It’s a sultry Tuesday afternoon in Charlbury, and a melting Colin the Caterpillar awaits its ritual consumption. This is no ordinary Colin: its naive smile and lapping tongue are hidden behind a mask — a doctored image of JD Vance, looking bald and babyish with red distended cheeks. As chants of “Fascist Creeps, Off Our Streets” fade into prattling chatter, an orderly queue forms for those wanting a slice of the effigial cake. The children eat first, and then the sweet-toothed adults tuck in. This is how nearly 100 people in Charlbury have chosen to show the US Vice President — on holiday in the nearby hamlet of Dean — that he’s not welcome in the Cotswolds.
One sign announces that Charlburians are “NOT TOO POSH TO PROTEST”. That isn’t true: the demonstration is specifically not a protest, but a “Vance Not Welcome party”: that’s why its organisers, the Stop Trump Coalition (STC), brought the cake. Immaculate dogs saunter obediently on leads as their owners chat. (I overhear one person suggesting that this caucus should be called “Labradors Against Vance”.) A passing Volvo estate car toots its horn.
This is an omnicause demonstration: some fly Palestine flags, while others attend on behalf of the climate, “courtesy”, migrants and Ukraine. All these myopic single-issue angers converge in the figure of Vance. “This is a man whose regime is authoritarian,” says Jake Atkinson, a speaker from the STC. “They are abducting people off the streets in the US and deporting them without any due process. They are funding and arming a genocide in Gaza and they are rolling back support for a free Ukraine.”
But it’s not just Vance’s politics that have angered locals. Last Sunday, his 19-car motorcade thundered into Dean — a sleepy, 12-house hamlet where the former British prime minister David Cameron lives — after having spent the previous weekend with David Lammy at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s grace and favour country house. He rented Dean Manor from lightbulb millionaire Johnny Hornby and his wife Pippa (who apologised “for the circus” on a local WhatsApp group seen by the Telegraph). George Osborne arranged the rental for him. There, Vance duly set up an itinerant court, to which he summoned the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, and Thomas Skinner — the ex-Apprentice star, acclaimed for eating sloppily patriotic breakfasts and saying “Bosh”.
“People have not been able to use footpaths, have been stopped, asked for their contact details and social media — that’s a real intrusion,” complains Juliette Crisp, who moved to the area in the Eighties. The entire hamlet was “secured” last weekend, as checkpoints were hastily erected at both road entrances, while sweaty police officers rushed to block all nearby tracks and footpaths. A British policeman, whose job it was to move traffic cones back and forth by the south checkpoint, told me that he was averaging 12,000 steps a day within the same small patch of road. A few Americans, presumably Secret Service agents, perambulated in civvies and wiry sunglasses.
One local farmer posted on Charlbury Forum to say that 14 sheep grazing near Dean had disappeared. Soon, Charlbury was rife with speculation: a gate left open, or something darker? The sheep seem to have been found. Elsewhere, Clarkson’s Farm star Kaleb Cooper’s tractor was stuck behind the vice presidential convoy in Chipping Norton as it started to rain. “[If] he just drove around in a VW Polo,” he wrote on Instagram, “nobody would know who he was.”
Charlburians are used to this level of attention. In the last three weeks alone, they’ve hosted the former vice president Kamala Harris — who stayed at The Bull pub for Eve (daughter of Steve) Jobs’s wedding — and the Wilderness Festival. If there’s any truth to the oft-used moniker “sleepy”, it’s that Charlburians have spent the last few decades with their eyes wedged open by cocktail sticks, teased with small plates and matcha lattes and desperate for a rest.
“If there’s any truth to the oft-used moniker ‘sleepy’, it’s that Charlburians have spent the last few decades with their eyes wedged open by cocktail sticks.”
This being the land of black labs and Ukraine flags, some kind of demonstration against Vance was inevitable. Here, Vance’s treatment of President Zelensky is deemed unforgivable. In Spelsbury, one woman told me that she hoped to “give Vance the kind of welcome he gave Zelensky”. But when I asked one of the demonstrators whether that’s what she hoped to do, she said: “No. We’re far too middle class for that.” His comments about the UK also wound up the demonstrators. Since becoming Vice President, he has called the UK “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” and “the first truly Islamist country” with nuclear weapons. Georgia, 23, accuses him of “hypocrisy”: to go around “slagging us off, and now he’s on holiday here”.
Many of the demonstrators belong to what is called the Pastoral Bourgeoisie — a class of comfortably middle-class, cottage-dwelling, Coalition-nostalgics, who work locally or from home, or are in semi-retirement. They are cakeists, unwilling to countenance lower migration despite being proprietorial over their own neighbourhood. Theirs is a retrograde liberalism that’s left them trapped in a sort-of glitching VR headset jammed in a Sunday Times Property Supplement in the Summer of 2022. That was their heyday: they’d seen off the pandemic in leafy good cheer, and the nation still considered their values (honesty, integrity, courtesy) important enough to vanquish Boris Johnson. Next up, JD Vance. “I am just incandescent at the thought of Vance dumping himself on my countryside,” says Jude, a 60-year-old man. “People [here] might look old and crusty and wrinkly, but they value courtesy, morals.” Jake Atkinson tells me that Vance is guilty of “egregious abuses of power that don’t agree with British values”.
It’s unsurprising, then, that so many wealthy Democrats have moved here since Trump’s re-election last November. Charlbury sits in what estate agents call “The Golden Triangle”, the bit of countryside between Burford and Chipping Norton, where the proliferation of country clubs, good restaurants, and passable coffee means it’s been dubbed “The English Hamptons”. Plum Fenton, director of Savills’ country house team in the Cotswolds, told me that there had been an increase in dollar-based transactions since then, while David Henderson, who works in their residential department, said that many of these buyers have been coming from Democratic strongholds — though as yet they don’t have data on this.
Ellen DeGeneres is certainly the most famous of these newly landed “Yanks on the Wold”, and she decided to move here the day after Trump was re-elected. She bought Kitesbridge Farm at the end of 2024 for £15 million, made considerable renovations, and then sold it to move elsewhere since she “needed a home that had a horse facility and pastures for them”. Once again, though, she’s escaped MAGA-dom after reportedly taking an urgent holiday whilst Vance is in the area.
In his 1971 book The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner writes that “America, here [in the Old World] had imaginative advantages, being unencumbered by the worldliness with which Europe had learned to inhabit the European world”. In looking at the UK, they have a radical idealism — oft-misguided — which cuts through the lumbering, sceptical fatalism of worldly Europe. Thus wealthy Democrats, liberated from their homeland’s tyranny, ignore the UK’s present disorder and see a liberal idyll where a centre-left government came to power on the back of a landslide. So too can Vance believe that within the caricatured “Yookay” of the online Right — a lawless world of failed multiculturalism — there’s still something worth salvaging.
“It’s what they imagine England looks like,” says Charlbury’s vicar Fergus Butler-Gallie — a land of yellow oolitic sandstone and Hobbitish Cotswolds vernacular. As far back as 1929, American industrialist Henry Ford imagined such a Cotswolds: he imported a cottage from Chedworth which he rebuilt at Greenfield Village in Michigan, a museum that sought to preserve the old world as it was swept away by Ford’s innovations. But his buying agent knew the cottage wasn’t what Ford wanted, and so he made several modifications to make it look how Ford had imagined it would. The Times observed how the villagers “viewed the whole proceeding with disfavour, not unmixed with indignation. In common with most rural parishes, Chedworth suffers from a scarcity of houses, new ones are so costly to build as to put them beyond the reach of the ordinary man.”
Today, rich Americans are similarly shielded from local issues. The outskirts Charlbury are more This Country than Country Life. Hidden beneath a veneer of wealth, some 30 families attend the local food bank, and Butler-Gallie tells me that the church helps pay for their school uniforms and heating bills. Charlbury once had a prosperous gloving industry, and was the centre of a booming agricultural region. (I drove past more signs reading “STOP THE FAMILY FARM TAX” than telling Vance to leave). Now it has tourism and the silly rich. “Americans? I love them,” says Peter Cowley, an 85-year-old parking attendant at Diddly Squat farm shop. “They’re generous. They spend. They tip well.” They are necessary. In Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, a chronicle of Americans in Europe, Ralph Touchett tells Isabel Archer that “there is no romance here but what you may have brought with you”. But in the Cotswolds there is: for it’s the romance that sells.
