Dear Readers,
With featurettes, interviews, investigations and links to articles that you might like to read, welcome to Off The Fence: Britain’s only newsletter. This operates as the propaganda arm of the print magazine, which is available to buy here.
This week, we have pieces on Syrian ambient music, an interview with a youngish writer called Simon Akam and an outstanding bit of gossip-sleuthing. But first – and we’ve always wanted to say this – a story about fences.
Malice at the Palace
Meghan and Harry brought up the issue of security during their interview with Oprah Winfrey. According to our source – who worked as a member of the royal household – this particular issue was the site of particular conflict during their 12-month stay in Windsor.
Prior to its recent renovation, Frogmore Cottage had a rickety wooden fence built around the garden, with a metal railing number on the outer perimeter for security. A third fence was then added for reasons of privacy. This fence, we are told, was not just a physical barrier but also something of a metaphorical rapprochement: Harry and Meghan had requested an extensively manned security system of the type commonly found enclosing American embassies. Given that Frogmore Cottage is located within royal property, and given the likely expense, the Queen had refused for the taxpayer to shoulder the burden. So a ‘hand-woven hazel fence’ was provided as a boutique way of satisfying the newest member of the royal family.
An approved expense was the construction of a luxury kitchen. Our source relays that Meghan kept asking the head chef at Windsor Castle to prepare meals to be kept in the fridge, which led the Queen to comment on whether her granddaughter-in-law knew how to cook.
This was not the only flashpoint during Harry and Meghan’s 18-month tenure as members of ‘the firm’.
As has been reported, she upset the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, with her requests in the lead-up to her wedding. Kelly, the daughter of a Liverpool docker, is not exactly one of the paradigmatic ‘grey men in suits’. Samanatha Cohen, a fearsomely capable Aussie, was drafted in to help the couple navigate the endless press attention. Her departure, our source relays, had much to do with her working relationship with the Sussexes.
The Windsor court is a strange, complex institution, which our insider freely admits: ‘the royal family don’t talk to each other, like a normal family.’ Holding events and launching campaigns are usually discussed between the representatives of the different households. Meghan, we are told, would do things without ‘asking for help’, which grated with a hierarchical body that is used to things operating in a certain way.
In her tenth decade, the Queen continues to oversee the operations of hundreds of employees. When Meghan gave birth to her son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, the Daily Mail reported that she had rejected the services of the family’s gynaecologists – Alan Farthing and Guy Thorpe-Beeston. To the average member of the public, a woman taking ownership of the most intimate moment of her life seems eminently sensible. Yet, according to our source, this action confused the Queen and perturbed other members of the royal household, who felt that what was ‘good enough for them’ should be good enough for Meghan, too.
But what of these bullying allegations? Did Meghan really treat people with contempt? Our courtier says that she had a ‘reputation of being incredibly difficult to work with’, and that the reason they are only emerging now is that Buckingham Palace was ‘semi-protecting her’. Now, it seems, the gloves are off.
Our source thinks it was a grave error on the part of Buckingham Palace to launch this investigation. Meghan was, our source insists, ‘a lot more robust’ than she needed to be with those working with her, but while these allegations will likely be found credible by many witnesses, they tarnish the reputation of the royals, who have done so much to keep their machinations hidden from public view. In any case, the timing and nature of the inquiry’s announcement might raise eyebrows.
Buckingham Palace’s 92-word statement on their investigation was forthright and declarative, taking time to specify that their ‘HR team will look into the circumstances outlined in the article. Members of staff involved at the time, including those who have left the Household, will be invited to participate to see if lessons can be learned’.
Their only post-interview statement, regarding Meghan’s own claims of racism, press smears and emotional abuse, ran to just 61 words, and gave little information regarding forthcoming processes other than to say that matters ‘will be addressed privately’.
A reminder, then, of those fences the Palace will and won’t erect around itself.
It’s the Thought that Counts
Last week, the Times splashed with the news that Meghan Markle had worn earrings given to her by Mohamed Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince. While we can’t comment on the story, we’ve long been intrigued by the elaborate gift-giving of MBS and co., who once gifted rapper Lil Wayne a Lamborghini Urus.
MBS and his entourage gave Jeremy Hunt a metal sculpture of a hawk on a plinth (understated) and Boris Johnson a Mouawad Bookend plated with gold and rare metal (tasteful).
On a state visit to the US, he gave Donald Trump and the first family a $6,400 ruby and emerald pendant necklace, as well as garments worth $700 to Ivanka. Who would have thought that the leader of the world’s most gender-segregated nation would have such a way with ladies’ fashions?
Our favourite MBS-associated gift though, is the one he received from Vladimir Putin, who gave MBS a rare Kamchatkan Gryfalcon. In fairness, Vlad owed MBS a thank you: the obliging chap had agreed to a $3bn arms deal just eighteen months earlier.
Unfortunately, at the ceremony Putin’s prize bird shat on the floor in full sight of the world’s cameras.
Soft Music For Hard Times
In 2014, Syrian dissident Obay Alsharani escaped Assad’s regime, moving to family in Saudi Arabia before finding himself in a refugee centre in Sweden.
‘I studied with my cousin,’ Alsharani told Joe Muggs in the Guardian this week. ‘We did civil engineering at Damascus university together. But there was a university council that monitored everybody, they knew my cousin was political, they knew I went on a lot of demonstrations too. I fled Syria in 2014 because I knew my name would come up; very shortly after I left my cousin was arrested, and he died under torture.’
While many deeply moving stories of this nature have been told during the past decade, few have found their way to the Guardian’s music pages. The difference is Muggs was talking to him about his current life, making stirringly sparse and contemplative ambient music.
His newly released album Sandbox is shot through with the deep melancholy and gauzy wistfulness of Boards of Canada or Brian Eno at their most powerfully bare, informed directly by the trauma of his experiences.
‘I didn’t understand that music before,’ he told Muggs, ‘here’s so little there.. [b]ut then I realised it gives you space to put yourself into. And I was constantly thinking, “What am I doing here? Everything is different here, this feeling of alienation, even trees look different.” I wanted to express that feeling.’
The entire article is worth reading, not least since Muggs is one of the most persuasive voices currently articulating how music that doesn’t even always sound like music can achieve the effect Alsharani describes. We sat Joe down in his most comfortable egg-shaped chair and asked him why ambient music is experiencing such a surge, and how it can act as a radical, even healing, force.
TF: When you spoke to him, Alsharani mentioned he used the supposed emptiness of this music as a way of expressing his alienation and trauma. This doesn’t appear to be unique in the genre, are there other examples you’d cite?
An obvious recent one was the first Kevin Richard Martin album. It's a little darker in tone but it is oddly relaxing - it's written as catharsis of the memories of his son being born premature and sick and the times in hospital when it was touch and go.
Richard Norris's Music for Healing was created expressly as an escape from chaos and anxiety, while Jas Shaw’s new stuff – he's putting out a series of three ambient mini-albums – is written as an escape from confinement. He's had chronic health issues that meant he had to isolate from the beginning of COVID.
There's a couple of recent ambient records by trans/intersex artists who've talked about using the music as a way of helping process their transition, like Ana Roxane, whose music is ‘inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty’. Or Iceboy Violet, who takes the most macho of drill / trap songs, and extracts just the beauty from them... a metaphor for finding the calm centre in the most threatening situation.
Some people listen to ambient music and hear nothing but noise, or nothing but its absence, so why do you find this music powerful?
There's a couple of things. Firstly, it transforms your environment. It's like lighting or scent, as much as it is like music that you put on to ‘listen to’. It's literally comforting. The proverbial analogue bubblebath. And in this period of extreme stress, not only is it soothing in its own right, but it reminds people that they can change their surroundings for the better in small ways, make themselves feel safe and comfortable in the domestic space, which has otherwise begun to feel like a cage.
The other, and this is a bit of a half-baked theory on my part, is that cutting loose from set tempos sets people's thoughts free to roam a bit. There are plenty of studies that show that your brainwaves lock into the tempo of music. That is obviously mood affecting, depending on how much higher or lower it is than basic human markers like heartrate, walking pace etc. But when you have music with NO tempo, your brain is free to set its own pace.
I think when, now more than ever, we are locked into routines, that's a blessed relief.
If any of that sounds like a balm to you, Joe Muggs does an excellent weekly ambient show on WorldwideFM. You can find Obay lsharani’s Sandbox on Spotify here, and album opener Cocoon here.
Sneaking into the Gardens
The film Notting Hill follows William Thacker (Hugh Grant), who runs a travel bookshop off the Portobello Road. A chance encounter with Hollywood star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) leads to an unlikely romance as hapless Thacker comes to court a globally famous actress.
Why are we recounting the plot? Well, we think we’ve uncovered the real-life William Thacker and Anna Scott.
In this video interview with GQ, Hugh Grant explains who Richard Curtis based the film on: ‘a friend of his, a very unfamous bloke living in Notting Hill who happened to fall in love with an extremely, extremely famous person I’m not allowed to mention’.
Well, we reckon that ‘William Thacker’ is book publisher William Sieghart, and that ‘Anna Scott’ is Uma Thurman. According to this 1997 profile of Sieghart, ‘the former girlfriend that everyone talks of is actress Uma Thurman.’
A charming bookworld posho called Will who has a house in Notting Hill? Who dated a globally famous star? Who reads Seamus Heaney’s poems with Richard Curtis? And who seems to be long-standing pals with the director? We’re pretty sure we’ve got our man.
By all accounts, Sieghart is a good guy, and he’s long been married to Molly Dineen, a documentary film-maker of extraordinary sensibility and range.
None of which excuses having inspired Notting Hill.
A Year in Somerset
James Bloodworth wrote a beautiful piece for us about shielding his 91-year-old grandmother in the countryside. It was syndicated by the Times, who also sent a photographer to take some wonderful pictures of James and his gran together.
We’ve published five pieces this year on our website. Three of them have been syndicated by national newspapers… so subscribe to the print magazine so we can keep paying for talented writers to collaborate with us.
An Honourable Tradition
Simon Akam’s The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 has caused the broadsheet commentariat to splutter into their kippers. The product of three years of meticulous reportage, it explores the U.K’s strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the culture of outmoded masculinity that encouraged, perhaps, those ill-advised ventures to lapse into catastrophe.
The subject of an extraordinary legal row two years back, Akam’s book offers a narrative outside the strictures of the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) bizarre ‘Green Book’ diktat to journalists. It explores how men tell stories about themselves and each other, how institutions sedulously cover their tracks and how one of the most vital parts of the British state is – in some respects – hidebound by an outmoded class system (plus, it comes with a jaw-dropping anecdote about the last days of Lucian Freud).
As you will have gathered, we really can’t recommend the book enough, and you can buy a copy here. We spoke to Simon by telephone last week in a wide-ranging conversation that we’ve edited for clarity.
TF: With the Brereton Report, the Australians have conducted a comprehensive audit of the war crimes committed by their special forces. Do you think that something similar is possible in the UK?
That report was largely powered by whistle-blowers, so I think it would require an internal impetus. There’s this British thing whereby we don’t air our dirty linen in public, so I think that the short answer is no, we won’t. There might be some MoD inquiry down the line, but as we’ve seen with both the banking and media industries, self-regulation doesn’t really work.
Your book was the subject of two very strident reviews in the Telegraph and the Times, which led one wag on the infamous army website ARRSE to comment: ‘The fact that the MoD routinely responds to criticism of this sort by briefing wretches like Con Coughlin and Max Hastings, rather than engaging in debate, illustrates just how awful we are at the whole communications piece.’ What do you make of their critiques?
I thought the Hastings review was more substantial, and engaged with the book more than the Coughlin one... but there’s this idea in Britain that criticism of the military is treasonous, which is an issue I address within the book. One one hand, I tried to show the human experience of being on the receiving end of a multi-year probe into allegations of war crimes. I write in detail about Johnny Mercer, who fought in Afghanistan, dismantled the Iraq Historic Allegations team and is now pushing forward the Overseas Operations Bill – in essence an attempt to wholly ban supposedly ‘vexatious claims’ into allegations of historic war crimes. The point I wanted to make though is that the situation is rather more complex than that. Some of these claims certainly were vexatious. But not all of them were...
Can you tell us more about the birthing of The Changing of the Guard? It has been through more than one publisher…
The book was firstly bought off proposal by William Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House (PRH) in 2015. While writing it, I had a visiting fellowship at Oxford University at the Changing Character of War Centre. After it became clear the book contained criticism of the army – and it is undoubtedly true that my reporting was stirring alarm within the military – my supervisor there, who had close relations with the military, broke off contact with me. Shortly before the book was published, he then wrote to PRH and told them they should expect to be sued on publication. PRH in response demanded both that I give the manuscript to the MoD, and the imposition of 'copy approval,' with everyone named in the book signing off that they were happy with what was written about them. Obviously, that lies well outside accepted journalistic practice. They then cancelled my contract, asked me to pay back my advance and to pay a portion of their lawyers’ fees. I then organised a coalition of press freedom organisations to write to the publisher.
That did not move PRH's position, so I gave the material to the Guardian, who wrote about it in the summer of 2019. I then got in touch with Scribe, who had previous experience of this kind of situation with the book Billion Dollar Whale, which they published after another major British publisher would not. Scribe wanted to do my book, but PRH refused to release the copyright unless I signed an NDA, which I was unwilling to do. All the money Scribe put up therefore went to PRH to buy out the copyright and in theory they are demanding I pay them another sum of roughly £10,000 by September.
Basically, I expected Penguin to act like a news organisation, and be robust in the face of external pressure. They were not.
Astonishing. With all these issues of censorship, are you still keen to work this journalistic beat?
I don’t want to be a professional military historian, though I am working on a profile of the French Foreign Legion at the moment and continuing with my other usual magazine work – my day job as it were. I'm also developing an idea for a completely different non-fiction book, not about the military. Without sounding hoary, this was very difficult to do.
Do you think there’s a tendency in the UK to shy away from ‘difficult’ journalism? You do a lot of work for American publications, how do the two countries compare on that front?
Well, I think it’s in many ways a question of news organisation resources, which are much higher in the States, as you know. But as Dominic West said when asked why there wasn’t a British version of The Wire – perhaps it's also true that ‘journalists in this country lack ambition.’ There’s too much of a slant towards opinion, which I try and stay clear of. American organisations can be a little bizarre sometimes, you know you have a fact-checker calling you up to say ‘how do you know the sky was blue on that day?’ but at its best American journalistic rigour is just magnificent.
A sentiment we echo! Thank you very much, Simon.
How to Coin it in 2021, pt. 1
Earlier this week, we read of how a man called Robin Cannon is offloading his seven vintage Bentleys, having sold a £5 million pound Jacobean mansion – and all to fund his divorce. Now, who is this West Country mogul? Some heady heir to William Beckford? Not quite. Mr Cannon owns three care homes in rural Dorset.
How you make monopoly money in that part of the country? After doing some digging, we discovered that Cannon Care Homes are rolling over in sterling. For the year ending on the 31 March 2019, the company cleared an after-tax profit of just over a million pounds.
Each of the three care homes has only around 60 residents. So how do they make so much money? A weekly charge of £1,571 per resident will do the trick.
There’s no suggestion of malpractice or incompetence on the part of Cannon Care Homes. But such brazen profiteering off the infirm and elderly boggles the mind.
How to Coin it in 2021, pt. 2
Celebrity shout-out app Cameo allows you – for a fee – to get a birthday message from Nigel Farage, some words of encouragement from Caitlyn Jenner and to be insulted by James Buckley, who played Jay in The Inbetweeners.
Archie Bland has provided a cacklingly funny profile of the industrious actor, who has made £300,000 in the last year from Cameo.( If you’re feeling extra daring, you can look up Buckley’s videos, but they are very much NSFW.)
In the spirit of fair-minded journalism, we reached out to a friend of TF who is currently on the app to ask: ‘do you look forward to doing the requests?’
They replied: ‘I mean, I look forward to the money? Which – I have to admit – feels like free money. But there we are.’
In Case You Missed It
Why not drift above this earthly plane, with this toothsomely mounted compendium of 36 space probes?
Bookforum mounts a light savaging of George Saunders’ Russian literature and ends up making it sound really good, actually. ‘So, Kukin has died, there in Moscow. As a new friend of Olenka’s, I am sorry for her, the darling. But as a reader, I am sort of glad. Goodbye, Kukin, you gave your life for rising action.’
Scared of the dark also scared of sharks? We come bearing mixed news. MongaBay announce the discovery of three glow-in-the-dark shark species.
Software developer Matt Korostoff presents one of the most staggering visualisations you’ll see this week; a wearying graphical treatment of the current carceral situation in the United States, which needs to be scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled to be believed.
Happy four-year anniversary to the best interview of all time.
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All the best,
TF
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