Dear Readers,
We have a new issue on its way from the printers. If you haven’t yet subscribed, then you can do so here, and enjoy the thrill of receiving two pieces of post in a week from a quarterly magazine.
This time out, we take a look at unfunny online atheists, Sir Len Blavatnik and propose a new political direction for a mayoral hopeful. But first, a little dive into the food delivery app that can’t stay out of the news.
Inside the Pouch
In the last five years, the distinctive teal jackets worn by Deliveroo riders have gone from being a local streetwear must-have to a symbol for workers’ rights in the global gig economy. Founded in the UK by an American investment banker, Will Shu, the company has just executed what one pundit has called the ‘most embarrassing flop in City history’, with a flailing float on the London Stock Exchange. The Fence spoke to Paolo*, a former director at Deliveroo, to find out why the company tanked.
In 2015, Paolo was responsible for persuading restaurant chains to start working with Deliveroo. Even in the early days, with just a handful of colleagues, Will Shu kept himself away from clients: ‘he’s not really a people person.’ And what was the view on workers right at that stage? ‘The internal view was that because a driver was working 20 hours a week on average, that we couldn’t offer them full employment. That it could develop into a problem was a known risk.’
Working at Deliveroo in the start-up days was similar to many other tech firms: talented young graduates working in an informal setting at a dizzying pace. In Paolo’s telling it was a fun and optimistic place to work until pressure from investors began to change the working environment. ‘The profile of my colleagues changed – there were suddenly lots of accountants. And there was turnover in key roles, a lot of nervous churn.’ Paolo himself left in 2017, and has since seen a diaspora of talent as his former colleagues have been snapped up by other tech firms in London.
Deliveroo transformed from plucky underdog to corporate behemoth by expanding into a host of different countries. They also began to allow fast food brands, like Nandos and KFC, to compete with the fancier offerings on their app, like Five Guys or Wagamama – both of whom Paolo said he charmed onto the company’s roster in 2015. Operating at both the high-value and low-value end of the market and constantly running a loss, Paolo thinks the business model is the real reason that investors are staying clear. In 2019, Deliveroo lost £320 million and very nearly went bust. During the pandemic, with perfect market conditions for a food delivery app, they still lost £220 million. ‘If they can’t make money during coronavirus? That’s a bleak outlook,’ says Paolo – with something of a cheery tone.
Elsewhere, The Fence hears that problems with workplace culture blighted Deliveroo, with two separate senior executives departing under a cloud after office relationships went awry.
Deliveroo has received extraordinary public support from the government, with Rishi Sunak hailing it ‘a true British tech success story.’ Yet in 2019, the company was saved from an investment of some £440 million for a 16 per cent stake from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. For whatever reason, a planned in-depth investigation from the Competition and Markets Authority failed to materialise. With the Supreme Court compelling Uber to grant its drivers worker status, and with potential investors calling the company ‘a ticking timebomb’, the kangaroo-turned-unicorn is going to stay at the centre of the national conversation.
*Names have been changed
Careering Online
‘The dominant literary style in America is careerism’, wrote the critic Christian Lorentzen in a widely shared piece on Blake Bailey’s even more widely discussed biography of Philip Roth. ‘For decades it has simply been the case that novelists, story writers, even poets have had to devote themselves to managing their careers as much as to writing their books.’
Earlier this week, Lorentzen appeared with critics Merve Emre, Jane Hu, Bookforum editor Michael Miller and novelist Karan Mahajan at a zoom event to discuss professional survival in the world of American letters. Naturally, The Fence – always keen to ensure that low standards of professionalism are upheld in literary life – watched to see how the attendees minded their p’s and q’s.
Most of the speakers were on scandalously good behaviour, but top marks to Lorentzen for lighting a cigarette as soon as he concluded his introductory remarks, smoking five more in the next ninety minutes and drinking some sort of pre-mixed cocktail – our guess is a Moscow Mule – from a mason jar throughout. The spirit of criticism lives on!
Bent Coppers
While Substack takes a hard rap for enriching blue-tick hacks as they whip their hobby horses to a poorly edited death, it does also provide a platform for other writers to offer work that, despite not being published by major newspapers, could not be more in the public interest. The UK’s leading investigative journalist, Michael Gillard, has just published his first outing, profiling Scotland Yard’s anti-corruption squad. Needless to say, Jed Mercurio owes him a drink or two, and if you like hard, unvarnished news, then you should sign up on the dotted line.
Don’t Call Him an Oligarch
In Issue 6, we profiled Sir Len Blavatnik, who as of this week is the richest man in the UK (according to the good people at Forbes). For those unfamiliar with his work, the Odessa-born 63-year-old owns Warner Music Group, the freehold to the Haymarket Theatre, and was one of the first backers of the global smash-hit musical Hamilton. As a philanthropist, he established a School of Government at Oxford University through a £75 million endowment.
A munificent media mogul with a passion with high-quality arts? Well, it’s not quite as simple as that. As they say in Russia, ‘never ask about the first million’. This 2014 investigation by Connie Bruck sedulously tracks Blavatnik’s rise through the ‘aluminium wars’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his continued partnership with Viktor Vekselberg, who currently has $1.5 billion in assets frozen through directives from the US Treasury.
Blavatnik hired ‘diplomat’ Sir Michael Pakenham to advise him ‘on English manners, morals, life and business.’ In short, to embed him in the top ranks of British society (and you can see the fruits of those labours here). What is noteworthy is that Pakenham’s employment was first reported by an American publication; so the New York Times was the first major newspaper to explore the controversial relationship between Oleg Deripaska and Lord Barker of Battle, who has now left taken leave from the upper house to work full-time as executive chairman of EN+, an energy and metals company that has been the target of US sanctions.
While these Russian titans can be litigious when it comes to allegations of links to the Russian President, the influence of these men is clear, and clearly troubling. Fortunes of questionable origin within the British body politic are not a new development, but there is a dark irony that the UK shuts its borders to the poor and dispossessed while laying out the red carpet for men like Blavatnik, whose bloody trail from the stomach of Russia has led them to the heart of the British establishment.
A Camberwell Beauty
Alas, Laurence Fox’s bid to be Mayor of London has run into teething issues. In October, the actor-turned-activist called three people ‘paedophiles’. Last week, Simon Blake, Crystal and Nicola Thorp began legal proceedings to sue him for libel. Over at the bookies, punters have laid down more money on Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn and Piers Corbyn to win the election (none of whom are running).
Now, in the interests of irony, we would like Laurence Fox’s political career to continue. So far the campaign has focused on general issues (COVID passports, free speech, demanding a Union flag outside of every school). Given that this isn’t translating into votes, might we suggest a more localised tack?
As we detailed in Off the Fence #6, it was the good fortune of a TF staffer to find themselves neighbours with none other than Laurence Fox himself, who like our current Prime Minister, made for an unlikely resident of the cultural melting-pot-slash-public transport black hole that is the south London district of Camberwell.
While he has now moved elsewhere, Fox lived for some months slap bang right next to Denmark Hill station, the non-beating heart of the neighbourhood. The transit hub for King’s College – one of the largest hospitals in Europe – currently operates a paltry three trains an hour to Victoria. Even more irritatingly, the Grade II-listed ticket office has been turned into a drab pub, and the entrance hall has been snazzed up into an overpriced café. So there is only one way in and out of the station, which means that during rush hour the station is transformed into a MC Escher hellscape of frustrated commuters sighing into their £3.70 cappuccinos. Meanwhile, plans for Camberwell to be placed on the Bakerloo Line have been shelved again.
So, what exactly are we advocating? It’s quite simple. Laurence Fox needs to transform his ticket into a single-issue vote that makes it easier for one of the people writing this newsletter to use their local train service. Were he to strain every sinew to bring efficient and frequent trains to the respectable citizens/ loyal subjects of his erstwhile neighbourhood, he would have the capital’s leading newsletter on side, and we’d happily stuff your inbox with fulsome praise for his activism and acting (although probably not his music because who has the time?) in between all your favourite literary, political and Old Irish Man Making A Sandwich content. Despite a preponderance of publicity for his platform, early polls placed him at 1%. Projecting 2016 turnout on to that would give us 25,000 votes. Adding Camberwell’s 22,000 would almost double that number, so what does he have to lose? Your move, Laurence.
In Case You Missed It
Issue 7 of The Fence comes with a blistering inside take from London’s theatreland, and the calamity it inhabits a year into its closure. In the New York Times, Esmé Weijun Wang offers a different view on how the pandemic’s streamed performance model has made theatre accessible to millions of disabled people for the first time.
We thought this piece by Kate Clark one of the finest pieces we’ve ever read on, well, Afghan hounds.
A wry tale in the Irish Times, of a homesick kid who took self-posting to its logical extreme by mailing himself from Australia to Wales.
Sam Fishell offers a truly stunning thread on the life and career of baseball titan, Rube Waddell.
Daisy Alioto provides this story for Dirt of involuntarily al fresco artists, punk rock troubadours and the evaporating alt-spaces of New York City, all told through Google Street View.
For the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv delivers a day-ender of a profile of Elizabeth Loftus: on psychology, mothers and the meaning of memory.
And Finally
Here at The Fence, we long for the good old days of atheist shit-posting – the simple joy of Richard Dawkins, the emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, observing canine 69s, or claiming Bin Laden had won after he had some honey confiscated in an airport. These were signs of his incipient madness; but at least they were funny.
In 2021, atheism has an image problem. It is now, as a movement, irredeemably associated with cringe.
The essence of it is this: many of those involved in propagating godlessness online still think they’re the cool teenagers in the corner, socking it to the man, when in fact they’re now the greying and braying dads (and mums) embarrassing their kids after one glass of Rioja too many.
This shift in dynamic was demonstrated on Good Friday by one Professor Alice Roberts. She posted – on the day when many of the world’s two and a half billion or so Christians were marking the death of Jesus Christ – the grammatically creative statement ‘Just a little reminder today. Dead people – don’t come back to life.’
Had Roberts posted this 20 or so years ago, many would have seen it as a vital part of her job, in the struggle for scientific truth against obscurantism. However, as the tweet got some attention, an interesting thing happened. She was upbraided by atheists for continuing that credal system’s descent into attention seeking, while also being roundly rinsed by Christians and other believers – who proved to have a better sense of humour than she bargained for.
Hot on Robert’s heels came a man called Mitch Benn, a full-time comedian and part-time model for the Burton summer 2008 catalogue. Trapped in some sort of time warp, Benn clearly imagined that his Easter song ‘Zombie Jesus Chocolate Day’ would be a sure-fire bet for virality. Instead the replies to his tweet became a cavalcade of mockery – with zoomer and millennial users uniting to either throw ironic paraphrases of decades-old in-jokes (‘methinks you have won the internet for today!!’) or to pan it in less subtle terms: one user described it as ‘ear syphilis’.
Both Benn and Roberts exhibit the problem for middle-aged, middle-class, white British atheists. They think they’re punching against some cabal of port-addled bishops garbed in lawn sleeves, all the while failing to realise that they themselves are the ‘Establishment.’
The average atheist is a wealthy 50-year-old living the suburban dream somewhere in the stable West. The average Roman Catholic is a teenager in Latin America. The average Muslim is a child somewhere in the Middle East. Even the average Anglican is a woman in her twenties in sub-Saharan Africa. As tempting as it is to cling onto disproved truths rooted in an imagined past – things ain’t what they used to be.
The rise of political awareness around identity has made lazy mockery of beliefs less acceptable. And after a pandemic where churches, mosques and synagogues stepped in to comfort the sick, bury the dead and feed the hungry, many people are less willing to buy into a schtick that relies on a stereotype of people of faith as malevolent weirdos.
While the results of the UK census are yet to be released, consistent polling shows younger people are wary of any religious labelling – which includes admitting that they are atheists. Given the public faces of that creed spend their time exhibiting a superiority complex in their own beliefs, a refusal to educate themselves about the beliefs of others, and that which is fatal in contemporary discourse – a terminal unfunniness – this comes as no surprise.
*
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TF
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