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You may remember the first half of 2020, when, as light relief during the early stages of the pandemic, we could look towards the banks of celebrities trying to raise our spirits and come together in mutual hostility. Schools and industries had shut down, key workers were struggling, but the one certainty in life that remained undisrupted was that, as long as Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman kept sharing their inspo-content, we would never run short of a laugh. Covid ended and now we have Donald Trump – and guess what, some of that dynamic is back.
It’s different this time because the threat is different, but for anyone living in the US who has glanced, longingly, towards Europe or Canada and wondered about the possibility of moving, comments made by Ellen DeGeneres this week may strike a familiar note; specifically, the extraordinary tone deafness that only high net-worth individuals can hit when trying to share in a common experience. DeGeneres and her wife, the actor Portia de Rossi, moved to rural Oxfordshire last year and this week, DeGeneres was interviewed on stage in Cheltenham and gave us some insight into exactly what happened.
“We got here [to England] the day before the election and we woke up to lots of texts from our friends and crying emojis,” said DeGeneres, to a crowd of 600 or so at the Everyman theatre. “We were like, ‘We’re staying here, we’re not going back, we are not leaving.’ So yeah, we bought a house that we thought was going to be a part-time house then we decided we needed a different house and now we’re selling that house. If anybody wants a house. It’s a beautiful house. It’s a beautiful stone farmhouse.”
A lot to unpack here, obviously, but let’s start with “we’re selling that house / if anybody wants a house / it’s a beautiful house”. As anyone who has moved countries knows, there are all sorts of problems to be solved in the first flush of arrival, chief among them panic-buying the first eight-figure house you stumble across and then wondering what to do with the horses. So it was that, while the property to which DeGeneres refers has a pool, a helipad and what E! News described this week as a “party barn” – which they may or may not believe to be common British usage – sadly it doesn’t have a big enough stable. “Portia couldn’t live without her horses,” DeGeneres told the Wall Street Journal this week – there but for the grace of God, etc – anyway if anybody wants it, it’s on for £22.5m and the Daily Mail has all the details.
There are, of course, real reasons for Americans in general and DeGeneres and her wife in particular to want to flee the US and at the existential level, fear of Trump can strike anyone. During the talk in Cheltenham, the former talkshow host spoke about the threat posed by the US president to LGBTQ+ communities, mentioning in particular the revived enthusiasm among certain Christian sects in the US for rowing back federal protection of same-sex marriage. If necessary, said DeGeneres, the pair would remarry in Britain.
But it is also true that, like wealthy women seeking an abortion before 1973 or in southern states today, there is almost no bind that money can’t buy you out of – in this case, moving countries without any of the customary friction. And so DeGeneres and her wife find themselves newly absorbed into the immigrant-expat continuum, occupied at one end by undocumented immigrants being seized and deported in the US by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and at the other, by those so wealthy they can go on holiday and seemingly decide, on a whim, to stay for ever. Each experience is attended by different rules, terminologies and demonisations, and is subject to sometimes fiercely defended distinctions from other, less favourable categories.
For instance, I remember making the mistake, once, of asking an American friend about her grandparents’ emigration to the US from Europe, assuming rather romantically that they’d gone through Ellis Island. She looked appalled and informed me, crossly, that they’d come in on an ocean liner and docked directly in the city, the family piano safely crated in the hold. No one on that boat was inspected for head lice. “We were legal.” Those belonging to communities targeted by Trump who also voted for Trump are less baffling when you consider these differences.
None of which, of course, pertains to Ellen DeGeneres, who is worth the sort of money (an estimated $450m) that makes the visa problem faced by most Americans hoping to move away from Trump – or stay in the US in spite of Trump – disappear. Still, even among the elite, moving entails a steep learning curve. The new house DeGeneres and her wife have moved into isn’t far from the old one but is a much newer building, enabling the Mail to prod one local into calling it a “monstrosity”, and a possibly different local into saying “it looks like a prison”.
DeGeneres, meanwhile, is still in the honeymoon period, and finding it all very beautiful. As she told the crowd at Cheltenham this week, she considers her new compatriots “polite,” the life here “simpler”, and has reached the conclusion that, “everything here is better”. Whether that’s the charms of the English countryside or the insulating effect of super-wealth we can’t know for sure. Either way, we look forward to watching the progress of the entertainer’s application to put up a large stable in an area of outstanding natural beauty make its way through the famously helpful and accommodating English planning authorities. Ellen, welcome to Britain!
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
