JD VANCE, nominated this week to run as Donald Trump’s Vice President, is what an all- American working-class hero looks like.
It’s not always pretty. Vance — like his Tango-tinted boss — is an avowed American Firster. Unapologetically nationalist. Protectionist. Isolationist.
Vance could not give a damn about Europe, including Ukraine.
It was Vance, the boyish senator from Ohio, who joked that the first Islamist country with nuclear weapons is, wait for it, the United Kingdom under our new Labour government.
Which gives you some idea of how much JD Vance values the special relationship between the US and the UK. He couldn’t care less.
Anyone still dreaming of a US-UK trade deal should not hold their breath. The future Trump administration is where the special relationship will go to die.
All those wars for freedom we fought together, all our deep cultural bonds, the ties of our common language — it won’t mean a hill of beans.
Yet there is much to admire about the future Vice President Vance.
Trump seeks to appeal to the left-behind Americans. But Vance was one of them.
I first encountered Vance when I read his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy — a shocking and moving memoir about his deprived upbringing in the rust belt of Appalachia, which was later made into a Netflix film.
“The abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wish I didn’t,” he said of his parents. His mother (played by Amy Adams in the Netflix film) was a hopeless drug addict.
She was there to tearfully applaud her son when he became Trump’s nominated running mate.
But it was his beloved grandmother who raised JD Vance.
He joined the Marines, went to Iraq, put himself through Yale University working multiple jobs, became a lawyer and made a fortune investing in Silicon Valley.
And, like it or not, Vance speaks in the authentic voice of the American working class.
We have had our share of working-class heroes.
Lee Anderson — ten years a coal miner — made the journey from Labour to the Tories and finally to Reform UK, and our own Trump, Nigel Farage.
The big difference between JD and Lee is their proximity to power.
Vance has an excellent chance of becoming the American President after Trump, while Anderson belongs to a protest party with five MPs, who will never get anywhere near 10 Downing Street under our first-past-the-post voting system.
Reform’s only superpower is that, by dividing the vote on the right, they will always have the ability to prevent the Tories from winning a General Election — and let in Labour.
Which is an extremely crap superpower.
But we understand now that the right, divided, will always be defeated.
It is true that the Tories, unloved after 14 long years in office, also lost votes to Labour, the Lib Dems and the Monster Raving Loony Party.
But the four million voters who defected to Reform are what destroyed any Tory chance of beating Labour.
JD Vance is a hard man from a hard place.
Trump’s veep will be no great friend to the UK.
But when Vance speaks, millions of working-class Americans recognise him as one of their own.
The Tories will never return to power until they have their own version of JD Vance, a man or woman who connects directly with the soul of the working class — and makes Reform totally irrelevant.
Until then, the Tories will remain parked comfortably on the benches of His Majesty’s Opposition.
And looking rather relieved that, after 14 long years, it is finally all over.
WHEN the Princess of Wales took her seat in the Royal Box for the men’s final at Wimbledon, the crowd gave her a bigger cheer than when Carlos Alcaraz beat Novak Djokovic in straight sets.
Later that day, while Prince William and Prince George were watching the football in Berlin, Kate took a photograph of Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis watching the game at home in their England replica shirts.
Kate sharing pictures of her children again means as much as the appearance at her beloved Wimbledon.
Her fight against cancer is not over, but last Sunday felt like the start of her comeback.
And a reminder of just how much her country has missed her.
I WOULD bet my life that Joe Biden will be gone within days.
No doubt it is true that he has Covid – but to me that diagnosis feels like the beginning of the end.
His closest allies want him gone. An Associated Press poll published on Wednesday said two-thirds of Democratic voters want Biden gone.
But still he stays.
Make it through a second term? Joe Biden looks like he will struggle to make it through lunch.
The bewildering thing about his reluctance to quit is that his family do not insist upon it, simply for his own protection and to prevent further humiliation.
What’s up with his wife? Perhaps Jill Biden, currently the cover girl of American Vogue, loves being First Lady a little too much.
Whatever President Biden may desire – and he is a bigger narcissist than Donald Trump – he is clearly not well enough to continue. Either Biden quits this week or they are going to need a stair- lift on Air Force One.
ALL credit to Evan Vucci, the 47-year-old photographer who took the photograph of Donald Trump, bloodied but unbowed, in the feverish seconds after that failed assassination attempt.
Vucci captured an incredible, iconic image.
Trump with his fist defiantly raised, the Stars and Stripes streaming against a cloudless blue sky, a Secret Service agent staring directly at Vucci’s camera from behind his dark glasses.
It has been compared to Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945.
Like Rosenthal on Iwo Jima, Vucci witnessed a fleeting moment, and he captured it, and that image will come to define Trump’s presidency, whatever happens in the years ahead.
Vucci’s astounding photograph was breaking news.
But it is also history.
HISTORY will be kind to Gareth Southgate.
History will be especially kind if England fail to win – actually WIN! – the 2026 World Cup in North America.
To top Southgate, the next England manager must master not just Spain and Italy and Germany and France, but also Brazil and Argentina. Good luck with that.
We whined that Gareth’s tactics were too timid. We complained that Southgate did not make the substitutions that were so screamingly obvious to us as we sat on the sofa shouting through a mouthful of margherita pizza.
We bitched when he stuck with his favourite players for years beyond their best-by date.
But Southgate’s record does not lie.
Gareth is the England manager who took us to the final of two tournaments in just three years.
In his quiet, understated, modest manner, he has set an unbelievably high bar for anyone to surpass.
We will learn to love Gareth Southgate now that he is gone.
SHARON STONE’s four million Instagram followers were treated to the Hollywood star’s playful recreation of her career-defining cross-legged scene in Basic Instinct.
“Basically yours,” she teases.
But the observant will note that, at 66, Sharon’s Instagram post finds her wearing pants.
Now that’s what I call growing old gracefully.
THE Covid Inquiry heaps blame for the pandemic on the Tory leadership – almost as if the virus emerged from a lab inside Conservative Central Office.
No doubt mistakes were made. But how does any Government prepare for something that has never happened before – or not for 100 years? It is too simplistic to blame the wicked Tories for a virus that impacted the entire planet after emerging from the other side of the world.
The Tories who are being scolded by the Covid Inquiry did get our vaccination programme up and running faster than any government on Earth.
And they deserve endless credit for that.
