For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

If one lesson has emerged this travel season, it’s that you really, really don’t want to be on vacation in the vicinity of Vice-President J. D. Vance. Last month, with the Trump Administration continuing to conduct sweeping immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, Vance and his family went to Disneyland, where, apparently, parts of the park were shut down for them. “Sorry, to all the people who were at Disneyland, for the longer lines,” Vance said, on a new podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “But we had a very good time.” Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers altered the outflow from a lake in Ohio to raise the water level of a river where Vance would be boating. A source told the Guardian that the change would create “ideal kayaking conditions,” though the Secret Service said that the intention was to facilitate Vance’s security detail; Vance’s office denied advance knowledge. Miller, on her podcast, asked Vance if there’s anywhere else he’s dying to go. “Hopefully we can find some excuse, as Vice-President of the United States, to go to Hawaii,” he replied.

Last week, Vance and his travelling circus touched down in the U.K. He visited David Lammy, the country’s Foreign Secretary, at the latter’s residence in Kent, before heading on to the Cotswolds, a scenic area west of London that looks like what an A.I.-image generator might spit out if you asked it to conjure the British countryside. (If you’ve seen the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s steamy book “Rivals,” you get the idea.) Vance and his family reportedly stayed in a lavish Georgian manor owned by a light-bulb magnate, obliging me to ask whose bright idea that was. Residents complained to the British press about the associated inconvenience, recounting road closures (leading to, gasp, wet crops), bad American driving, and an indiscreet Secret Service presence. (One local official likened the profusion of agents to a scene from “Men in Black,” adding, “It was a bit over the top really.”) Jeremy Clarkson—the cantankerous former host of the car program “Top Gear,” who recently called Vance “a bearded God-botherer”—suggested that a no-fly zone had obstructed drone filming for a show about a farm that he owns nearby. This led to headlines claiming that Clarkson had joined, or was even leading, a “backlash” against Vance—though he subsequently mocked the claims of chaos by posting a video of a peaceful pastoral vista.

Cotswoldians are used to celebrity visitors and residents: Clarkson, for starters, but also Piers Morgan, Ellen DeGeneres, and the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has a home in the hamlet where Vance posted up. (Kamala Harris also visited, shortly before Vance did.) Nor is Vance the first politician to vacation with an irritating retinue in tow. But his trip was unusually fraught. Protesters rallied in a local park, toting signs with slogans like “COTSWOLD CHILDLESS CAT LADIES SAY GO HOME” (brandished, reportedly, by a woman who does have children and does not have cats), “WAR CRIMINAL,” and (my personal favorite) “JD VANCE CLAPS WHEN THE PLANE LANDS.” A van drove around the area displaying a meme of Vance with a shiny bald head, which went viral after a tourist claimed that he was turned away from the U.S. for having it on his phone. (Homeland Security officials have denied that this happened.) According to reports in the Observer and the Wall Street Journal, police went door to door, asking residents to identify themselves and disclose details of their social-media accounts. In fairness, Vance did recently warn Britain’s government against advancing down a “very dark path” of online censorship. (His office denied any advance knowledge of the social-media questioning; a British police spokesperson said that it had not taken place.)

If the otherwise silly story of Vance’s vacation has a serious side, then his choice of destination has curious symbolic connotations, too. The Cotswolds have a rich association with a vein of upper-class establishment conservatism that is in retreat around the world. In many ways, Vance’s rise has been a compelling manifestation of that retreat. Whether Vance has left this sort of politics behind entirely, however, might be another matter.

For a man-of-the-people politician, Vance certainly seems to go on a lot of vacations. If he were a public official in the U.K., as Marina Hyde rightly noted in the Guardian last week, “he’d have been fitted with an unflattering holiday-related nickname months ago, and no one would take him remotely seriously.” (“Vance-cation” has a nice ring to it.) But, on this recent trip, he also attended to political business. There was the meeting with Lammy, the center-left Foreign Secretary, who has become friendly with Vance—somewhat improbably, given the gulf between their politics. It may have helped that, as Politico put it, Lammy “let Vance beat him at fishing” during their Kent sojourn; Vance’s kids caught carp, while Lammy caught nothing. (Lammy apparently lacked the requisite fishing license, and has since reported himself to an official watchdog.) Since arriving in the Cotswolds, Vance has mingled with various right-wing politicians, including Robert Jenrick, a plummy Conservative lawmaker with growing populist pretensions, and Nigel Farage, the Brexit architect, who has a very real chance of becoming Britain’s next Prime Minister. Because Vance is terminally online, he also met with Thomas Skinner, a former candidate on the British version of “The Apprentice,” who now seems to spend much of his time posting the word “Bosh” on X. Vance recently defended him after Skinner said that a parade of left-wingers had called him a racist when, in his telling, he was just a “normal man who loves his family and this country.” It’s been a big week for Skinner: yesterday, he was named a contestant on the British version of “Dancing with the Stars.”

In the British political imagination, the Cotswolds have been most closely linked not with the Farages of the world but with the likes of Cameron, who was part of what came to be known as “the Chipping Norton set”—an élite social circle named for a town that’s a ten-minute drive from Vance’s bolthole (albeit longer with motorcade traffic). The set became infamous in the early twenty-tens, shortly after Cameron took office, when another of its members, Rebekah Brooks, a lieutenant for Rupert Murdoch, was criminally charged in the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Murdoch’s British newspaper empire. (Brooks was acquitted, and now works again for Murdoch.) Cameron styled himself as a modernizer keen to dispel the hard-edged image of the Conservative Party—in one famous stunt, he went to the Arctic and hugged a husky in order to prove his environmental credentials—and as a committed internationalist. Indeed, he resigned as Prime Minister, in 2016, after voters rejected the case he had made for Britain to stay in the European Union. Around the same time, he criticized Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban as “divisive, stupid, and wrong.” In a 2019 memoir, Cameron wrote that he had been depressed by Trump’s brand of protectionist, xenophobic politics; that he “couldn’t have agreed more” with a speech in which President Barack Obama warned that Trump’s rhetoric was a slippery slope toward demonizing “whole nations, races and religions”; and that Trump’s references to “Islamic terrorism” were crude and unhelpful.

Cameron’s school of conservatism now appears to be dead—at the hands of Vance, among others. (Last year, Vance described the U.K. as perhaps the world’s first nuclear-armed “Islamist country.”) His trip to the Cotswolds can be read, even if unintentionally, as dancing on the grave of this world view. Not so long ago, however, Vance appeared to be closer to Cameron politically. Shortly after the publication of his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance dismissed Trump as “cultural heroin.” In the book, he also made the case that post-industrial and rural poverty in largely white, Rust Belt communities was a result, in part, of a deficit of personal and collective responsibility. Such ideas echo rhetoric that Cameron used to indict what he saw as a “broken” British society. In 2016, George Osborne—who, as Cameron’s finance minister, oversaw a program of fiscal austerity that shredded Britain’s social safety net—described “Hillbilly Elegy” as one of his books of the year. After reading it, Osborne has said, he reached out to Vance, who, in turn, apparently complimented the Cameron government. The two men are still friends; according to the Financial Times, it was Osborne who sorted Vance’s accommodation ahead of his Cotswolds trip, and the pair dined together this week.

As has been endlessly chronicled, Vance has been on quite a political journey since 2016. Some aspects of his embrace of Trumpism—and, with it, an insistent economic populism and anti-corporate posture—strike me as sincere, and others less so. If there’s one clear through line of Vance’s politics, however, it is how he has, albeit with differing emphases, styled himself (or, at least, allowed himself to be styled) as a voice for the poor and downtrodden masses far from the madding crowds of big coastal cities. Whatever Vance’s real views, this image is hard to square with, say, serving in an Administration that has just passed a huge tax cut for the ultra-rich, or with getting special treatment on a kayaking trip, knowingly or not. It seems hard to square, too, with his Cotswolds visit.

This, at least, is true in the sense that the Cotswolds, which have become a playground for London’s élite, is not typically associated with hardscrabble imagery. But there is poverty there, of the rural kind that tends to be less visible—certainly if you stay in your country pile, with its tennis court, gardens, and orangery. “There is real hardship and deprivation behind the media stories of the area whose latest description, apparently, is the ‘Hamptons of England,’ ” one local told the Telegraph, a conservative British newspaper, this week. In 2013, in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, a reporter from the New York Times visited the area and heard something similar. “This is still a working-class town, and this is a working-class pub,” one man said, over a pint, at least until “these tall people named Giles and Pippa show up.” And, now, J. D. ♦