`J.D. Vance’s Holiday Bonus?’ The Times of London “quipped,” in reporting that U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and his family began their summer vacation in Great Britain today, at the estate of Foreign Secretary David Lammy. The 115-room, 3,000 acre Chevening House is where British Foreign Secretaries generally reside (occasionally shared with another minister) while they are in office. The Vances will stay there a few days, before moving on.
Lammy has been buttering up J.D. Vance for some years, according to a (nauseating) backgrounder published by London’s The Guardian on August 7, under the cheesy headline, “Shared Prayers and Tears: How Lammy Wooed J.D. Vance and the White House.”
The story goes that Lammy, who famously described Donald Trump as “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” in 2018 and, who equally famously has been a close friend of Barack Obama before he was President, going back to 2005, had then “had a gut feeling that the Republicans would win the White House back,” and therefore “worked for `years, not months’ on building the necessary relationships,” Donjeta Miftari, a former foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Keith Starmer, explained to The Guardian. Lammy is “an incredibly effective operator,” in Miftari’s view. The Guardian writes that “Lammy, a touchy-feely sort of politician, targeted Vance for a full charm offensive early on,” before Labour was in office, or Trump had won the 2024 election.
