Trump’s election victory was widely seen as a boon for America’s top one per cent, but not all of them welcome the return of the Don. Some of them are fleeing their native America, and choosing the UK as their sanctuary, writes Ali Lyon.
Tom Ford and Ellen DeGeneres have plenty in common.
As well as both being open and proud members of the LGBT community, they have spent much of their careers in Los Angeles, mixing in the West Coast glitterati circles with Hollywood movie stars and tech billionaires.
At 63 and 66 respectively, they hit adulthood in a swashbuckling incarnation of America, whose superiority was unquestioned, and in which they felt the arc of history, to paraphrase Martin Luther-King, always bent towards progress.
They have also, at varying times since his ascendancy, publicly shared their misgivings of what a Trump presidency would mean for the United States.
Ford, a billionaire whose eponymous clothing and fragrance lines make up one of the world’s most successful fashion houses, chose to use his hitherto apolitical fashion shows to reveal his disapproval of the 45th and now 47th President’s remorseless approach to stopping illegal immigration. While household name and TV presenter DeGeneres branded the recent US election as a choice between ‘love and inclusion vs hate and violence’. Not every voter saw the choice in such terms, but a choice was made.
The voters’ choice has reportedly helped push them, and a rapidly growing number of their compatriots, on to yet more common ground; one which involves the multi-million pound purchase of homes in – and a relocation to – some of the UK’s most exclusive postcodes.
Post-Trump exodus
Henley & Partners, a residence and citizenship specialist, recently reported a 504 per cent increase in the number of enquiries it gets from American citizens compared with just four years ago, with many clients either side of the electoral divide, it said, citing the country’s high stakes election as a core motivating factor.
Meanwhile a survey carried out by International Living found 65 per cent of its respondents said the showdown between Trump and Harris was expediting their potential move abroad.
Along with her partner, DeGeneres chose to snap up a country seat in the rolling limestone hills of the Cotswolds. The pair has even been seen familiarising themselves with their latest watering hole; one which happens to be owned by the UK’s most famous farmer, Jeremy Clarkson.
Ford, on the other hand, opted for a more urban but no less upmarket setting for his self-imposed exile, buying up an £80m Chelsea pad earlier this month, in what is believed to be the UK property market’s largest residential purchase of 2024.
Ellen DeGeneres has moved to the Cotswolds
Ostensibly, this unusual cohort of political refugees is making an odd – and potentially ill-advised – financial move, swimming against a tide of ultra-high net worth individuals moving out of the UK. The country is – after all – suffering from its highest tax burden since the second world war, and governments from both its major parties have, increasingly, turned to wealthy foreigners, and the wealthy in general, as the country creaks under its evermore pressurised – and patently underperforming – public services.
Thanks to a combination of changes to the the country’s non-dom reforms, hikes to capital gains tax, and a general sense of national drift, this year’s UBS Wealth Report found that between now and 2028 Britain can expect to lose the most millionaires (not per capita, but overall) of any country in the world.
The 2024 UBS Wealth Report found that between now and 2028, Britain can expect to lose the most millionaires of any country in the world.
And yet because the US is one of the few major economies to apply its taxes based on citizenship rather than residence, little of this, explains David Lesperance, a founding partner of the tax advisory Lesperance & Associates, factors into his US ultra-wealthy clients’ decision making.
“I’ve got freaked out Americans who are telling me, ‘I don’t want to live in a MAGA America, I think it’s going to be a sh*tshow. I want to go somewhere I can feel safe,’” he says. “Gun violence is a big deal in the US. Political polarisation is a huge concern.”
Lesperance recalls one Jewish client planning to leave the ‘land of the free’, who bluntly said to him that while the scourge of rising antisemitism is a trend bearing out many countries, the “thing about antisemites in the US is that they have AR-15s”.
Another driver that is luring wealthy Americans over – one that predates Donald Trump’s resounding victory – is the relatively parlous state of the upper end of London’s property market.
“We’re at an almost eight-nine year low ebb in the market,” says Stuart Bailey, Knight Frank’s head of super prime sales.
“The dollar to sterling ratio has been attractive,” he continues, before adding that there was a four-month period between the election and the Budget where American buyers also had far less competition from the market’s usual participants, as “non-doms and high net worth Bits sat on their hands” waiting to see what came down the line in Rachel Reeves’ Budget.
American UHNWIs’ favourite postcodes
As well as Chelsea and the Cotswolds, many American emigres are choosing the salubrious neighbourhoods of Notting Hill, St John’s Wood and Bayswater, where the once iconic Whiteley shopping centre is being redeveloped into luxury residences and a hotel.
Charles Leigh, who is a director at both The Whiteley and Mayfair’s 60 Curzon development in Soho, tells City AM that some of the US clients he speaks to are making the move across the pond despite Trump’s presidency being personally lucrative.
“The vast majority of people who are buying into our buildings… will almost certainly end up being better off under Trump, we guess,” he says. “But the morning that Trump got in, [one US client who had already exchanged with us] sent an email and picked up the telephone and basically said: ‘When’s completion, get us out of here.’”
Since the election result, the percentage of applicants at The Whiteley who were from the US has jumped from 16.5 per cent to nearly 20 per cent. And the proportion of completions involving American buyers rose to over 20 per cent from the 17.2 per cent that have actually bought at the residence.
On top of the financial reasons, London has also managed to keep its socio-cultural pulling power to Americans. Despite a narrative of managed decline setting in, Leigh points to the country’s schools, its connectivity and its miscellany of high culture and property offerings as feathers that remain in the UK’s – and largely London’s – hat.
As Lesperance says, “You’ve got to think what would work for each client that moves. What can they sell to their family at the breakfast table?”
For an increasing number of Americans, the answer to that question is not only somewhere free from the more extreme whims of a highly unpredictable president, but the prospect of either long evenings in London’s glittering West End or – in DeGeneres’s case – with The Corrs, Natalie Imbruglia and Jeremy Clarkson in a country pub.