Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence, the weekly propaganda arm to our quarterly print operation. Over the weekend, we’ve been finessing Issue 11, and it’s now on its way to the gentle palms of the art director, Mathias Clottu. Clocking in at 64 pages, it’s carrying pieces by a handful of bold-face names and a couple of first-time writers, too. There are some outstanding features and deep dives within, but many of you will be pleased to hear that we’ve doubled down on the jokes: this issue has a packed-out ‘etc’ section with some particularly stupid articles that we can’t wait to share with you. If you would like to be a part of Britain’s most exciting newish magazine, then do subscribe for the year at the price of £25 only.
The Horizon scandal at the Post Office resulted in the prosecution of 736 postmasters. Lately, 555 of these convictions have been deemed ‘unsafe’, and 72 of them have been overturned. It’s the largest miscarriage of justice in British history – and you can read Marina Hyde’s forceful piece on this rank controversy here, or dig into Richard Brooks’ and Nick Wallis’ original investigation at this link. But today, our editor-at-large, the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, shines a light on Paula Vennells, the woman at the centre of the cover-up, and her connections to the Church of England.
Please, Mr Postman
The Cheshire village of Backford has a pretty church, built of the region’s distinct red sandstone, dedicated to St Oswald. Its most remarkable piece of decoration is a chained King James Bible, dating from 1617, a mere six years after the translation appeared. When I visit churches and encounter such books, I make sure to turn to a page containing a piece of weighty Old Testament prophecy. It suits them, I think. This passage from the Book of Amos is a favourite:
‘Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail… The Lord hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works’ Amos 8:4,7.
In September 2013, Martin Griffiths, a former postmaster, walked in front of a bus on the A41 at Backford. At home, his family found a note linking it to the accusation of fraud that had been flagged by the Post Office’s new Horizon computer system. Martin had been accused of a massive defrauding of the Post Office on account of this error. Subsequently his widow was forced to sign a gagging clause.
From the late 2000s onwards, deaths linked to the Post Office occurred across the country. Former postmaster Peter Huxham, who had been jailed for fraud, was found dead in his home in Dawlish. Sub-postmaster Fiona McGowan died of an overdose in Edinburgh after being accused of false accounting. Louise Mann, wife of the postmaster of Morehampstead in Devon, took her own life after a similar accusation.
The former CEO of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, oversaw a ruthless prosecution campaign of those postmasters accused of fraud. Accused, it turns out, wrongly, due to catastrophic errors in the Horizon computer system. Vennells was no ordinary CEO, but also an Anglican priest, tipped for leadership from the start, and regularly rubbing shoulders with bishops and senior managers of church institutions. Vennells was informed of the possibility of errors but doubled down, denied its faults, continued prosecutions and aggressively resisted attempts to challenge this mistreatment.
The Post Office and the Church of England are institutions which find themselves in the no-man’s land between the public and the private sectors, and there are observable tropes in the manner in which they conduct themselves, principally in the way they mix an external benevolence with a ruthless internal culture. As one cleric recently put it to me: if the Church of England discovered that another company or institution was treating in the way in which the Church of England treats its own clergy, they’d chain themselves to the appropriate HQ. (While it does lead to the amusing image of bishops valiantly handcuffing themselves to their own cathedrals.)
In the Church of England, an accusation of bullying against a cleric is still much more likely to result in life being made more difficult for the victim than the perpetrator. Whistleblowers are considered to be troublemakers rather than prophets. It isn't so much that Vennells learned this leadership style in one institution – and then imposed it on the other – rather she is a perfect embodiment of the symbiotic relationships that exist between managerial castes across both institutions.
The very worst thing of all is that these effects rarely proceed from actual malice, but rather a blind devotion to hierarchical managerialism. Recently, the bishops even suggested that administrative reform was what ‘God was calling the Church to’. It’s a particularly bizarre form of spiritual gaslighting – the sort that might emerge if Pastor Fred Phelps was branch manager of a Rymans. Nobody has yet set the dull cultic chant of ‘one of us, one of us’ to plainsong or Taizé but it can only be a matter of time.
Vennells has ‘voluntarily’ withdrawn from her role as an assistant priest in Bedfordshire, the Bishop of St Albans, in whose diocese she lives, has not taken steps to discipline her via a Clergy Discipline Measure or move to have her defrocked. Ironically, had one of those wrongly prosecuted sub-postmasters been ordained, this would have happened automatically. Bishops will happily wheedle on about justice, but when it comes to seeing it through on their own turf, especially when it comes to admitting they got something wrong in the past, they suddenly clam up.
As part of her long march towards repentance – currently progressing at a pace which makes the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness look like a trip on a Japanese bolt train – Vennells agreed to ‘stand back’ from the Church of England’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group in late 2020. The group states in its most recent annual review that it considers all human beings to be made in the image of God. The group has made no statement on Vennells’s past membership.
While she has successfully slinked away from much of public life, Paula Vennells’s Twitter account is still, at the time of writing, very much active. There is much retweeting of Post Office ad campaigns and of the senior bishops. Occasionally there is a personal foray, replies to accounts or just random @s out of the blue, but always couched in a sort of weird, dehumanised management speak. In Vennells’s words, Justin Welby gives a ‘strong and sensible statement’, Lambeth Palace conducts ‘good business with the spirit of generosity’, the Post Office ‘creates social capital’, The Church of England has ‘great confidence and clarity’.
Despite the almost absurdist humour of the jargon, many of these tweets were posted while she oversaw the merciless prosecution of innocent people – a very Anglican Torquemada in a pantsuit. What is most terrifying is that to her there clearly was no disconnect.
A look through her statements as the Horizon scandal unfolded is eerily familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the managementese spoken in the Church of England. Vennells claimed she wanted to be ‘open and transparent’, which can be read as an immediate red flag. She professed to wanting to get to the bottom of the affair, while throwing every procedural hurdle in the way of due process. A similar culture is endemic in the Church of England, from hastily shut down debates in synod, to individual cases where clerics are left in professional and personal limbo for years. Technicalities, ‘facilitated conversations’ (another device beloved by Vennells) and procedural hearings replace actual justice until everyone is too fed up – or too dead – to see things through.
There is another worrying echo in the Post Office scandal – the absolute denial of there being a party line. Vennells initiated a cross-institutional denial of any problems to the system, to the extent that the same spelling error was replicated across multiple statements to investigators.
The story isn’t about Vennells though; she is symptom rather than cause. She might hope that the press or the Church of England will forget about her works after a polite and appropriate period of time has passed. If she thinks so, it can only be hoped she picks up the book of Amos sometime soon. Perhaps she might go to St Oswald’s in Backford and leaf through the chained bible there. It can only be hoped that she comes to some form of repentance, that she reconciles herself to some form of justice being done.
You can follow Fergus – who usually strikes a cheerier note – on Twitter here.
Dangerous Intentions
Tom Newton Dunn signed off his final Evening Standard column on a particularly intriguing note. He suggests that Cressida Dick, the recently ousted commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, was ousted by Sadiq Khan, after the Mayor was briefed on the findings of a review into anti-corruption procedures by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, which allegedly contains enough scandal to fill ‘a dozen Daily Mail front page stories’. According to the source, over 50 police officers with criminal convictions have been allowed to join the force over the last few years.
Apparently, this review will be published next month, but there has been little coverage of this story elsewhere. It’s noteworthy that previous investigations into police corruption and malpractice have yet to be fully released to the public. Operation Countryman – which was conducted between 1978 to 1982 – is still buried in the archives in the cause of ‘public interest immunity’. We can only wonder whether the latest review from HMIC will suffer the same fate.
Pins and Needles
In what will be news to a great many of you, London Fashion Week is in full swing, as the centrepiece of the country’s largest creative industry returns to its pre-pandemic pomp. While the star-laden shows fill the headlines, in the background there are thousands of harried young workers celebrating months of hard, hard labour. And yes, lots of very funny stories of celebrity misdemeanour. Jade Angeles Fitton wrote a drily funny dispatch of her years working at LFW for Issue 8 last summer, in a piece that really captures the quiddity of an industry on which everyone has an opinion. Do give it a read.
Partye Zhovotnaya
With characteristic tardiness, the Home Office has closed the tier one investor visa for wealthy internationals. Over the last two decades, Russian oligarchs of shady background have scored these visas with remarkable ease, but with war in Ukraine likely to begin at any moment, the government has finally bowed to pressure. As Oliver Bullough notes in this interview, it’s an act of political tokenism that will have minimal effect on Putin and his allies.
For the London-based service industries that attend to the whims of the Russian elite – the solicitors, estate agents and tax accountants – it will still be business as usual. Whether the next generation of minigarchs stay in the country remains to be seen, though. At the top end, the private tutoring industry is a particularly grim racket – and we will have more to say on this subject in the near future. For the time being, here’s a classic from Issue 5: an anonymous account of what it’s like to work as a governess in Moscow, and how to navigate sharing a sauna with your boss as he watches pole-dancing on a floor-to-ceiling television.
The Long and Winding Road
Last Thursday, the ABC circulation figures for UK-based magazines were released. The dominant trend continues: figures for lifestyle publications continue to freefall, but leading current affairs titles maintain their growth, with the London Review of Books and Private Eye among the big winners. In short, people will pay for quality journalism (and they will also pay – in their hundreds of thousands – for Caravan and Motorhome Club Magazine).
If you look over the spreadsheets, you might notice that there aren’t many new publications among the 250 titles listed – and by ‘new’ we mean ‘established in the last fifty years’. The barriers to creating and sustaining an original new magazine are hefty, and they’ve become more overwhelming lately, with the price of paper increasing, the cost-of-living crisis and Brexit-related custom charges.
For a newish publication like us, advertising revenue remains a pipe dream. That’s why subscriptions to the print magazine remain our chief source of income, and the money we generate from it allows us to keep the website – and this newsletter – free to air. We’re committed to keeping our cost prices at an agreeably low sum: £25 for four print magazines and 50 newsletters for the year provides, we believe, real and significant value. So, if you haven’t yet signed up, please do support us by subscribing today.
Lord of the Dance
Why are the Boomer generation so adept at Instagram? While Millennials and Gen Z-ers have learned to curate their lives with parsimonious self-interest, the children of the fifties and the sixties are reinventing themselves online: witness TV motormouth Jeremy Clarkson’s sunrise floral compositions, observe Busta Rhymes’ Valentine Day’s tribute to his daughter, do enjoy Irvine Welsh – perhaps the only novelist who knows how to use social media – record his nights out at with his old Leith posse.
But none of these senescent social media fiends can hold a candle to Michael Flatley, the prince of the Riverdance, who operates one of the greatest accounts going. Here he is palming a first edition of Ulysses, here he stands in the middle of the River Blackwater flauting with abandon, only then do we find him paying tribute to the late Stephen Hawking. Truly, it’s posting content as God intended.
In Case You Missed It
Ivo Dawnay honours the memory of P. J. O’Rourke.
You can’t turn a hobby into a job! Laura Bachmann looks at why you shouldn’t care if your parents disapprove of your creative career.
The dirt pile without a shred of dignity: the New York magazine profile of Julia Fox is embarrassing for everyone concerned.
Did you know that the Punjabis of west London love BMWs? Ciaran Thrapar takes you inside this unexpected car collecting community.
Despite global condemnation, Vladimir Putin triumphed in Syria in 2014. But what happens if he wins in Ukraine, too?
Iconically iconic; David Trotter examines the myth of the late, great Greta Garbo.
And Finally
Even though it's almost 15 years after his death, Luciano Pavarotti still remains embedded within the global consciousness, which is no mean feat for an opera singer whose career coincided with the rise of what people of a certain generation still refer to as ‘popular music’. Pavarotti was a brilliant artist – that much we all know – but he was also something of a marketing seer. After he achieved worldwide fame in the wake of Italia ‘90, he held a series of concerts in his hometown of Modena, where he hosted chart-topping superstars like Elton John, James Brown and George Michael. But perhaps the most surprising collaboration came when he joined the Spice Girls on stage for a unique rendition of Viva Forever: a sparkling little clip that is guaranteed to brighten your Monday morning.
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And here the newsletter endeth, at least for this week. We look forward to joining you seven days from now. If you’d like to pick up something from our archives, then there’s a link just below to help you along the way. We’re opening up for pitches tomorrow afternoon, and do get in touch with any queries, complaints or pointers that you might have by replying to this email – it’s always a pleasure to chat to our readers. Until the next time!
All the best,
TF
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