Dear Readers,
Welcome to Off The Fence, our fortnightly newsletter-slash-propaganda arm. We’ve been busy with the upcoming print issue: expect a revamped features section with deep dives into the world of financial crime and the crass mediocrities of theatreland. On that note – please do subscribe to the print magazine. It is our only meaningful source of revenue through lockdown (and likely beyond that).
To business. Last week, the world delighted in the batshit insanity of the Handforth Parish Council Zoom meeting. We have a very funny letter from an anonymous church organist who saw the Cheshire Parish Mafia up close. There’s a survey of the achievements of Ian Hislop, a recipe from Genghis Khan, but first: a tribute to the singular genius of the UK’s vaccine hero(ine), Kate Bingham herself.
Better Kate than Never
Long before the coronavirus was so much as a twinkle in a pangolin’s eye, Kate Bingham and Boris Johnson found themselves at loggerheads.
They were on holiday in Scotland with their families. Boris wanted everyone to spend the day watching the launches at LARGS, the Largest Annual Rocketry Gathering in Scotland, which was taking place nearby. But Bingham wanted to go and grill sausages on the beach.
Now, Johnson is the man who rewrote the rulebook of British politics, took Britain out of the EU and came to power with a historic mandate more or less through sheer force of personality. No one could accuse him of lacking willpower. But as he munched away on his sausage later that day, thinking wistfully of all the rockets being launched out of sight, he may have reflected on an important fact of life. No one wins in a fight with Kate Bingham.
Speaking to a network of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, The Fence has pieced together the answer to the question on everyone’s lips: what is it like to spend a weekend with Kate Bingham? The answer is: exhausting.
You are woken at 7AM each morning by the sound of Bingham, her husband and all three of her children practicing their instruments at a near professional standard. Coming down, you find that Bingham has come home from her morning ride, mucked out the stables, prepared breakfast for the party and is now geared up in a fleece and cycling shorts, ready for the day. On the table are the remains of her breakfast, and a few scattered pots of organic jam.
The day’s activities are intense. ‘Every minute of every day is timetabled,’ said one friend. Multiple people – the majority, in fact, of the people we contact for this story – told The Fence about being frogmarched up and down mountains ‘in the pissing rain’. One recalled climbing two in a single day; after the second descent, Bingham turned to her exhausted companions, clapped her hands and said, ‘Right – what we need now is a pint.’
‘Just thinking of Kate makes me feel tired’, said one friend. ‘She’s got more energy than the entire cabinet put together.’
Come Monday morning, the devoted mother and fell-walker is replaced by an industry-renowned biotech investor. Until recently, the world of biotech was not necessarily awash with successful investment stories. Bingham was known for her ability to buck the trend. The former chair of a VC fund told The Fence that her name was practically grounds to invest by itself. ‘People would say, “By the way, Kate Bingham’s investing.” It was that personal.’
After Bingham was made Chair of the UK Vaccine taskforce, those who knew her felt an enormous sense of relief: ‘when I heard she’d been appointed I thought: right, that’s going to be a winner then.’
Publicly, there were murmurs about cronyism and incompetence. Many civil servants were less than thrilled, and Bingham’s high-powered professional proved an uncomfortable fit in Whitehall. Privately, some suspect it was this tension that prompted the rash of negative stories which emerged about Bingham in November when, after a week of negative headlines, she was forced to deny that she had shared sensitive information with private investors. At that moment, many exhausted citizens began to suspect that the vaccine would be as much of a disaster as everything else.
The Government’s response to the pandemic has been racked with cronyism, incompetence and a jobs-for-mates ethos that has cost billions of pounds, and very possibly thousands of lives. Under Bingham’s guidance the Government has spent £900 million pounds on 400 million doses of different vaccines. That’s a lot of money: roughly half the annual budget of the UK’s Courts and Tribunal Services. But it is far less than the £22 billion spent on our perennially woeful test and trace system.
To put it another way, the UK has spent a lot less on lifeboats than we did on plugging leaks – and is going to get a lot more out of it. Our doubts were reasonable then, but they were misplaced. Though the UK’s massively effective roll out of the vaccine was not Bingham’s triumph, the successful and strategic procurement of doses with advanced supply chains definitively was. It was not Brexit, but Bingham, that got the jabs here so quickly.
As for those negative stories, you’d currently be as hard-pressed to find a bad word about Bingham in public as we were in private. Humble pie? Put it in our veins.
Florals for Spring
In the grip of a national lockdown, major British fashion labels of international repute are forcing their employees back into the office to work on the next season. They are also making their interns travel to the office to assist their employees (these same interns work four days a week for four to five months, all unpaid).
It’s completely outrageous, but why isn’t this a story? The fashion world operates a successful omertà. Firstly, it’s extraordinarily competitive to get a job as a designer, and NDAs are an intransigent part of the contractual landscape. And more importantly, most media outlets won’t report on fashion’s egregious attitude to workers’ rights because they are dependent on the advertising revenue that these multi-billion-pound corporations provide. Might a national newspaper do what is right and launch a long overdue investigation into high fashion’s exploitation of their employees?
A Letter from Cheshire
When I first caught a glimpse of the infamous Handforth Parish Council meeting video, I instantly thought: ‘I recognise this’.
As a naïve fresher at Manchester, I successfully auditioned for a church organist job a few minutes away from Handforth. I’d catch the London train from Manchester Piccadilly every Thursday night for choir practice, and again on Sunday mornings for services. The first few weeks were unremarkable, the choir of about twenty retirees appeared harmless. Before rehearsals they’d chat about knitting, sometimes about their grandchildren, but often about roadworks. Yet over time, this illusion began to crumble.
As the weeks went on, I started to notice violent glares being cast across the choir stalls, and whispered conversations being held in corners of the vestry. Gradually, it became apparent that all was not well, that there was an all-consuming, factionalised form of internal politics at play. These factions were formed over the most trivial disagreements, I remember particularly bitter fighting over the question of how many reserved parking spaces there should be on a Sunday.
As I sat, watching the infamous video of Aled and his friend cackling and yelling, my mind was cast back to what I had seen on those Sunday mornings. Week by week a form of obsessive and visceral drama unfolded over the most mundane workings of parish life, a mere five minutes from Handforth.
The town has been swallowed up by its ever-expanding neighbour, Wilmslow, which are now connected by a long stretch of semi-detached houses, loaded with their anthracite grey windows, all with immaculately clean Range Rovers: the gated domains of property developers and footballers. Alex Ferguson, Rio Ferdinand, and Dion Dublin are just some of the area’s residents. But the east Cheshire glitterati are not the stars of this story, but rather a dwindling population of retirees.
It was always clear who the ringleaders were, and they weren’t all members of the choir. Many were those parishioners who would form a queue after services to tell me that I was playing too quietly, loudly, quickly, or slowly. The snipes were ceaseless and always delivered with a smile.
Aled iPad’s nonsensical jibe at Cynthia ‘ooh coming from you in Birkenhead, that sounds good’ really gets at the root of the Handforth/Wilmslow problem – the world stops at the parish border. The older population of these towns have lived through a property boom, they’ve seen a nouveaux riche coterie move in and bring exclusive nightclubs and Aston Martin showrooms with them. But instead of moving out, the retirees have stayed and formed a parochial mafia, exercising their power through allotment committees, residents’ associations, and parish councils. They know that they live in a ‘desirable area’ and they’ll be damned if its prestige is not preserved. They behave like the lovechild of Hyacinth Bucket and Malcolm Tucker.
At church, it was always fascinating to listen into conversations at post-service coffee. Parishioners who were the very image of sweet old dears would enter into deranged gossiping:
‘Have you seen the state of Geoff’s front garden? It’ll bring house prices right down.’
‘Linda is having to trade her Mercedes in. She must be hard up.’
‘Peter’s wife looks like a prostitute in that coat.’
And it didn’t stop at gossiping, full-blown rows would break out over nothing. On one occasion I had a hymnbook launched across the stalls at me by a 60-something who called me an ‘arsehole’ for not asking him to sing a solo. A group of ladies would turn up early so they could sit around one member of the Parochial Church Council as she drafted vitriolic emails and WhatsApp messages.
Following a dispute about Good Friday hymns, I received an email sarcastically signed ‘Ha! Ha! From Lillian.’
I was intrigued to note the amount of sarcastic laughter in the Handforth Parish Council recording. It was this calculated veneer of happiness and civility that, in my experience, really made things unnerving; it was almost as though they were enjoying themselves. And perhaps they were – these positions of provincial responsibility provide many suburban pensioners with a much-needed form of entertainment. Once you have entered into the world of parish politics, parking spaces become a serious matter, the condition of the local park’s lawns is crucial, the juvenile daubing of graffiti on a bus stop seems a matter of national importance.
I finally decided to call it a day after enduring almost six months of debate over the acceptable length of the Sunday morning anthem. PCC members scurried about, churchwardens drafted emails, and threats were made regarding the involvement of diocesan officials. I was caught up in the middle and couldn’t see why it was so important, no matter how hard I tried.
Looking back, I can’t hold grudges against any of the people I encountered. They were all odd, many were nasty, some were maniacal, but they were all the victims of their own creation. Their grasp on reality had fallen victim to the micromanagement of local affairs, a constant frenzy of preserving their area’s reputation. And having been an onlooker, all I am able to say, like Jackie Weaver, is that it’s nothing if not lively in Handforth.
Birdies of the World Unite, You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Grains
Ecuador’s presidential election has rumbled to its second round, with socialist candidate Andrés Arauz ahead in the polls. Precisely how much this has rattled his ideological opponents can be discerned by the emergence of some decidedly ornate and clumsy smears against his character in the past few days.
Ecuadorian magazine Semana alleged on Monday that Arauz had received funding from Colombian guerrillas ELN, facilitated by Progressive International, a non-profit organisation currently deploying electoral observers to the country’s polls. No proof of any connection between ELN and either Arauz or Progressive International was produced, other than a video on social media purporting to show gun-toting ELN guerrillas chanting Arauz’s name.
Released on Sunday, it depicts three masked men under an ELN banner, registering their approval for the candidate in a nondescript patch of ‘Colombia’, according to a subtitle handily affixed below the image.
The video spread widely on social media and was picked up by other organs throughout the region, but hit upon a snag when it came to the attention of birdwatcher Manuel Sánchez, who detected an unmistakable, high pitched-squawk in the background. ‘I recognized the whistle instantly,’
Foreign Policy reported him as saying on Wednesday morning, ‘and I knew that the video could not have been filmed in Colombia’. The distinctive trill came from a pale-browned tinamou which is – as we all know – entirely non-native to Colombia, ranging through a habitat which ‘extends only from western Ecuador to northwest Peru’.
The delight to be taken in such birdy nerdery reminds us of other excellently unlikely debunkings, such as the time Pakistan’s former PM Nawaz Sharif was implicated in a massive corruption scandal when his family forged financial documents for the year 2006, using Calibri, a typeface that didn't exist until 2007. Or, consider the case of Juan Catalan, an LA mechanic who was accused of murder, and exonerated only once footage of him in the background of a scene of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, corroborated his alibi.
The Fence has not been able to reach a pale-browned tinamou at time of press, but did manage to speak with David Adler, General Coordinator of Progressive International, who said he felt vindicated by the debunking, and grateful to all those in the ornithological orbit.
‘As a child, I was often dragged along to birdwatch, spending long hours with my ornithologically inclined brother on trails and hikes with heavy binoculars. I hated it. Years later, I have come to see that ornithologists not only watch birds — they also watch over our democracies. The birdwatching community has once again shown that the sounds of nature are the sounds of society. We fight alongside all the birds of the world, hasta la victoria siempre.’
We Need To Talk About Ian
Last week, the editor of Private Eye gave a lengthy interview that you can read here. 175,000 print subscribers are a truly astonishing figure (we have less than half that number). There’s a tendency among the highbrow outlets to regard the Eye as a parochial slice of Little Englander whimsy, but that reflects their own highfalutin prejudices more than it does cold actuality. No other outlet takes on the entrenched power structures of this country with such consistent verve (and has the lawsuits to prove it).
But it goes deeper than that. Like much of the London creative industries, the magazine world is very European. And whenever we speak to sophisticated continental types who work in design and illustration, there is only one magazine they want to talk about: the Eye. The covers and the masthead are rightly celebrated, but the cut and paste technique of the design, which melds the granular investigations with the broad-brush lols, is a thing of quiet genius.
In British media, all magazines look to America, with their fat budgets and fact-checkers galore. Yet once upon a time the reverse was true: Spy, the satirical ‘80s monthly, was inspired (not just in name) by the Eye, and the influence of Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen’s iconic mag can be very clearly seen today in the witty, dry prose of New York magazine and its various online umbrellas.
Lastly, it’s not exactly news that many media companies are owned and operated at the whims of the billionaire class. At the same time, many new media companies rely on brand partnerships to survive, which doesn’t hold out so well for editorial integrity. To keep the magazine profitable and independent without selling out the original shareholders is a pretty astonishing feat on the part of Hislop. Well done, Lord Gnome.
Cancelling Philip Roth
In Mel magazine, Hannah Williams writes a long overdue corrective to the book-Twitter trope of the ‘Bad Male Author’. It’s a cleverly done essay, where the author asks sources about their favourite ‘bad’ male writer. One particular correspondent writes this of Papa Hemingway:
‘I’ve written before about how queer his writing can be, and he’s got a very intensely homoerotic gaze. As a lesbian reader, his homophobia and misogyny don’t bother me very much because they seem layered with other, more interesting aspects of the work, and in fact, I’d argue that it’s not just a matter of looking past his sexism, but instead grappling with it.’
As discussion of history turns away from whether a given individual is perceived to be ‘problematic’ or not, could it be time for contemporary literary critics to stop reducing texts to their author’s politics, and focus more meaningfully on the texts themselves? We live in hope...
Ermigawd, It’s A Briddish Grassy Knoll!
Alexander Larman, TF contributor and historian, has written a book that reveals the hidden history of one of British history/The Crown’s most infamous episodes: the Abdication of Edward VIII. The centrepiece of the book is the failed assassination attempt of the King by George McMahon, who produced a revolver as Edward rode past in Hyde Park on the 16 July 1936. Sentenced to 12 months for his act of aborted regicide, McMahon was also a paid informant for MI5. Were the spooks secretly in on the act? The Crown in Crisis has just received a glowing write-up in the Wall Street Journal and we heartily recommend it.
Some Self Care from The Fence
Sirin Kale writes, with her customary wit, of her battle to summit the ‘aluminium Annapurna’ of a 27-year Diet Coke addiction. If you’re trying to kick an expensive, unhealthy fizzy drink habit, might we suggest that you experiment with the emperor of iced beverages: a glass of fresh lime soda. It is healthy, refreshing and we attach a recipe here.
Purchase four limes from supermarket (the greener, the better).
Squeeze these limes into a juice.
Cut the remaining segments of the limes into segments, and reserve.
Mix lime juice with one tablespoon of sugar and then pour into a tall glass.
Add ice cubes (no less than two, no more than four).
Pour in soda water and mix with a spoon.
Add the two reserved segments of lime to the mixture, that slick mixologist’s touch.
Serve whilst still cool.
Enjoy that sweet, sweet drink as you tap away at the desk.
In Case You Missed It
At the FT, Sarah O’Connor writes a stirring State Of The Future piece, which sports the kind of headline usually printed on a tattered newspaper blowing conspicuously across the wasteland in a post-apocalypse movie; Why I Was Wrong To Be Optimistic About Robots.
Ben Okri weaves an unsettling tale of identity and perception for The New Yorker, and talks to Deborah Treisman about what it does and doesn’t say.
Bloomberg’s Isabella Steger charts goings-on in a Cantonese-speaking room on social media safe haven Clubhouse, mere hours before access to the platform was shuttered by the Chinese Government.
At Hyperallergenic, Hakim Bishara adds some colour to the story of an entirely new blue that’s just dropped, YInMn, the first new chemically made pigment in two centuries. ‘[N]amed after its components — Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese —…its luminous, vivid pigment never fades, even if mixed with oil and water’.
Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti delve into flatulent fauna with an unaccountably informative tour through The World’s Most Dangerous Farts for TED-Ed.
Last week we featured the perfect ham sandwich, this week we take you to the Urals, where an unlikely YouTuber recreates Gengis Khan’s favourite meal, which consists of beef, onions and rocks. Listen to the flowing streams and bathe in the mountain air!
A Message From Father Alex
As the Vicar of St Matthew's church in Burnley and on behalf of the PCC I'd like to offer my sincere gratitude for the kindness of The Fence readers who raised over ten thousand pounds to support our ministry in east Lancashire. We are currently exploring how best to use the donations but we have sights firmly set on supporting the mental wellbeing of those living in poverty here in south-west Burnley.
Love and thanks, Fr Alex Frost (Vicar)
*
That’s the lot for this week. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, please do subscribe to the print magazine in the link below. We have some very exciting news when we come back in a fortnight hence... which we look forward to sharing with you all.
Of course, there is nothing we like more than to hear from our readers, so please do get in touch with us if you’d like to chat. If you have any points, critiques or just want to have a natter, reply to this email.
All the best,
TF
We are also delighted to offer a subscription service. For £25 you will receive all four copies of the magazine per year, delivered to your door.
