Dear Readers,
It’s that time again. Good evening and welcome to Off The Fence, the Mailchimp-backed paramilitary wing of our quarterly magazine. This week, we’re abandoning the stance that gives our newsletter its name and unloading on a handful of excruciating dorks. What can we say, we woke up this morning and chose violence.
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Trident & Faildent
As we enter the last days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the broad swathe of the political and media establishment who cheered him into Downing Street have come up with a variety of excuses to distance themselves from proceedings (and, you might imagine, a sense of shame and accountability). One of the more interesting accounts comes from Tory MP, Andrew ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell, who last week said that ‘many of us thought he would govern in the way he did when he was Mayor of London, through being chairman of the board, running a very good team.’
While it’s certainly true that Johnson’s mayoral operations were not as chaotically ramshackle as his current tenure as First Lord of the Treasury, his time at City Hall was loaded with controversy and ineptitude that still haunts the capital today. Allow us to shine a light on one example.
Operation Trident was set up in 1998 to rebuild trust between the black community in London and the Metropolitan Police. Working in conjunction with respected figures like Lee Jasper and Stafford Scott, over 200 staff investigated gun murders that were disproportionality affecting the black community. You can watch this documentary about the murder of Marcus Cox to see the unique way in this partnership functioned, and the results that it delivered.
In 2012, Boris Johnson, assigned the murder unit to another crime command, which was intrepreted as a ‘political hijacking’, as many of the members of the Trident advisory group were associated with the Labour Party. To one onlooker, Trident had now been ‘castrated’, as it had lost its most powerful function. Members of the advisory group resigned in protest. Operation Trident was finished.
Ten years later, and the results of Johnson’s action are clear. Across the UK for the year ending March 2020, there were 105 black homicide victims, the highest number since 2002 – the year Trident was at its height. According to the figures, a British black man is five times likelier to be murdered than a British white man.
As the new press secretary at Number Ten says, Boris Johnson is ‘not a complete clown’. Yes, he’s a dangerous one.
To the Mana Born
Writing for the Manchester Mill, which is itself one of the most exciting new media projects to emerge in Britain in the last decade – Jack Dulhanty pulled out the very best reportage of the week: an investigation into the surreal, febrile kitchen culture of Mana, Manchester’s only Michelin starred restaurant. After noting the boos that Mana’s head chef, Simon Martin, received at a regional awards show, Dulhanty sourced a host of scarcely believable stories from former staff, detailing the falsehoods and abuses behind a restaurant that claimed to reject the cruelties of traditional restaurant life. Mana is not the first Noma-inflected eatery to be marred by accusations of workplace abuse; Julia Moskin’s dissection of The Willows Inn and its head chef Blaine Wetzel rocked the fine dining world when it was released in April of last year, and Dulhanty’s story is of equivalent heft and skill. If New Nordic saw its rise in the noughties, and post-Nordic emerged in the tens, you would like to hope that faux-Nordic does not come to define the twenties.
Pie & Mighty
Jonathan Pie – yes, Jonathan Pie – is working with the New York Times – yes, the venerable Grey Lady herself. Your dad’s favourite shout artist has just scooped your dream by-line, making the commute to work every morning just that little bit more agonising. What was the piece? Well, it’s titled ‘Boris Johnson is a Liar’ and that’s all we can tell you, because it’s a video which we will not watch, and it’s copy that we will not read. We’re not linking out, either. Google at your own discretion. Performative cynicism limps on in 2022.
Alien v. Supervisor
Now that the long march to Issue 11 is well & truly underway, we thought to dispense a couple of choice morsels from the past couple of editions to keep you lot salivating for what we have in store this year. This week, we have Thomas Gorton’s hilarious recollections from his time as a professional Xenomorph, working at the dilapidated, ill-fated sci-fi emporium that was Spaceport in Seacombe, on the stranger side of the Mersey. Come for the crying children, stay for the stoned soldiers.
A Hard Day Down The Content Pit
Our small editorial team unites once or twice a week to bring you this newsletter – and also the quarterly print magazine. But we are also available for collaborations with other publications, and also for commercial work too. So if you’d like The Fence to write for you, send an email to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll take it from there.
Lads! Lads? Lads.
Some rotters from the ruggers, if you’ll allow: James Haskell is a former rugby player who has now branched into electronic music and ‘comedy’. In partnership with a brewery company, he’s produced a video in which he tries – and fails – to channel the energy of Ricky Gervais. See if you can watch it all the way to end without wincing. It’s all part of a pattern of behaviour for the musclebound Haskell, a Flashman-type figure in his younger years who has now tried to reinvent himself as ‘DJ Bantos’. For when it comes to elite performances of cringe, there’s no one who does it quite like the English rugby team of recent vintage.
There is no one who is prouder of attending Durham University than Will Greenwood, so much so that he drunkenly gatecrashed the 2011 BUCS final and gave a rambling, incoherent speech which has to be seen to be believed.
Lawrence Dallaglio, the former captain, boasted to an undercover reporter that he used to hustle ounces of cocaine across south-west London, but then denied it, saying that he was trying ‘to impress the journalist’... which is a pretty humiliating position for anyone to be in, let alone the captain of a national sports team. Needless to say, the head honchos of the Rugby Football Union at Twickenham HQ let him off and reinstated him as captain.
Of course, we’re talking about the same RFU that embedded the insignia of the Victoria Cross into the England kit in 2014, before having to scrap the designs after unilateral condemnation for using Britain’s highest military award to market £90 shirts. Honest banter!
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
It’s likely that you know Pamela Anderson principally as that nice lady who brings coffees and cakes to Julian Assange, but this was not always the case. This year, her 1990s heyday has been given the 2020s treatment: an eight-hour streamable miniseries of dubious quality. In this lively piece, Philippa Snow questions the merit of having Lily James, swanlike English beauty, play the role of Pamela Anderson. But please allow us to praise – and critique – Hollywood hair and make-up in a future iteration of the newsletter.
Reading around the subject, we became particularly intrigued by Tommy Lee. Who is he? Who are Mötley Crüe? Yes, we’ve read that they’ve sold millions of records. One of the biggest bands of the 80s. Lots of drugs. But in all seriousness: can you name a single song of theirs? Conducting some research over the weekend, we came across this little number, which is perhaps the most try-hard thing we’ve ever seen. And we’ve watched a lot of things.
In Case You Missed It
Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay chart the bewildering changes in American politics since 2016, and the new kingmakers that go into Making A Modern Republican.
The Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, our editor-at-large, wrote a beautiful column in last week’s Church Times, reflecting on his role in the memorial service for the surgeon who once saved his life.
Simon Parkin shines a light on the trauma and betrayal of Britain’s policy of imprisoning WW2 refugees.
Christine Grimaldi pens an evocative and heartbreaking account of forced labour and religious exploitation, in My Grandmother’s Secret.
Max Read charts the dizzying pyramid that is The Celebrity NFT Complex.
In a short thread, Dan Pearce documents the opening boss battle of Asura’s Wrath which might be the single greatest action sequence we have ever seen.
And Finally
Pardon us for editorialising, but yesterday’s African Cup of Nations final proved two things incontrovertibly: firstly, Liverpool are the most important team in world football, and secondly, even a dismal 0-0 draw is not a barrier to moments of beauty and spectacle, if followed by a tense, dramatic shootout. On the evening, it was Sadio Mané’s penalty (his second of the game; he missed the first) that clinched it for Senegal, but the boy from Bambali was not the most emotional man on the pitch at the final whistle: that honour goes to his manager, Aliou Cissé, who collapsed in a heap upon his star player’s decisive strike. Cissé, who himself missed a penalty in Senegal’s shootout with Cameroon in 2002, addressed his nation’s victory with eloquence: ‘I dedicate this victory to the Senegalese people', he told the post-match presser. ‘For years, we have been chasing this cup. Today we will be able to put a star on our jersey.’ Mané addressed it a bit more directly by taking the trophy to bed with him.
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That’ll do it this week, but if you have any questions, thoughts, queries, theories, asinine observations, wry asides, or personal threats, please feel free to reply to this email – everything goes to our editorial team, and responding to emails makes us feel productive.
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Catch you next Monday: same time (late afternoon/early evening), same place (your inbox).
All the best,
TF
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