vacation? Or Odesa? Or Kharkiv? At least he can sell them weapons while he insults them. Has it not occurred to him that, on the

heels of his shocking, unwarranted and totally barmy ongoing insults about the UK, that the Cotswolds locals just might feel it fair to piss in his beer when he orders that 'quaint old pint of British ale?’ That he might not actually be welcome, perhaps even actively unwelcome?

Vance, again, has not understood. He is parachuting himself into a society warzone where he may very quickly need to call for a helicopter dustoff, back to the safety of Georgetown, where his cousins have half-buried an old Chevy sedan, nose down in the front yard with an old yaller dog chained to it, just to make him feel at home.

And here's the thing. The Chipping Norton Set has some interesting alpha members. Like Jeremy Clarkson, a sometime celebrity journalist, and the nearest thing we have to a multi-millionaire shock-jock who has publicly claimed both Vance and Trump as 'despicable'. So, JD, if you were planning visits to Clarkson's farm shop, or his restaurant, or his pub — well, go ahead, but expect a thump on the jaw, a standard Clarkson response to people he doesn't rate.

The reigning queen of the Chipping Norton Set is the Fleet Street tabloid editor turned business-diva Rebekah Brooks. The flame-haired Teflon-coated scandal-escapologist is currently CEO of News UK, and No 2 to that kindly old gent Rupert Murdoch. So, JD, best not mention the Wall Street Journal, eh? Or that $10bn lawsuit?

Down the road from Mrs Brooks is a delightfully funny lady, who leads a quiet life raising chickens. She came to the Cotswolds not long ago, having emigrated from America. She sought to escape what she felt was authoritarianism, loss of liberty, free speech (really) and general oppression. She's Ellen Degeneres. Gay, married, childless, smart and outspoken, she scores only a one out of five on the Vance scale of Weirdo Fundamentalist Approval. Actually, strike out the married point, too. Ol' JD just doesn't get this same sex thing. Unless, of course, it's his torrid bromance with Trump. JD, dude, look out for the chicken lady.

A little further down the same road — there's only one real road through the Cotswolds, paved with aspirations — there lives a burned-out politician called David Cameron. He called Trump 'stupid, wrong and mysoginistic', and many people feel that's the entirety of things that Cameron got right in his whole political career. Cameron's views on Vance are not known. But for all his great failings, Cameron is unlikely to take Vance's cruel, stupid and utterly groundless attacks on the UK lying down. After all, Cameron, like all disgraced British Prime Ministers, has nothing to lose.

And one more Cotswolds neighbour is worth mentioning (the rest are just not worth mentioning at all). Steve Hilton. Engaging, charismatic, clever, and probably raving mad. As Dominic Bark-at-the-Moon Cummings was to Johnson, so Hilton was to Cameron.

Hilton was British until 2021, so probably still has the English dignity, the manners, the good grace, to gloss over Vance's fearfully ignorant rudery.

But Steve Hilton, for reasons which escape even apparently Steve Hilton, is readying to run for Governor of California on the Republican slate (not many members of the Chipping Norton Set can make that claim). So maybe he'll be happy to put Vance up for the night.

One thing’s for sure. Nobody else will.