Why on earth does J D Vance want to holiday in the Cotswolds?
But a century ago, the Cotswolds were a picturesque agrarian backwater. The novelist Nancy Mitford, who grew up by the Windrush valley, immortalised her childhood landscape in The Pursuit of Love as a place inhabited by backwoods peers and their gamekeepers, with fox hunting the only distraction from the prevailing rustic ennui.
The pretty villages and rolling hills of the Cotswolds have captivated artists and writers, from William Morris and T S Eliot to Jilly Cooper's racy Rutshire chronicles and Armistead Maupin, whose most recent novel, Mona of the Manor, is a camp romp set in Gloucestershire. In summer the residents brace themselves for the coach parties that throng the quaint streets. But they are currently braced for sightings of a different sort of vehicle: the armoured SUVs of the vice-presidential security detail, escorting J D Vance and his family to their holiday home.
The transformation of the Cotswolds from a beautiful and rather private swathe of middle English landscape to a hub of high-wattage celebrity and political power has been a gradual process, with dramatic effects. Resident celebs – invariably voluble about the charm of a simple, rustic life – include Kate Moss, David Beckham, Damien Hirst and Idris Elba. And the group of political and media figures known as the Chipping Norton set (whose supposed members deny that any such entity exists) includes the former prime minister, David Cameron (now Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton), the television presenter, farmer, shopkeeper and publican, Jeremy Clarkson, the News International executive, Rebekah Brooks and her husband, the racing columnist Charlie Brooks, the media executive Elisabeth Murdoch and her then husband, Matthew Freud, et al.
The Spectator magazine reports that 'apparently senior British political figures, who have knowledge of the Cotswolds social scene' are helping with the Vance family's holiday arrangements. Where power congregates, so does the necessary infrastructure, and the Cotswolds is now lavishly supplied with facilities that might attract a US vice-president in search of some R&R: private members' clubs, each more exclusive than the last, pubs owned by celebs and an American-owned deli in Stow-on-the-Wold.
Local estate agents report a surge in wealthy American clients seeking to settle permanently in the area. In the vanguard were the comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi, who sought sanctuary in the UK after the election of President Trump. DeGeneres enthuses about their new life: 'Everything here is just better,' she told the broadcaster Richard Bacon. 'People are polite.' The Vance family will hope she is right about the politeness: their recent US vacations were bedevilled by protests, and there are rumours of 'resistance' in the Cotswolds.
Meanwhile the Americanisation continues apace. All that is missing is a reality show, along the lines of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. But in Charlbury, preparations have begun for a pilot with a cast of unspeakably glossy and well-connected residents – rumoured working title, Ladies of the Cotswolds. What fun Nancy Mitford would have had with it all.
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