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Why uber-rich Americans are escaping to the UK [1]

['Helen Kirwan-Taylor', 'David Byers', 'Giles Coren', 'Rosamund Urwin', 'Media Editor', 'Julia Llewellyn Smith', 'Georgina Roberts', 'Professor Tanya Byron', 'Julie Henry', 'Dr Mark Porter']

Date: 2025-05

There were two moving vans on my leafy street in Holland Park in west London this morning. Even before I saw the enormous boxes marked “Bloomberg” being hauled up the front stairs, I knew that the newly renovated house with two basements had just been sold to Americans in “tech”.

A friend who chairs our communal garden committee and therefore receives all the buying agents’ vetting calls recently said: “Every house in Notting Hill is now for ‘soft sale’.” In other words the locals are braced for the Donald Dashers, wealthy Americans with a (still) strong dollar on their side who do not need to read another deranged news story to persuade them that now is the time to leave the US. In fact one such American disarmed the Polish builders of a nearby house still behind scaffolding by walking in and asking: “How much?” Moving trucks arrived a few weeks later.

The Home Office says that applications for UK citizenship surged in the last quarter of 2024, rising 40 per cent year on year. More than 6,100 US citizens applied last year, the most since records began two decades ago and 26 per cent more than in 2023. Elena Hinchin, from the law firm Farrer & Co, believes the American political landscape is a very serious driver. “We’ve definitely seen more interest than under the previous administration,” she says. The abolition of the non-dom tax status has led to many Americans already in the UK applying for British passports.

As some non-dommers flee the UK to their temporary and suicidally depressing tax shelters in Dubai and Cyprus (I just met a Belgian man who is sharing a bedroom with a fellow non-dommer in Malta for tax purposes; his wife chose to pay up instead), Americans are coming to London.

We just redecorated a small flat in Notting Hill which had a feeding frenzy of rental offers from American professionals within an hour of its listings. Somehow word got out as far as Palm Beach in Florida, where a frazzled friend of a friend begged us on Zoom to reconsider, saying she would pay 25 per cent above the asking price because she desperately needed a place to live in while she looked for schools for her two children.

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Tanned and shrouded in, I assume, Cartier jewellery, she did not exactly look the part of a political refugee. She travels by private jet, not inflatable dinghy, but the sense of persecution was there. She explained that Democrats and Republicans used to just about rub along on the small billionaire island that houses Mar-a-Lago, but now that Trump is back, the former are being dropped from book clubs, social circles, charity committees and even children’s playgroups. “It’s time to go,” she said. When the rich, with their global bank accounts, are scared, you should be too.

Donald Dashers are looking to move quickly JOE SOHM/VISIONS OF AMERICA/GETTY IMAGES

One of my friends was just offered, through an upmarket short let agency, £25,000 a week in rent by an American family if they would leave their Notting Hill house within a week and put in air conditioning. The agent, who does not want to be identified, explained that houses all over this neighbourhood are discreetly being tarted up and vacated to make room for a mass arrival of, first, members of the Hollywood elite, and then techies, none of whom can wait long enough for their furniture to arrive. Short-term rentals often end up lasting years, she said, adding that many Americans want to move to London because “that’s where their friends are”.

Arthur Lintell, a partner at Knight Frank, Notting Hill, expects a deluge of buyers within the next three months, which coincides with changes in UK tax status. “London is a safety deposit box,” he says. “Currently we have many Americans looking for rentals as they cement their plans. Sales-wise, this is the perfect time.” Jo Eccles of the buying agency Eccord says that Americans now account for at least 30 per cent of her company’s clients, the highest proportion yet.

I didn’t need to click on the Bloomberg headline “Americans are using their Ancestry to Gain Citizenship in Europe” (this includes a 46 per cent rise in applications for Irish passports by long lost descendants) to work out that Americans are itching to get out before they no longer easily can. I say this because a European friend with a green card was recently detained by immigration at JFK for seemingly no purpose other than to scare her. “It’s a warning,” she says. “Foreigners are not welcome.”

Two American friends who moved to London a few years ago on a consultancy visa are busy trying to track down their Scottish ancestors so “we don’t have to go back”. (They’ve optimistically rented out their New York apartment, suggesting that Keir Starmer is softening on visa requirements for American professionals.)

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• I grew up an over-praised American. Coming to Britain was a shock

We’re way beyond the head-nodding and tut-tutting stages of the second Trump presidency. Even the nose-holding wait-and-seers whose hedge funds will benefit from Trump’s supposed tax cuts and deregulation policies are having a rapid change of heart as they choke on each day’s newest crazy news.

All of Europe is now a property porn shopping mall for Donald Dashers but, as tempting as Italy, Portugal and Spain may be, an immigration lawyer tells me off the record that “England is the only European country where laws stick — that’s why the oligarchs use our courts”. I tell my taxocrat friends, who claim Dubai is “so charming”, that when the Trump shit really hits the fan, a tax haven will not save you. In fact the local police will probably confiscate your house.

Emails from friends are turning practical. “What does a four-bedroom house on Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill cost?” one New Yorker asks, adding: “Where’s your closest beach?” I can see the rapid calculations in his head: it’s four hours on a Friday night from the Upper East Side to East Hampton. Getting to Nice or Ibiza from London might actually be quicker. As a keen skier, he also calculated not only the time-saving advantages of skiing in Verbier compared with, say, Aspen, but also the costs. “It’s cheap for us,” he says. He also talked about wanting to live in a city where people can talk freely. “No one discusses politics in New York any more,” he says. “It’s getting weird.”

American celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, Tom Ford and soon, I hear, Bette Midler may be the most outspoken Donald Dashers but many others are now lining up.

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The cherry on the cake for the Donald Dashers is that Trump is about to make it even easier for the 1 per cent. “I support ENDING the double-taxation of overseas Americans!” Trump said in a statement first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Previously, rich Americans living in London have had to give up their citizenship not to get stung twice by tax, but now they may be able to apply for British citizenship and keep their American passports in the safe just in case.

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[1] Url: https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/americans-moving-to-uk-nwz3mv92x?utm_source=chatgpt.com%C2%AEion=global

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