Shire Folk: How a Luton football hooligan became a hero to the world’s richest man

It’s a little before 9 a.m. when Georgia Banjo reaches Greenville, Texas, a town about 50 miles east of Dallas. She’s there to meet Brent Money, a state representative in his late forties who wears jeans and a smart shirt and smiles so broadly his eyes squint. Money loves Downton Abbey, Father Brown, and All Creatures Great and Small. He recently spent seven or eight hours on Ancestry.com tracing his family back to 1480 in England. He wants to visit the old church his ancestors built. But he also wants something else: “I don’t want there to be a call to prayer coming out of it when I arrive.”

This is what led Banjo to Texas. She’d noticed a darker side to how many Americans now perceive Britain—not as a land of nostalgia, but of danger. Warnings about Sharia law, no-go zones, grooming gangs. The sense that the country is being lost to Islamic invaders. Money doesn’t just care about Britain because of his ancestry. He sees it as a cautionary tale. And when asked which activists or leaders he looks to, he mentions speaking at an event that Tommy Robinson was at.

Two Lutons, two Britains