This obese and tattooed rabble are set to elect the seriously deranged to take over the US
God Bless America and God help the rest of the world. Donald van Gogh is now a shoe-in for the November election unless someone else with a rifle is more accurate. And if they are, once civil war in the US subsides, J D Vance will walk it.
It’s all very depressing that this vast nation on which the West largely depends is made up of the brilliant and the seriously deranged but, alas, not in equal proportions.
In a previous life after my time at the Express I co-owned The American, a weekly newspaper for American ex-pats in Britain, most of them in London. In the main they were the high-flyers in finance and the law with impressive disposable incomes. And, unlike more than 60 per cent of their compatriots back home, they had a passport.
We see the latter most nights on our TV screens, obese, tattooed and wearing those MAGA and Trump vests and baseball caps. It’s not a good look. Compare and contrast the US citizens living in London and on the American West and East coasts and it’s as if they are from different planets.
In my days (short lived) as a press baron I recruited the editorial staff through a brilliant scheme called BUNAC, the British Universities North America Club, founded in 1962 which had grown out of a society for Yanks at Oxbridge and London. Our first editor was a sassy 21-year-old straight from Cornell called Molly Touger, niece of the great Nora Ephron. When I told her that she was to interview Philip Lader, US ambassador to London under both Clinton and Bush Junior, not only was she not nonplussed but produced a memorable piece.
Oh that all Americans were like Molly or her successor Rachel de Thample, now a much published food author. Instead we have a fast-fading geriatric president with an invisible VP and his opponent, a lying philandering felon and his newly installed deputy who once called Trump ‘America’s Hitler’.
James David Vance, born James Donald Bowman and later James David Hamel (oh do keep up), is fascinating for so many reasons. The changes of surname are down to his feckless mother’s serial marriages before he was taken in by his maternal grandmother whose (very) tough love turned him from a deeply troubled kid with terrible mood swings into a top-of-the-class swot.
The mother, Beverly, was a nurse who couldn’t keep her hands off the drugs she dispensed, ending up a heroin addict (happily she survived and has been ‘clean’ for six years.) To use that peculiarly American term, they were dirt poor, so-called white trash from the Appalachians before upping the few sticks they had and moving to Ohio. Typical Trump voters long before Trump took to politics.
But Vance (his grandparents’ name) made it to Yale, qualified as a lawyer, became a venture capitalist and wrote his story, Hillbilly Elegy, 10 years ago. I’ve yet to read it but have just watched Ron Howard’s excellent film adaptation and it is difficult not to admire Vance for his remarkable achievements and still a few weeks off 40.
It is his views I find troubling. He favours isolationism, is anti-free trade, wants to abandon Ukraine to the warm embrace of Putin and has ludicrously talked of the UK as a likely Islamist nuclear power under Labour. It might have been a very lame joke but, just for the record J D, the Muslim population of this country is six per cent. And he wants to outlaw abortion and is anti-same sex marriage and gun control. In other words the very model of a Far Right Neocon.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy has been on a Vance charm offensive since before the general election and it was a good call. The two have some things in common. Lammy was raised by his mother after his father vanished and by sheer hard work won a scholarship to the independent King’s School, Peterborough and on to SOAS and then to Harvard. He too became a lawyer. And like Vance he’s a committed Christian.
Oh, I nearly forgot, Both Lammy and Vance have compared Trump to Hitler and both later retracted what they said. They should get on like a house on fire.
*****
When my late friend Garech Browne married Princess Purna of Morvi in Bombay in 1981 it was a comparatively modest affair given the groom’s Guinness family zillions and the bride’s royal status.
Not so the recent ghastly five-month extravaganza which constituted the wedding of Anant Ambani, son of India’s richest man (£92 billion) and Radhika Merchant, daughter of a chap hardly scratching around for the last papadum.
Festivities included a Mediterranean cruise for 800 of their closest friends which raised the ire of locals on the French and Italian Riviera because of the noise and the non-stop fireworks. Entertainment was from Justin Bieber, Andrea Bocelli and Rhianna and the eclectic guest list of 1,300 for the ceremony itself ranged from the Kardashians (inevitably) and Mike Tyson to the Blairs and the Boris Johnsons (looking very miserable I’m happy to report.)
The whole shebang cost almost £500 million in a land notorious for the vast gap between the haves and the have-nots who make up most of the population. The UK gives £2.4 billion annually to India, a country which last year sent a rocket to the moon and whose prime minister Narendra Modi has just returned from schmoozing Putin in the Kremlin.
*****
If Guido Fawkes is to be believed, Keir Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey flew to the NATO summit in Washington by private jet. One for each of them. Starmer also went to Berlin by the same expensive and environmentally dodgy mode of transport. What’s wrong with turning left on a scheduled flight?
And to think this was meant to be a new start.
*****
Test Match Special is always a delight and listening last week to the great Jimmy Anderson’s swansong did not disappoint. But there was a period of strained silence when commentator Alison Mitchell was discussing the most picturesque cricket grounds in Sri Lanka with summariser Phil Tufnell.
‘I rode bareback on the beach at Galle,’ Allison told Tuffers. You could almost feel his pain as he tried to stifle the guffaws. My man in the dirty mac explains: Riding bareback is porn speak for unprotected sex. Tuffers clearly knew that, poor Alison didn’t.
*****
It’s the marching season in Northern Ireland and this timely definition reaches me: An Orangeman is an Irishman who, in order to be thought of as an Englishman, dresses as a Scotsman in honour of a Dutchman.
It’s the way I tell’em…
ALAN FRAME
18 July 2024
