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You have to let politicians go on holiday, I guess. You have to accept the existence of world leaders with whose views you disagree, especially now that it’s almost all of them. So why does it feel like a particular provocation for JD Vance to be planning a trip to the Cotswolds? His itinerary isn’t yet known, but its bare bones are that, sometime in August, the Vances will visit London, Oxfordshire and Scotland.
For a recap on what, exactly, is wrong with the US vice-president, there is nothing more evocative than February’s press conference with Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Of course, many of Vance’s more extreme views – calling Democratic politicians a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives”, claiming that staying in an abusive relationship was preferable to getting divorced, and saying that abortion should be banned – were already well known, from a combination of his voting record and his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. But Republicans say a lot of things, particularly while seeking election. You may have been able to infer Vance’s drive to dominate and control others, but it wasn’t until that exchange with the Ukrainian president that you could witness it.
Legacy media struggled with the right language to describe that press conference: the BBC called it an “angry spat”, CNN got a little bit closer to the mark when it said Zelenskyy “bristled” at his “berating”. To any normal human listening to it, unfettered by a muddled commitment to impartiality, it was bullying. Any description that fell short of picking a side, that did not say “Trump and Vance set out to humiliate Zelenskyy”, felt like a whitewash. Against a backdrop of implied financial control, Vance’s repeated demands – “You should be thanking the president”; “Have you even said, ‘thank you’ once?” – were for public abasement, and it was strange, disgusting and sullying to witness.
Two weeks before that, Vance had indulged in a mass gaslighting event at the Munich conference, claiming that Christians were persecuted in the UK, private prayer at home could be banned in Scotland, the EU had overturned an election in Romania, and freedom of expression was at risk in Germany, Sweden, almost everywhere, in fact, since Europe had gone off the rails. It felt strange and unsettling to hear him use this language – humiliation, defiant untruth, his upside down world in which the victim is painted as the offender are components of coercive control. It is infinitely preferable to avert your eyes than to consider what this means for the rules-based international order.
And it is much harder to look the other way when he is holidaying in Chipping Norton. Somehow, the London leg of his journey doesn’t feel so confronting; larger, more sprawling and anonymous, the capital is bound to contain some nefarious visitors at any given time, and those of us who live here can’t react to everything. In the Cotswolds, by contrast, nothing happens that isn’t immediately visible. Boris Johnson can’t have a pint in Charlbury or buy a stately home with a three-sided moat; David Cameron can’t borrow Jeremy Clarkson’s tractor and blow it up; the place is like a petri dish, every minute change in its makeup immediately registers. Yes, it is exceedingly pretty, but it has done nothing to invite high-profile, divisive politics to its doorstep.
The Telegraph reports that activists plan to disrupt Vance’s trip, which is possible, but a logistical nightmare, given that public transport is rubbish across the Cotswolds. But really, Vance himself is the activist; it is a troll move to holiday in the most visible part of a country that you loudly claim has gone to the dogs. The rest of us are more re-activists.
