Pat down the golden retrievers: Cotswolds put on high alert for Vance family visit

With helicopters whirring and police quizzing residents, the vice-president's visit is stirring up rural life, writes Vanessa Thorpe

- Vanessa Thorpe

A stay in the Cotswolds is a guaranteed retreat from the adrenaline of a pressured city life. Not this weekend, though. The villages around Chipping Norton are on alert.

Thames Valley police are making door to door calls along the sleepy residential stretch in the hamlet of Dean, where the former prime minister David Cameron and his family have their house. “We're used to seeing police around, because of Cameron, but nothing like this,” said Sarah, a retired travel agent. “It makes it hard to get about.”

The narrow lanes in this corner of Oxfordshire, lined by tall, dry grass, are being patrolled by uniformed and non-uniformed officers due to the arrival of the man who is, arguably, the second most powerful in the world: JD Vance.

The US vice-president is being entertained in an 18th-century manor house owned by friends of the Camerons, the lightbulb millionaire Johnny Hornby (not to be confused with the marketing executive of the same name, also with a Cotswold pile) and his wife Pippa.