British-born socialite Lady Victoria Hervey spent more than 20 years in Los Angeles, but she never felt compelled to visit Washington, DC, until one very special invitation: to the second inauguration of President Donald Trump. “I had quite a few friends on the inaugural committee,” she tells Vanity Fair, speaking by phone from her native London. “It was a blast, actually.” Now her MAGA hats—at least six, arranged in transparent plastic boxes—decorate her Knightsbridge apartment. This spring, she said it was time to get one that says “Make England Great Again.”
Hervey laments that the weather in Palm Beach has been too hot for her to summer on the MAGA circuit. “It is exciting because you’ve got the Secret Service guys everywhere. Mar-a-Lago definitely feels like the epicenter of what’s going on,” she says. “You feel like you’re in some sort of alternate universe.”
Hervey enjoys epicenters. In the 1990s, she was famous on the party circuit, ruling London’s tabloids as an It girl. But even It girls face term limits. In 2001, the Daily Mail called her “the most ridiculous person in Britain,” and the aristocratic model decamped to the USA. Though her acting dreams didn’t pan out, Hervey stuck around on the West Coast, attending film premieres and parties with friends like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Eventually, she advertised the launch of a swimwear line, Ladyship Swim, and plans to design clothing with a friend, Scott Hensell.
Still in LA at the start of the pandemic in 2020, she says it felt like “a veil had been lifted.” Hervey canceled her cable subscription and started getting all her news from independent outlets and Telegram groups. She posted criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement and heavy skepticism of the COVID vaccine to her 568K followers on Instagram. Then a friend invited her to attend a few Trump rallies. And then came Palm Beach.
“I found myself at Mar-a-Lago around 2021. I got invited to an event Rudy Giuliani was hosting. Then from there, I started meeting a lot of people, and just really creating a network down there,” Hervey says. “Because of what was going on in the world, I decided that I wanted to know more, and I wanted to learn more about what was really going on, and I wanted to get myself close to the people that are in power.”
Hervey is expert at the time-honored tradition of obtaining an autographed MAGA hat: “The best place to get him, really, is up at the golf club, if you are wearing one of his hats and he spots you close to him.”
Eventually, Hervey made an appearance at a day of Harvey Weinstein’s trial alongside blogger Jessica Reed Kraus, whose HouseInhabit account boasts 1.3 million followers. The pair have been friends since 2022, meeting in person for the first time at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in London and subsequently connecting over their shared interest in Ghislaine Maxwell. Now they spend weekends together in Palm Beach, grabbing brunch before getting their makeup done and heading to the president’s home base.
“Lady Victoria fits right in with this, and she brings big British glamour to it,” Kraus says. “She’s like a society swan in these settings, and she stands out as sort of a dazzling addition to American politics.”
But America was not permanent for Hervey. “People were getting shot on the street in Beverly Hills,” she claims, leading her to move back to London in 2022. (Beverly Hills had 1 criminal homicide in 2021, and none in 2022 or 2023.) But she has kept a toehold in Palm Beach society. And now, she is expert at the time-honored tradition of obtaining an autographed MAGA hat. “The best place to get him, really, is up at the golf club, if you are wearing one of his hats and he spots you close to him,” she says. “He would say to me, ‘Oh, do you want me to sign that?’”
“[Trump’s] presidential campaign—it was genius,” she says. “The way he did the McDonalds thing…. I was like, ‘He’s won.’”
Though she’s now skeptical of mainstream media, she once had a perch on the inside. In 2000, the Sunday Times gave her a short-lived column called “Victoria’s Secrets,” where she detailed her exploits. Of a party Britney Spears threw at Planet Hollywood in London, Hervey wrote, “Macaulay Culkin and I stood on the sidelines and tried to spot the famous names. Suddenly feeling my age (24), I went home early.”
Another night of partying led to the club Kabaret, “where Fran Cutler was holding court with Kate Moss and James Brown, the man responsible for Kate’s new blonde wedge. Of course I asked him to do my hair, so stand by for the Victoria!”
For the last few years, she has put those observational skills to use for politics. On election night, Hervey and Kraus were at the Palm Beach Convention Center, watching as the president delivered his victory speech. For Hervey, the highlight of the night was meeting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “I was put on a group text with him about four years ago, and I finally got to meet him,” she says. “I texted him ‘good luck’ the day before on the group text, so he knew when he saw me, ‘It’s Victoria from the group!’” A few weeks later, she got to meet Giuliani at a Mar-a-Lago luncheon. A source close to the former mayor of New York confirmed that he dined with Hervey and a friend this year but declined to comment further.
She had a front-row seat to the president’s once budding bromance with Elon Musk. “It’s like when you speed date and then you get married too fast,” she says of their falling out.
Trump’s second win didn’t come as a surprise to Hervey. She thinks he clinched his reelection in October, when he spent a day serving fries at McDonald’s. “[Trump’s] presidential campaign—it was genius,” she says. “The way he did the McDonalds thing…. I was like, ‘He’s won.’”
Trump’s victory drew her even deeper into the MAGA world, and she had a front-row seat to the president’s once budding bromance with Elon Musk. “It’s like when you speed date and then you get married too fast,” she says of their falling out. “I’d seen [Musk] at Mar-a-Lago, and he actually looks a lot better in person, actually. He’s quite hunky in real life, like, tall.”
In the 1990s, Hervey modeled for Country Life, wearing couture in the halls of a grand estate. Now, she fits the MAGA-red aesthetic to a tee—blonde hair in barrel curls, a shiny tan—but she’s a blueblooded aristocrat. Victoria, daughter of Victor Hervey, the 6th Marquess of Bristol, has a pedigree that makes the Windsors look like interlopers. In the 15th century, her ancestors acquired the land in Suffolk that became their family seat, and in 1795, they began construction on Ickworth House, a Georgian mansion where Hervey spent her early years.
Her ladyship title came with a warning about how she should act. “It was explained that I would have to behave in a certain way, and people would be looking up to me,” she says. “I had to be an example for people. My upbringing was pretty strict.” At around age eight, she went off to boarding school. In the Victorian era, England’s hereditary elite had a near monopoly on land and politics, and thus exclusive possession of wealth, status, and power. By the 1980s, 500 years of the old regime was rapidly coming to an end. When Hervey came of age in the 1990s, whatever strictures might have restrained her as a child fell away on the dance floors of London. The benefits of elite status were diluted, the old estates were crumbling, and British patricians were competing in globalized markets with oligarchs from around the world.
Over centuries, the Hervey name endured high highs and lower lows. Her father served three years in jail in the 1930s for stealing jewelry—UK’s Channel 4 gave him the moniker “The Real Pink Panther”—and her older brother John, the 7th Marquess of Bristol, became famous for hard-partying ways and squandering a fortune once estimated at 35 million British pounds. (In 2025 US dollars, it would be worth about $84 million.) By 1998, John was in such dire straits that he needed a bailout from the National Trust, giving the British historic renovations charity a 75-year lease to turn Ickworth into a hotel. A two-bedroom suite runs around £310 per night.
“You can’t really buy your way in, and it doesn’t matter if you are a billionaire from somewhere else. There’s certain things that you’re not going to get into or you’re not going to be accepted,” Hervey says of her upper crust world. (The year Hervey began her MAGAsition, Evgeny Lebedev was granted a life peerage, becoming Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation. But these titles are similar to political appointments and they don’t bestow the same cache as an inherited title.) “Those old families, they still stick together. People have all grown up with each other at school together,” she adds. “My father was an Etonian and my brother went to the same school.”
In Trumpworld, Hervey’s pedigree is her allure, and she brings a glitz and confidence that obscures any nuance to her reputation. But it’s hard to get around the fact that the aristocracy has lost its power, and in parallel, softened its centuries-long commitment to the Conservative Party. Hervey herself used to be a Tory voter, but now she says she is putting her energy behind Reform UK. British political gadfly Nigel Farage founded the party after his successful advocacy for the Brexit vote in 2016. And support for his brand of anti-immigration, pro-drilling populism is growing.
Though far-right politics have an upper-class history in the UK, Hervey thinks the Reform UK pitch is “getting voters from everywhere.” She adds, “It appeals to everybody. It doesn’t matter what your background is. Rich, poor background, it’s just—do you love your country? Are you patriotic?”
In February, her phone was stolen out of her hand in Pimlico. She partly blames immigration for certain changes in the UK. “It’s a little bit like America, you know? In England, we’re having the same problem. War veterans and people like that are being forgotten, and yet they’re giving people money that are coming over the border, and these people are getting housing, and they’re getting credit cards.” (Impoverished asylum seekers in the UK are often given debit cards loaded with about $60 for food, clothing and toiletries.)
And so, she found herself at the penthouse of the Hay-Adams Hotel just days before the inauguration in January, at the “Stars and Stripes and Union Jack Party,” where Farage toasted the deep ties between the Trump movement and his upstart political party. British Serbian opera singer Nevena Bridgen sang a mashup of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” The night’s attendees included right-wing royalty Steve Bannon and Liz Truss, along with bicontinental political strategists Raheem Kassam (an investor in DC hotspot Butterworth’s), Michael Pack, Nile Gardiner, and former diplomat Andy Wigmore.
The MEGA plan to make her homeland look more like it used to is simple, according to Hervey. “Strong borders, low taxes, safe place,” she says. “Have a proper police.” Two days after the inauguration, she flew back to London to join Farage for a high-class Reform UK fundraiser at the private club Oswald’s, which was founded by second-generation nightlife impresario Robin Birley in 2018.
In a sequined black minidress and black fur coat, Hervey moved through a crowd that billionaire property developer Nick Candy, Candy’s then-wife, singer and actor Holly Valance, former Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns, and Charles James Spencer-Churchill, 12th Duke of Marlborough, a relative of Winston Churchill.
“Photos weren’t allowed. I had one of them on my Instagram, and I had gotten told off by Nick Candy—I had to get it off!” Hervey says. “People were having a good time. I think they really raised money that night and got some big donations.”
About £1 million, according to figures the party shared with the media. It’s a nice chunk of change to make some MEGA hats for the mission.
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The post Lady Victoria Hervey, British 90s It Girl Turned Mar-a-Lago Habitué, Wants to Make England Great Again appeared first on Vanity Fair.
