Dear Readers,
Good morning, and it’s a pleasure to join you once again on a Sunday. It’s been a very busy week, with all hands to the wheel as we finish the Christmas issue before it’s sent to design. We’re now going to spend some much-needed time plotting up four bonza issues for 2022, where we hope to expand each print magazine by about 12 pages while keeping the cover price exactly the same at £6 only.
Today, we have a one-off deal, where new subscribers will receive a free digital pdf of Issue 8, which sold out in about a fortnight. Hit up this link here to avail yourself of this offer, which will expire at midnight.
Today, we’ve got a featurette on Britain’s most exasperating luvvie, some bits on donkeys and Andy Warhol, but first a dry little survey of how the country is run today.
All Above Board
Ben Goldsmith is the son of the late financier, Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, and the younger brother of Zac Goldsmith, the erstwhile MP for Richmond who was elevated to the House of Lords in December 2019, having lost his parliamentary seat in the General Election.
Seven months later, in the Dissolution Honours List, a number of major Tory party figures were rewarded with peerages: Philip Hammond, Ruth Davidson and the Prime Minister’s own younger brother, Jo Johnson. Alongside them was a figure who was little known even in the SW1 bubble: the British-Pakistani businessman, Aamer Sarfraz, who was ennobled for his role as a party treasurer, and who has donated £122,500 to the Conservative Party since 2018.
Operating between London and Islamabad, Sarfraz has a number of declared interests, the most recent being Mineable Limited, a company that was incorporated in July this year. There are two other co-directors: one of whom is Ben Goldsmith.
The Fence asked Lord Sarfraz for further details about the company, but he did not reply to requests for comment. There is no suggestion of any malpractice or wrongdoing.
In the Pandora Papers leak, it was revealed that Ben Goldsmith jointly owns a British Virgin Island-based film financing company with Conservative Party Chairman, Ben Elliot, whose courting of wealthy donors has triggered investigations from the Times and Financial Times.
Ben Goldsmith, who is a passionate advocate for rewilding, works as a non-executive director at the Department for Rural Affairs and the Environment, where he assesses the work of his older sibling, who is the Minister for the Pacific and the Environment, though he is not paid for his work there, despite the allegations made by Angela Rayner.
Lord Goldsmith and his younger brother’s older sister, Jemima, was once married to the Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, with whom she had two children. Here’s the cricketer-turned-politico meeting Lord Safraz last year: they do seem to be following social distancing regulations very stringently in the video.
Get Him to the Greek
On Tuesday, we published the opening article from Issue 9 online, in which Henry Jeffreys recounts his days working as Russell Brand’s publicist as the poodle-haired comedian was rising to his late-noughties pomp. It’s a bracing portrait of the long Britpop era, and provides some fascinating insight into the curious machinations of the publishing industry. Henry, who very kindly gave The Fence’s office a bottle of gin the other day, will be writing another wine column for this newsletter before Christmas, and in the meantime you can follow him on Twitter here. He’s a real mensch.
NW3 Ragnarok: Avengers Assemble
The idea of the ‘Hampstead intellectual’ still has weighty currency within the right-wing press, yet in reality, London’s most idiosyncratic village now has a decidedly international flavour: it’s the home of Italian private equity barons, former Premier League footballers and clipped troupes of American families, who’ve all priced out the architects, psychiatrists and assorted literary types who used to claim the hilltop eyrie as their own.
Now that it’s become Bel-Air-on-Thames, why is Hampstead still a byword for a crusty, antique genre of bien-pensant thinking? There’s one resident who’s largely to blame: Sir David Hare, that well-known scourge of the establishment.
The 74-year-old playwright was up to his usual tricks this week, fuming at length in the Guardian about how the BBC had failed to commission his latest slice of agitprop for the screen (though adding that he was ‘absolutely thrilled’ that Sky Arts had picked it up).
Earlier this year, he invoked Shelley when he released a ‘satirical’ poem in which he compared the Prime Minister to ‘dogmeat wrapped in the union flag.’ And as the owner of two separate properties in NW3, he spends a lot of time crafting missives to council planning committees, which puts the reader in the awkward position of feeling a twinge of sympathy for the zillionaire property developers who are subjected to them. Most strangely of all, Hare said in May that ‘it’s very hard to think of any playwright under 50 who can fill theatres.’ Tempting as it is to write a sassy clapback of all the hot young names on the scene, it’s more fitting to finish with a quote from an early Hare-hunter, the artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, with the following excerpt coming from his survey The Full Room: An A to Z of Contemporary Playwriting:
‘The most intriguing question about David Hare is how such a flat writer has come to be afforded such a mountainous reputation. It still baffles me… I presume the answer can only be a matter of desperate ambition, he simply wanted it badly… Perhaps the early enemy proved too seductive, and what began as a target became a lifestyle, or maybe the real enemy all along was vanity and that eventually couldn’t be defeated.’
Full Clip
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The Joseph Duveen Posse
MSCHF, the headline-chasing Brooklyn art collective behind the whole Lil Nas X Satan Shoes furore of March 2021 have returned with something we have to admit is quite ingenious. For an outlay of $20,000, the collective purchased an original Warhol sketch, Fairies (1954), and then reproduced it 999 times, before releasing the entire collection to the public – original included – at a cost of $250 a sketch. That modest outlay could leave you with an genuine Warhol at a black market price, or the kind of tat you’d buy in the Tate gift shop, but whichever one you ended up with, you will have ended up participating in MSCHF’s exhibit, summatively titled ‘Possibly Real Copy of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol’ (2021). Once we’d settled down from our jealousy at their ability to earn a quarter of a million in an afternoon’s work, we had to applaud these art pranksters for staying true to Andy’s vision: this was mass-production of art, alright. But when we want to do it with £20 notes, it’s ‘counterfeit fraud’, apparently.
A Token of Your Appreciation
Last week, some venerable heads decided to cash in their chips and sell their print covers as NFTs, with the Speccie offering their infamous Brexit butterfly cover, while the magazine-that-calls-itself-a-paper raised $422,000 by auctioning their Alice in digital Wonderland-themed number.
Both of these centuries-old publications followed hot on the heels of TF: we were the first British publication to sell NFTs, and you can still purchase one at this link right here, if that’s the sort of thing that strikes your fancy.
Donkey Sanctuary
Progress! Finally. After countless years of social unrest, economic decline, environmental calamity,and political disintegration, there is something good to share for once. The lawmakers on Capitol Hill, with the blessings of President Biden himself, have confronted the ungovernable tech giants on one of the great pressing issues of the modern age: the lack of a donkey emoji to counterbalance the elephant emoji co-opted by online Republicans. Reema Dodin and Charlie Anderson, dubbed as ‘Biden’s Emoji Czars’, have been fighting this good fight for over two years now, with the assistance of a self-described ‘emoji activist’, the American journalist, Jennifer 8. Lee. Together, they authored a proposal to the Unicode Commission – a sort of Académie Française of digital phallic substitutions – emphasising the urgent need for the humble donkey to be represented in the internet’s predominant visual language. After rejections, reappraisals, and a whole load of hobnobbing at the Sundance Film Festival for some reason, the group’s proposals were accepted this week, and Democrats will soon have an emoji of their own to play around with.
Answers on a Postcard
Back to Brand: not so long ago, Russell was married to a popstar, spearheading Judd Apatow productions and living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Now he’s making anti-vax YouTube content from a cottage in the Home Counties. Does anyone know why his film career has stalled? Reply to this email and let us know.
In Case You Missed It
Ben Jenkins asks the big question: would the queen, or a variety of elder people currently on Earth, recognise Mario from a photo?
Matthew Gault goes deep on the theory that sadboy golden child Timothée Chalamet was once a moderately successful modder of Xbox 360 controllers. Timothée confirms..
In a probing, and content-warning-necessitating piece, Molly Fisk explores family, trauma and what happened when her uncle John Updike wrote about her father.
Seeking only chaos, the spooky and irascible inhabitants of New Zealand seem hell-bent on giving the title of Bird Of The Year 2021 to a bat.
Derek Scally accompanies Colm Toibin on a book tour in Germany, as he attempts to sell Mann back to the menschen.
And Finally
It is All Hallows Eve, so why not reacquaint ourselves with the horror of childhood via Vic Berger's spine-warping survey of the most disturbing children's TV moments of all time.
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Last week, someone complained that this newsletter was becoming ‘too nice’, so we hope you have enjoyed this rather curt, bitchy outing. We’ll be back in a week’s time, but do remember that we have our special offer ending at midnight, where new subscribers get a free digital copy of Issue 8. If you’d like to chat to a member of the editorial team, then please do respond to this email. Enjoy your Sunday.
All the best,
TF
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