US Vice President JD Vance’s holiday in the Cotswolds has stirred up local frustration, with protests erupting and celebrities weighing in.
Vance and his family are staying at Dean Manor, a Grade II-listed country home in the tiny hamlet of Dean, Gloucestershire. Their UK trip has also included a stay with Foreign Secretary David Lammy in Kent, with plans to travel on to Scotland.
Motorcade disruption
On Monday, residents were caught off guard when Vance’s 18-vehicle motorcade rolled through the countryside, prompting road closures and police security checkpoints with sniffer dogs. According to *GloucestershireLive*, parts of the area were effectively locked down during the vice president’s arrival.
'Vance Not Welcome’
Today, protest groups “Everybody Hates Elon” and the “Stop Trump Coalition” staged a “Vance Not Welcome Party” in nearby Charlbury. Demonstrators carried banners mocking the vice president, calling him a “war criminal” and displaying memes — including the viral bald-headed image of Vance that a Norwegian tourist claimed had caused them trouble at US immigration.
Signs ranged from the satirical (“JD Vance’s Netflix password is ‘password’” and “JD Vance claps when the plane lands”) to the political, with one Chipping Norton property displaying: “Gaza starves, Vance not welcome.”
Clarkson’s response
Former *Top Gear* presenter Jeremy Clarkson, whose Diddly Squat Farm is about three miles from Dean, chimed in with his own brand of sarcasm. Posting on Instagram, he noted that a no-fly zone over Chadlington and Spelsbury — presumably for security — had halted drone filming for his show *Clarkson’s Farm*. “The JD Vance no fly zone. We are the pin,” he wrote, adding, “On the upside, no annoying light aircraft.”
Later, Clarkson shared a video of a calm Cotswolds landscape with the caption: “Utter chaos caused by Vance. How will we ever manage?”
Kaleb Cooper, Clarkson’s farming co-star, also weighed in, saying some of his wheat got wet after being delayed behind the convoy. He quipped that if Vance “drove around in a VW Polo nobody would know who he was.” Photo by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Wikimedia commons.