Dear Readers,
Welcome to Off The Fence, Britain’s only newsletter. The website has been revamped under the theme of ‘manic beauty’, and you can gaze here upon our works.
We’re also communicating with a Hebei-based mesh fencing company, who emailed offering to build us whatever Fence we wanted. We’ve told them we’re looking for a Fence that’s a little outré but still elegant – perceptive and stylish and very modern. We’ll give you more on that when we get it.
We’re sending Issue 7 to design this weekend, so look out for an April launch. First though, our insider takes us inside the world of high-end personal shoppers.
Handbags and Gladrags
The Central Line was sticky with heat on the way to work, so I had to go to the bathroom to apply deodorant before I walked out onto the floor of a famous London department store – The Store – where I was working as a personal shopper. We had a 9am appointment I had to be ready for – a couple in their thirties. He was short, no more than 5’ 4”, and dressed in Levis and loafers. His girlfriend was blonde, very blonde, and this was to be her treat for her birthday. She wanted a dress for ‘going out’. We had readied the rails of the suite: dresses from Alaïa, Victoria Beckham and Peter Pilotto.
The short man then asked me if I could get him some trousers. So, I went downstairs and took some off the rails from Gieves and Hawkes – the first suitable ones I could see – and then went back upstairs to give them to him. At The Store, we were told to give clients a longer pair, so they could be tailored-up by the in-house team. But as the short man looked in the mirror and saw the hems of the trousers folding over his feet like a pair of woollen shoes, he felt he looked ridiculous.
In a thick Scouse accent, he went berserk, telling me that ‘I wasn’t taking him seriously’. Company policy dictates that you should never answer back to a customer, so I walked out of the personal suite, and told my colleague, Emily, that she needed to take over.
An hour later, I asked Emily how she had got on with the couple. ‘They got more drunk, she didn’t like any of the dresses, but she did get a Gucci handbag, but only because he had shouted at her, with his glass of champagne still in his hand, “if you give me anal tonight, love, I’ll get this for you.”’
Working as a personal shopper wasn’t exactly my dream job. I was studying fashion at university in London, and needed to pay for my rent, my Oyster card, and yes, I wanted some new clothes. I had got a job at The Store through ‘Supreme Associates’ – a temping agency – who paid me £8 an hour and supplied me with a dull uniform with which I patrolled the shop floor. After a while, I was headhunted to join the personal shoppers. Some of my team were nice enough, but more than a few were unpleasant: a comically vain Brazilian man who cavorted around the store; a botoxed, posh English woman in her early middle age, who boasted of how she could still afford to send her children to private school.
When I worked there, the eight personal shoppers operated a 1% commission, so could, in theory, earn up to £70,000. They saw themselves as above the sales assistants, who stood for eight of the hours a day at their stalls, while they glided around the floors assigning themselves the roles of ‘personal stylists’. A more accurate job description would be ‘room-filler’. Before a client turns up, we would fill the private suite with clothes, but hardly with a discerning eye: the aim is to make a client spend £2,000 (at the very least).
We would stand either outside the suite, or inside the suite, as clients would try items for fit, and if clothes met with approval, a yellow sticker would be placed by them. At the end of the engagement, we would tally up the desired items and head to the till. The most I ever put through for less than an hours’ work was £24,000.
The personal shopping suite is pretty much a changing room. There are no locks on the door, but it does have a champagne fridge. Customers would leave rejected clothes in a heap for me to pick up, and it was painful to see these beautiful clothes treated like sweaty gym kit. I remember one Chinese family who came with their nanny. The father was eating truffle oil chips, which started reeking out the room as his wife tried on some our most expensive items. He would hand them to her, smearing the oil all over the lining of the Chanel tweed jackets.
After a while, I was trusted with the bigger clients. I was given a special phone for clients to reach me on, and I would get lots of two-minutes long voice notes at all hours of the day, or blurry photos of an item. Among these clients, there was an assumption that you knew every single piece of clothing in stock by sight, so you had to match detective work to breezy confidence. It was another world for me.
The al-Thani princesses would remove their niqabs as they came into the suite, and were clever and funny and loved clothes. There was one I liked in particular. She was slightly mentally handicapped, but had nevertheless got married, but was now divorced and living alone in London.
And there was little glamour in this rarefied world. At Christmas, I was stuck in the bathroom, with about 30 boxes all around me, wrapping up the presents for the friends and family of the proprietor.
I was asked to do it full-time. I was paid £2,000 pounds a month. But I was working late shifts three times a week, from 2pm till 11pm, and I was tired from pacing around the shop all day. I didn’t see my future in retail.
Eventually, providence came when I broke my leg on a date in a Hackney pub. I rang up The Store to tell them that the doctors reckoned I wouldn't be able to walk for the next six months. They accepted my resignation and sent a courier round to pick up my work phone.
Two years later, I haven’t stayed in touch with my colleagues, or even my clients, except one: the lonely al-Thani princess sent me a lovely bunch of flowers and a card when she heard I broke my leg.
An American Senator in SW13
Last week, in collaboration with the Guardian, we published our investigation into Josh Hawley’s tenure at St Paul’s School in Barnes. Read here on how the controversial politician charmed the pupils but alienated his colleagues at the elite all-boys school (and also how he made popcorn to watch the US invasion of Iraq).
Eye Opener
Last time out we saluted Private Eye for its forbearance in what has been a challenging time for print journalism, and its continuing influence on other publications. While these laurels still stand, we were justly reminded of some of the Eye’s less laudable efforts in a pair of excellent pieces from Huw Lemmey this week.
In Poove Power Part 1, Huw offers a compelling dive through the Eye’s record of gay coverage, from the 1960s to the present day, ranging from public schoolboy innuendo to out-and-out bigoted bile. It’s a searing piece that still manages to be measured in its delivery; contextualising the Eye’s output with the outrageous homophobia of the time, without ever letting them off the hook as it does.
(The Eye just this week published the following letter, titled ‘Fair Cop.’)
Fair Cop
Sir,
You are absolutely right to point out homophobia by the Sun’s editor and journalists in the 1980s (Streets of Shame, Eye 1540). It continues into the next decades with such headlines as ‘Pulpit Poofs can stay’ about gay priests, who were also referred to as ‘Holy Homos’. However, in all fairness to the Eye, in the 1970s / 1980s had a campaign to ‘out’ gay priests (not all of whom were gay), had a strip cartoon called ‘The Gays’ and frequently referred to gay people mockingly as ‘Sads’ which was hardly respectful.
Tim Wright
Homosexuality in 20th century Britain, the functions of the press, and the intersections of class and power are explored within both essays. The first part is free to read at the above link, while Poove Power Part 2 is for subscribers only.
We’re delighted to include an exclusive extract of the latter piece – but first, a few words with Huw himself.
TF: You say you first started reading the Eye in your late teens – how much of their ‘take’ on gay issues were you aware of then?
I think in my teens, the early noughties, the media landscape was so different on this issue. There were gay people breaking through onto mainstream TV without being jokes – people like Graham Norton, or shows like Queer as Folk - but in general explicit homophobia was still the norm. Richard Ingrams was no longer editor at the Eye but could still write articles about how there was no such thing as the gay community for liberal papers like the Independent and Guardian. So I can't say I really noticed the stance of the Eye at that age, although I was aware that the people who made it were clearly not like me.
You're quite measured in your critique of the Eye. That being said, do you think they have a responsibility to make amends for this coverage?
As far as I know, they've never apologised as such. Perhaps it would be a slippery road for a satirical newspaper to have to admit it was wrong, or, more likely, I wouldn't wonder if the attitude persists there. Not of a sort of aggressive homophobia, but of the sort of attitude towards queerness that people like Hitchens had, a worldly awareness that posit themselves as queer adjacent, but never so gauche as to make it a political or social identity.
My personal feeling about such things is that apologising misses the point. I'm interested in what they said at the time, what we can learn from the fact that it was in their interests to be homophobic in the way they were, and what it says about how we read it today, particularly in the light of their transphobic stuff today. The damage is done, it doesn't condemn them totally, but nor are they simply a product of the attitudes of their time. They helped create those social attitudes. My feelings on ‘apologies’ for historical bigotry like homophobia is that it's better to let the record stand. They made the decision to publish, and that should stand on the record of what editors thought acceptable. Private Eye thought queer people dying of AIDS was a good source of humour, and so, in my mind, let that stand as a sign of what society and Private Eye was like at that time.
Maybe [acknowledgments such as the Fair Cop letter published above] are the response. What purpose would an apology serve, once the damage has been done? Maybe some older queer people would like it, but personally, it's not for me.
You reference the current vogue for trans scaremongering among the UK commentariat, which follows many of the same patterns as the homophobia you examine in Poove Power. Why do you think this is so prevalent?
I think it's a whole spectrum of issues. Firstly, I think it's a combination of the extremely limited pool from which the media, especially the liberal media, draw their talent. There's a very narrow selection of people and a large amount of them tend to socialise together. I think it's almost impossible to understand why the Guardian and New Statesman are in the crisis they are in regarding transphobia without understanding the social relationships behind the scenes.
Secondly, I think the ossification of the liberal media is a factor in their transformation. There seem to be a lot of people holding onto columns when their writing is long past their best, and not alternative, possibly younger voices coming behind them. I think there's a generation who got their platforms long before social media and are really inured to criticism. In fact, they regard all criticism as trolling – while there are a cohort of younger writers who are far more self-critical and also far more anxious and upset by the degree of hostility they'd face.
Thirdly, and mainly, I think it's a material thing: in whose interests is it to maintain conservative and reactionary gender politics? And why do so many people who regard themselves as socialist feminists find the Spectator and the Telegraph so receptive to their anti-trans content?
Poove Power Part 2, Exclusive Extract
Although coverage of gays under Ingram’s editorship had always been pretty unpleasant, there is a definite sense that while he started off as a more liberal if mocking voice, this had changed. By the 1980s, with the GLC and increasing calls for gay rights and representation becoming an irritant for him, his tone had become more aggressively homophobic, something noted even at the time as having parallels with the Eye’s history of antisemitism.
Writing in 1982, Julian Barnes remarked, I think accurately, that ‘To the charge of anti-Semitism, Ingrams replies that the Eye is anti every other minority too, and that Jews have “become much too sensitive; they should be more tolerant of criticism, as they used to be.”... like homosexuals, they have got a bit uppity, and need to be reminded of this very English truth: that by toleration we do not mean equality.’
Image above is the Private Eye cover, May 1984, after one of Defence Minister Michael Heseltine’s aide Keith Hampson MP came on to a man in a Soho gay club who, it turned out, was an undercover police officer. Although the charge was dropped, Hampson was forced to resign. Aide/AIDS is the joke you’re looking for here.
Haldane for Private Eye, August 1985
Homosexuals, having grown too big for their boots, were by the mid ‘80s a stock target for Private Eye, a magazine that is forced to recycle much of its material, and to establish tropes, due to its regular fortnightly publication schedule. It feels like, when the AIDS crisis began to emerge in the UK, the Eye responded with the sort of casual cruelty it had become used to, unable to see the enormous human tragedy unfolding in the country. Much of its coverage of the AIDS crisis, from the first acknowledged death in the UK in late 1981 right up until the nineties, was marked by an almost gleeful cruelty that, in all honesty, would not have been out of place in a National Front newspaper.
In 1983 Auberon Waugh wrote in his diary piece ‘Would the Gay Community take it very badly if I suggested that American homosexuals visiting Britain should be required to spend six months in kennels before being allowed out to take their pleasure with the natives [?]’ As ‘UKJarry’ writes on StreetLaughter, Waugh’s piece was ‘intended here in a sententiously high-toned and blithely semi-nonsensical opinion-proffering manner’, but the irony must surely have struggled to fight through a general culture of fear and hatred around people living with HIV and AIDS at the time, not least when accompanied with the following cartoon.
(Read the rest here).
Hacks Aren’t Gentlemen
Among book reviewers, there’s a widely acknowledged rule that you don’t fillet a first-time author. Well no one seems to have told Max Hastings, who unleashed both barrels on Simon Akam’s book on the post 9/11 history of the British Army. In a crowded field, Hastings’ piece is possibly the most embarrassing piece of prose we’ve read this year. Claiming, without proof, that half of Akam’s allegations are false, Sir Max then blusters on with various confidences and snippets from the top brass. (Though you’ll probably be more interested to read the squaddies’ perspective.)
While he has never been a soldier, Hastings has, for some decades, been a prolific military historian. But his real passion in life is countryside pursuits. Yet his book on that subject – Outside Days: Some Adventures with Rod and Gun – was not warmly received on publication in 1989. So, in the interests of fairness, allow us to reproduce an excerpt from one particular review.
‘The shooting argot, which Hastings employs so gracefully, is the argot of the public-school prankster. Hastings writes of duffers and flukes and going the whole hog. A sweet photograph on the back of the book’s jacket shows the author standing in waders, a large salmon in each hand, a bashful, lopsided smile playing over his boyishly spectacled face. This is a man on holiday from adulthood in a country full of Crunchie bars and japes and fellows who say ‘Let’s go and have a bang at quackers’ when they want to kill a duck; a country where women act as school matrons to their charges; a country full of the laundered kiddie-speak of prep-school comics.’ Bang, bang, bang, bang’ is one of the sentences in Outside Days, and so is ‘Grrr’.’But, heavens it was fun!’ is another. A comparable tone of voice can be found in the Duchess of York’s new children’s book about Budgie the Helicopter.
‘The regressive instinct squares ill with the writing instinct, and throughout this book Hastings retreats from the possibility of a writer’s perception into the blather of upper-class rah-rah. But occasionally a glimpse of the real oddity and complexity of field sports emerges from behind the blanket of clubbability. At one point, Hastings is in the midst of an exciting, Buchanesque description of stalking a stag. He shoots the stag and kills it. ‘He walked two steps,’ writes Hastings, ‘lurched and keeled over to bounce in the heather. He looked at me once, from where he lay, as I came up to him, then that was that.’ One half expects Alan Bennett to be chipping in with ‘I got a glimpse of his face, and you know he smiled’, but in fact something far odder happens. Hastings sips coffee from a Thermos, and meanwhile, ‘I talked to the beast as the sun started to appear over the hill, because I felt an intimacy with him at the moment that no grouse or trout could match.’ From the world of Budgie the Helicopter, we are plunged into the strange, twilight world of Dennis Nilson, chatting away to those whom he thinks he has done something like justice.’
Shots fired on Sir Max! Next fortnight, we’re interviewing Simon Akam about his book, the British Army and the state of investigative journalism in this country.
In Case You Missed It
For Vulture Abraham Riesman excerpts TRUE BELIEVER: ‘a long excerpt about the scintillating, fraud-filled saga of Stan Lee Media, one of the most spectacular failures of the Dot-Com Bubble.’
Virgie Hoban of UC Berkeley announces the acquisition of FBI records documenting the surveillance of black leaders throughout the 20th century. It offers a deep, and deeply troubling survey of the materials involved in the agency’s attempts to – in their own words – ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize those at the forefront of African-American politics.
On the first anniversary of the death of seminal DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall, Cian Ó Cíobháin – presenter of Irish alternative radio mainstay An Taobh Tuathail – makes an extraordinary find; the identity and whereabouts of the young Cork fisherman whose words inspired the DJ and dozens of his fans to tattoo the words FAIL WE MAY, SAIL WE MUST on himself.
At the Atlantic, Sabrina Imbler writes on the precarious life cycle of an adolescent trematode worm, in a piece enviably titled Life Is Tough For A Teenage Parasite.
The Guardian’s Experience section strikes gold again with I Was In A Scientologist Jazz Band, the jaw-dropping mini-music-memoir you didn’t know you needed.
I Would Rather Die in London Than Live in Norfolk
Rob Palk, avuncular novelist and TF contributor, has written a cute little article about how he hasn’t been able to hug his girlfriend for a year. Yesterday evening, Rob was invited onto the Spectator podcast to discuss lockdown rules and more with Emily Hill, who is a columnist for Spiked and self-professed fan-girl for Peter Hitchens. The resulting ten minutes of madness is one of the funniest things we’ve heard all year (and begins at 31.30). Keen to make light of his public trauma, we reached out to Rob about his moment of celebrity. His reply came immediately:
‘If I ever need to remind myself that I'm not a polemical or disputational writer and to never take part in events where debate is asked of me, I shall simply play myself the audio of this podcast, silently goggling as I am challenged for not illegally porking my partner enough during lockdown then instructed to read the little-known novel 1984 by obscure scribe George Orwell. I spent the whole interview wondering what hell I'd stepped in to be making small talk with a Spiked lunatic. The cash fee I got for doing so was promptly spent on drinking away my shellshock.’
*
That’s the lot for this week. If you’ve enjoyed this iteration of the newsletter, then please do subscribe to the print magazine. There’s a link just below here.
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All the best,
TF
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