Trump Notebook | 12 July 2018

For more than 40 years we’ve lived in a beautiful, listed, Cotswold stone, Stonesfield slate-roofed farmhouse in Oxfordshire. The trouble is it’s an ex-Blenheim house, within earshot of the palace, and the current duke is having Potus — that unlovely acronym for ‘President of the United States’ — to dinner. Locals are muttering about this World Heritage Site being used to fete a pantomime villain. On Thursday we’re invited to a friend’s 70th birthday party at the Athenaeum, and there’s also a press night at the National Theatre. I wonder whether we’ll be able to manage either of these, as our village is almost certain to be in lockdown then.

If I were a little paranoid, I might feel that this preposterous President is stalking me. I have spent large chunks of the past few winters as the guest of friends in a rented house in Palm Beach; for the past two years our house has been exactly four doors from Mar-a-Lago. Every time the Donald is in residence, the semi-circular drive visible from my bedroom has been populated (and blocked) by members of the US Secret Service. Looking out of my windows, the drive to the right hosts the concrete-slab ‘Jersey barrier’, with the way barred by a large black car, whose engine is never switched off. To the left is the surveillance tent with the sniffer dogs, and those giant dentist mirror things they use for inspecting the undercarriage of your car. This year we found that the youthful Secret Service guys were real sweeties, helping us cancel the Uber cars that declined to enter our area, though one of us was wheelchair-bound, and promising to remember our faces and where we lived, so as to speed up returning in one of our own cars. The problem was that the SS people were rotated on what seemed to be a random schedule; so that the fresh-faced young man from Idaho who waved us out had been replaced on our return by a brand-new chap from Idaho.