JD Vance’s Welsh holiday anecdote prompts scepticism online

Nation.Cymru Staff

US Vice President JD Vance has sparked online scepticism after claiming two power line workers in rural Wales recognised him from articles he had written for an American conservative magazine.

On 4 July 2026, The Times published an extract from Vance’s newest memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, due to be released on 7 July.

In it, the Vice President describes a road trip around “Great Britain” he took with his now-wife Usha in 2013. He begins by detailing a visit to Caernarfon, “home to an extraordinarily old and beautiful castle.”

Noting that this was where Queen Elizabeth II crowned Charles Prince of Wales, he recalls that he and Usha “climbed to the top of the walls and looked down at the docked boats jostling in the water and at the medieval town below.”

He continues: “Our house in Cincinnati was built about 150 years ago, and people call it historic. At Yale, the oldest building on campus dates to the mid-18th century.

“This castle, by contrast, was already hundreds of years old when English settlers first landed in the United States. For nearly a millennium, young men had climbed the castle walls and watched the sun reflected on the surrounding water.”

Observing that it reminded him “how little of the life of the world we’d ever see”, the couple stopped in a pub for a “‘full English breakfast’, though we were in Wales”, where he told his wife Caernarfon Castle was “The coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and it’s not particularly close.”

However, commentators took issue with an anecdote later in the piece, in which Vance shares “Back in Wales, a couple of utility workers near a downed power line had stopped us as we walked from a pub.”

The workers asked where the couple were from, saying, “We’ve never seen you two around here” and that they were unsure why Americans would want to visit “this place”.

“Hilariously,” Vance continues, “the utility workers were dedicated conservatives who’d read some of the articles I’d written in National Review. They were Englishmen living in the Welsh countryside who read American conservative periodicals. The world is a strange place, I thought.”

Vance contributed to the National Review, a right-leaning publication, most frequently between 2013 and 2016, with his most recent piece in 2019.

Joe Allen, a policy lead for the Wales Trade Union Congress, wrote on X: “Vance claims here that he met two blokes fixing a power line somewhere in rural Wales in 2013 and they both knew him from his writing in National Review.”

Vance claims here that he met two blokes fixing a power line somewhere in rural Wales in 2013 and they both knew him from his writing in National Review. https://t.co/d2hZQ0dlNq pic.twitter.com/B3XVN1ofYy

— Joe Allen (@Joe___Allen) July 5, 2026

Some commenters responded with tongue-in-cheek jokes questioning the anecdote’s plausibility, writing: “My son in law works for National Grid. Reading National Review is very popular. They all like the sports pages and Trump’s advice column.”

Another wrote: “Now what are the chances of meeting 2 English National Grid workers living and working off the beaten track in rural Wales in 2013 who read the National Review, eh? Teirw!”

“And then they went to the pub and all the locals started speaking Welsh,” another joked.

Not everyone was convinced the anecdote was far-fetched, however. One commenter responded: “I think JD Vance meeting utilities workers in Wales who recognised him is entirely believable and I’m surprised some comments feel it is not.

“The readership and audience of podcasts away from the mainstream media is enormous and yet largely underground. Unless you explicitly ask your colleagues and friends what they listen to you probably just assume they listen to BBC and read the usual newspapers.

“There are effectively at least two entirely separate news-spheres and, until I started listening to both about 5 years ago, I literally had no idea.”

‘JD Vance: A UK road trip with my wife changed our outlook on life’ is available to read here.