Dear Readers,
Recently, lots of you have told us how much you enjoy this newsletter. After some discussion, we have decided to make it weekly, as we enjoy writing it too. We’ll be bringing our blend of investigations, featurettes, gossip and tips to your inbox every Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. At the same time, our reach will also continue to expand: you can look forward to dispatches from across Britain and letters from abroad in future iterations. Which is all very exciting stuff, but not quite as exciting as Issue 8 of our print magazine, of which only seven copies remain available for retail sale. Next time we join you; it will be sold out.
It’s pretty hard not to write about the Tories and their gleeful corruption at this moment in time (and we will write about it much more, in a fortnight, when our lawyer is back from holiday). This morning, OpenDemocracy published an investigation into a Tory donor, Sam Singh, which is pretty barnstorming stuff. The current glug of news was occasioned by the FT’s investigation into the Conservative Party co-chairman, who is the subject of our first story below.
CoupCoup De La Falaise
Who exactly is Ben Elliot? You can read this profile here for greater depth, but in short, he is the childhood best friend of Zac Goldsmith, and has made lots of links with the international super-rich, and is now using them to raise funds for the Tory party in a manner that can be deemed questionable at best. Speaking to some of the journalists who have been investigating Elliot’s practices, we are told that he uses the members club Five Hertford Street as an unofficial office from which to press the flesh with gawky billionaires keen for a bauble or two.
It’s not the first time that the Mayfair establishment has found itself...er… at the centre of the Establishment. In this feature, Edwin Smith suggests that it was the site of Michael Gove and David Cameron’s post-Referendum rapprochement. Delving into Joy Lo Dico’s profile of the club here, which suggests that the Brexit Party was formed there, too, you start to wonder: can members of right-wing political parties convene anywhere else apart from 5 Hertford Street? You also wonder why there hasn’t been an investigation into how this one club – where a gin and tonic is rumoured to cost £21 – can play such an outsized role in the country’s democracy. Maybe some enterprising hack should try sneaking through the door and see what they can find?
Join the Club
Over the last 18 months, our little project has grown from a silly, provocative quarterly print magazine into something slightly more serious. It’s also a project that currently provides five people with some monthly income, but more importantly, spreads crumbs of joy to thousands of readers. If you would like to be part of Britain’s most exciting new publication, and to be paid for doing so, then do read this little brief here if you would like to send in an application. The position is flexible, which means we can’t give an exact figure on salary, but we do pay generously.
Why Are You Asking Me This?
Over the spring, we asked a lot of famous people – including Michael Palin, Jackie Weaver, Mr Motivator and Melvyn Bragg – a series of trivial questions, and then collated them all into a list which has proved very popular online. We are indebted to a nameless contributor who stepped in at the eleventh hour with some top-notch celeb wrangling. At that moment in time, the list of people who didn’t respond to our survey far exceeded those who did furnish us with a reply, and the TF staff were growing mutinous at having to not only locate Piers Morgan’s private email address, but then also to send him a bright, succinct email, asking him if he could tell our readers how many belts he owned.
Along the Border
As Séamas O’Reilly’s first book Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? remains at the top of the Irish book charts for a second week running, we would like your help in ensuring our features editor enjoys the level of chart domination that, say, Bryan Adams or Wet Wet Wet savoured back in the early nineties.
Drink in these unilaterally positive reviews from the great book-buying public, and then, perhaps, purchase your copy from the good folks over at Waterstones. Next week, we’ll have a long and previously unpublished extract from the first memoir to make child bereavement a rollicking good laugh.
Paid Tha Cost to Be da Bo$$
In the High Court, Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich is suing journalist Catherine Belton for libel pertaining to allegations over his links to Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Representing the investor is Hugh Tomlinson QC, who is a translator of Giles Deleuze and the chairman of Hugh Grant-adjacent pressure group Hacked Off. In the latest replay of a recent grudge, Belton’s publisher, Harper Collins, is ultimately owned by one Rupert Murdoch.
In this oligarchal set-to, it might be hard for the disinterested reader to stake an interest, but it’s worth remembering that this is not the first rodeo for Mr Tomlinson, who represented London’s ‘untouchable’ crime boss, David Hunt, in libel actions against investigative journalist Michael Gillard and the Sunday Times back in 2013. If you’re interested in the freedom of press, either in absolute terms or the abstract, it’s worth reading this forceful summation by Dominic Ponsford, and worth pondering how Britain’s judicial system allows scrutiny to be ground into the dust.
Keep on Keeping Going!
If you subscribed this time last year, then you will have received various plaintive emails asking you to update your subscription at the full-cost price. It’s a fairly painless process, whereby you purchase a new one through this link here, and then we will cancel your old one. It also allows us to keep this newsletter free to read, and for you to keep receiving Britain’s freshest new publication every quarter. So everyone’s a winner.
Stephen Fry is a Hell of a Guy
A little known scribe has written something about the Honresfield Library, an antiquarian book collection that has been breathlessly described as the ‘Tutankhamun’s tomb of literature’, with original manuscripts from Walter Scott and letters from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra and other such jewels. How the collection was obsessively hidden from public view (and prying academics) for more than 80 years is a curious and fascinating tale, which is tackled at some length in this drily amusing essay by an amateur Burns scholar. In order to save the collection from the Sotheby’s chopping block, £15 million is required. We have every confidence that the British public will rise, as they always do, to the occasion.
Revolution 909
In very sad news, Chicago icon Paul Johnson succumbed to COVID this week, documenting his last days in a series of heartbreaking Instagram posts, which we link only to show how gruesomely real the pandemic remains even as the vaccines promise to end it.
In a grim twist of irony for a dance floor legend, Johnson spent the entirety of his music career paralysed from the waist down after being shot by a stray bullet in 1987, before having one leg amputated in 2003 after a car crash, then losing his last leg seven years later owing to further medical issues. All the while, he suffered from noise-triggered PTSD as he travelled the world, recording and playing his music.
His most famous track, the piano-stabbed tune Get Get Down hit the UK charts just prior to the millennium. But his most significant offering to the popular music canon comes with the disco-filtered Feel The Music, the track that literally inspired Daft Punk to start making house music. In Johnson’s telling, Thomas Bangalter played Feel The Music on a grand piano to show how much the duo revered their American guest. It’s a surreal, wonderful image: a braggadocious black American in a wheelchair being serenaded by two nerdy French guys in a Parisian living room. Though with Johnson dead, and the infamously reclusive Daft Punk disbanded, we might never know more about that star-crossed night.
In Case You Missed It
Jess McCabe pens a loving tribute to departed friend and colleague Dawn Foster.
In case you were feeling worried about your own overspending, Barcelona president Joan Laporte reveals the eye-watering debt projections which led to Leo Messi ‘parting’ with the club.
David Sedaris confronts the disquiet and delight of post-Trump America through the lens of his newly sanguine father.
Marc Hogan charts the wearying decline of vinyl’s popularity with indie and small labels, due in part to the recent boom in demand, COVID-related supply disruption and a bottoming out of production capacity worldwide.
Rachel Handler pulls off the interview coup of the week by quizzing her uncle, a one-time skipper at Disney World’s Jungle Cruise attraction, about his thoughts on Disney’s new movie adaptation of the ride.
Vic Berger creates one of his finest video compilations to date.
And Finally
With the news that the Tories might be really serious about it and tax the bankers and their bonuses at 90 percent, there’s no better thing to finish on then what is perhaps the greatest comic sketch of the last ten years. Why do young people find it so funny? Even though it’s written by a pair of past-it boomers? How is that impersonation of Jimmy Carr so apt? And when will the government just admit they got it wrong? Answers on a postcard, please.
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We look forward to joining you next Friday with an excerpt from Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, which we genuinely can’t wait to share with you all. It’s really very good.
If you’d like to get in touch with one of our editorial team, you can do so by replying to this email. Quite a few readers have been sending us messages, and it’s been a pleasure to pass on praise to contributors and issue the odd stern correction. On that last note, if you have some tips or information that you think should be featured in a future newsletter, then please do ‘reach out’ like a member of the Four Tops. We’ll be there.
All the best,
TF
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