Jeremy Clarkson: What really happened when JD Vance came to town
Some of my neighbours in the Cotswolds were greatly upset by the vice-president’s visit. Me? Erm…
Jeremy Clarkson
Sunday August 17 2025, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
As you may have heard, JD Vance, who’s the underpresident of America, chose to spend some of his holiday in the Cotswolds last week, and this seems to have gone down rather badly with the locals. One, called Jean, told reporters that “it’s one blinking pantomime after the other”. And that made me wonder: what are all these annoying things that are piling up in her head, like plastic flotsam on a tropical beach?
There was
my farm shop a few years ago, for sure. But the
parking problems with that have been solved now. So what else could be troubling the poor dear?
Maybe she believes what she reads in the papers. There’s plenty to go at on this front as every chin and chinette is writing pieces these days saying the Cotswolds have
become like the Hamptons and are full of enormous 4x4s and skinny school run mums doing cocaine over one another’s downward dogs.
Well I feel better qualified to comment than most because I moved to the Cotswolds 30 years ago. Back then, it was a bit backward for sure. The plumbing was Georgian, the power supply was iffy and the only two people I knew in the area were Gerald and the Marquis of Blandford. There were pubs, though, and some of them even served a choice of food. Cheese and onion. Or salt and vinegar.
It’s not like that any more. I could have a boned pigeon tonight if the mood took me. And these days, I even have friends on hand to share it with. Not during the week, obviously. They’re all in London then, but at the weekend they swarm up here to their Georgian piles and the social scene hits eleven.
But I don’t know how any of this affects Jean. Nobody is hoovering gak from her lavatory cistern. And why does she care who’s living in the big house at the end of the village, or how often they’re there?
We read often about how celebrities like, er,
Steve Jobs’s daughter, Eve, get married at Estelle Manor but that’s not a problem either because it bills itself as being “the gateway to the Cotswolds”. Which is another way of saying “not in the Cotswolds”. Then you have Soho Farmhouse, or “C**tlins” as the locals call it. Don’t know why. It’s miles away as well.
Perhaps then Jean was troubled by preposterous reports that Ellen De Generes had used all of a village’s water supply to fill her swimming pool or that Taylor Swift had rented a house in the area during her recent tour. But Taylor is a long way from the Who’s drummer Keith Moon, who used to own a hotel in Chipping Norton. Unlike Keith, she was so quiet, no one even knew she was there.
We certainly knew it when Vance landed. He arrived in a cavalcade of 27 massive black American SUVs and this was escorted by a shoal of British police remoras on motorcycles whose job was to shoo everyone out of the way. One of the people who they ordered to pull over was Kaleb Cooper, my tractor driver, but it was starting to rain and he urgently needed to get his load of wheat into the shed, so he invited his tormentor to eff off. And carried on regardless.
Later, this enormous convoy arrived in Chipping Norton’s petrol station to fill up. Which meant no one else could for an hour. And now we hear tales of locals in the village where Vance stayed being ordered to hand over details of their social media activity. And they talked also of a mast, erected by secret service agents, that hummed.
It all sounds horrific. Except it wasn’t. Not really. I can’t actually see the house Vance rented from my bedroom window but I saw no activity at all. They closed a couple of footpaths, which bothered me, let’s think, not one bit. And they wouldn’t let strangers drive into the village where the house was located. This didn’t bother me either because I know only two families in that village and one wasn’t around, because they’d rented their house to Vance, and the other is the Camerons and they were in Cornwall. The humming? Never heard it.
Yes, there was a kilometre-wide no fly zone round the house but as I don’t imagine Jean has a helicopter, I can’t see how this would have an impact on her life. It was slightly annoying for me though because we use drones to film my farm show. But it was quickly dealt with thanks to a conversation which went something like this.
Security man: “Is that your drone?”
Me: “Yes.”
Security man: “You aren’t allowed to fly that today.”
Me: “F*** off.”
Security man: “OK.”
The only really irritating thing about Vance’s visit were the protests. I’m no fan of Beardy, believe me, but it seems mealy mouthed to noisily ruin his holiday, no matter how much you disagree with him. Mercifully, however, the crowds that gathered to express their disapproval were so small, I thought someone was hosting a bring-and-buy cake sale.
Of course, I saw lots of footage online of the massive convoy tearing around the lanes of Chipping Norton but what were we expecting? Vance is from America, where there is Disneyland and Las Vegas. So of course he’s going to move around like he’s half Pope, half rock star. And anyway, the town is shut every year for a funfair, and every Christmas there’s a wonderful pantomime and this just felt like more of that. A bit of a giggle for a while.
And instead of complaining, we should use some of our famous humour to get our own back. Next time Angela Rayner goes to the States, we should insist on a 28-strong Aston Martin cavalcade and demand no-fly zones. The Five-0 can hardly refuse.
But in the meantime, I would ask Jean to look at the view to the south of Chadlington. I’m looking at it now and it’s beautiful, and tranquil and calm. The same as it was when I arrived here 30 years ago.
