It’s hard to pinpoint just exactly when the Islamist takeover of the United Kingdom happened. Some say it was when BBC News at Six started opening with a call to prayer, others that the King’s speech being given in Arabic was the real clue. Most agree we were past the point of no return when the largest city in the West Midlands was re-named Birming because ham is not halal.

That’s the world we live in now, or at least it is according to the man who, come November, is likely to be vice-President of the United States. The Ohio senator caused something of a stir when a video surfaced of him speaking at a Conservative conference and declaring the UK “the first truly Islamist country” to attain nuclear weapons.

With Donald Trump leading in the polls, Mr Vance could well be second in line to the presidency in a couple of months, but who is he? And why is he so afraid of sparkling water?

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Born James David Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, Mr Vance wrote in his autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy: “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart”.

Middletown was a city whose economy was based almost entirely around Armco, the steel manufacturer founded there in 1889. It drew James and Bonnie Vance, the maternal grandparents of Mr Trump’s running mate, there from the Appalachian mountains.

They were part of a steady trickle making the journey down U.S Route 23 and Interstate 75 from Kentucky to Ohio, or the ‘Hillbilly Highway’ as it became known – 13% of Kentucky residents had left the state by 1950.

Fuelled by the furnaces, the population of Middletown grew from 33,695 in 1950 to close to 50,000 a decade later but, as was the case for much of what was then known as the ‘Steel Belt’, the good times couldn’t last. In 1973 the US was producing 229 million metric tonnes of iron and steel but by 1982, the annus horribilis for the industry, the output was less than half that. Mr Vance was born two years later.

“I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been haemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember,” he wrote in the opening to Hillbilly Elegy. His father, Donald Bowman, walked out on the family when he was a toddler while his mother struggled with addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. The senator was largely raised by those same grandparents who had followed the Hillbilly Highway in search of a better life.

Mr Vance was 17 when the September 11 attacks happened and, in his own words, “like any self-respecting hillbilly, I considered heading to the Middle East to kill terrorists”. He was deployed to Iraq as a military journalist with the Marines in 2005, an experience he describes as the most formative of his life. He would later graduate from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and philosophy.

Mr Vance has been historically keen to play up his hillbilly background, contrasting himself with what he calls the ‘American elites’. In Hillbilly Elegy he claims never to have heard of sparkling water until going for a meal with the international law firm Gibson Dunn.

“I took one sip and literally spit it out. It was the grossest thing I’d ever tasted,” he writes, professing not to have realised until the waitress brought him a second bottle that ‘sparkling’ meant carbonated and not just high-end.

It’s something that would be written off as laughably cliché had it come from a Hollywood movie and, indeed, it was.

Hillbilly Elegy was made into a Netflix filmHillbilly Elegy was made into a Netflix film (Image: 2020 © NETFLIX)

Mr Vance’s memoir was adapted into a Netflix feature film of the same name in 2020, with Ron Howard directing and Amy Adams and Glenn Close in the lead roles. Reviews were not good.

The Independent accused it of “perpetuating stereotypes about the poor”, the AV Club called it “bootstrapping poverty porn” which “reinforces the stereotypes it's meant to be illuminating”. Mark Kermode called it incredibly dramatically intert and, frankly, boring” while Entertainment Weekly simply concluded: “Hillbilly Elegy is two movies, one laughably bad and one boringly bad.”

Two years later, having first considered a bid for office in 2018, Mr Vance was elected to the Senate, defeating longstanding Democratic incumbent Tim Ryan. Since assuming his post he’s operated very much in Mr Trump’s right-wing populist, MAGA, wheelhouse – but his political positions haven’t always been so easy to pin down.

In the 2016 election he announced in a now-deleted social media post that he was voting for the independent candidate Evan McMullin, while in another he described the future President as “reprehensible” and concluded “God wants better of us”. Mr Vance further described Mr Trump as “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for the impoverished communities like the one in which he grew up and speculated in a message to a friend that the former Apprentice host might be “America’s Hitler”.

The vice-Presidential candidate has spoken in favour of collective bargaining, visited striking car workers on the pickets in 2023, and opposes ‘right-to-work’ anti-union acts. However, he has been given a 0% score on his voting record AFL-CIO, the US’s largest union federation, and opposes proposed reforms to make it easier for workers to unionise.

Even Mr Vance’s religious beliefs appear somewhat amorphous. Raised in what he describes as a “conservative, evangelical” Protestant home, he “outright rejected” the faith and says he would have described himself as an atheist while at Yale Law School. He was baptised into the Catholic Church in 2019.

Now though, it appears he’s a true believer in the Church of MAGA.

JD Vance and Donald TrumpJD Vance and Donald Trump

There is, logic tells us, a fairly decent chance that Mr Vance will be President. Mr Trump is leading in the polls but is 78-years-old and not known for living the healthiest of lifestyles – not to mention someone recently tried to assassinate him. In the event of the death of a sitting President, it’s his VP who takes over.

Were that to be the case, the senator would make a more than reliable keeper of the flame. Mr Vance is against abortion, opposes same-sex marriage, has proposed spending $3bn to complete the wall on the southern border, and has downplayed the effects of climate change.

On foreign policy he’s a staunch supporter of Israel, hawkish on Iran and has been a vocal critic of the US sending military aid to Ukraine following the invasion by Russia in 2022, admitting “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other”.

Echoing a long-term fixation of his running mate, Mr Vance has described China as “the biggest threat to our country”.

Finally, for all he comes from a self-described hillbilly background, the Ohioan is in lockstep with Republican dogma when it comes to the poor.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse… thrift is inimical to our being,” he wrote of Appalachians in Hillbilly Elegy. “We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class. And when the dust clears—when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity—there’s nothing left over.”

He refers to his uncles as “drunks who fight everybody and they beat their wives”, making them “the embodiment of the Appalachian man”. As many commentators pointed out at the time, Mr Vance has never actually lived in Appalachia.

The socio-economic problems which turned the Steel Belt into the Rust Belt have been well-documented, and Hillary Clinton took the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ for granted to her ultimate electoral peril. The opioid crisis still gripping America began in its post-industrial heartland, and states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana and Illinois have some of the highest rates of fatal overdose. Depopulation is an issue too. From 2000 to 2020, the population of Cleveland, Ohio fell by 22%, Gary, Indiana by 32% and Flint, Michigan by 35%. The last is the hometown of filmmaker Michael Moore, decidedly on the other side of the political aisle to Mr Vance, who in his first film Roger & Me documented a young woman selling rabbits for “pets or meat”.

Still though, when Mr Vance describes his home as a “hub of misery”, it’s probably worth taking with a pinch of salt, considering he seems to believe there are minarets on the top of Buckingham Palace.