Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that we spend the weekend writing to complement the quarterly print magazine that we spend months making. At times, starting and sustaining a new publication can feel like a solitary endeavour – but it doesn’t have to be. New media is exceptionally vibrant right now, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.
Today, we are delighted to announce that we have partnered with one of the most exciting platforms to emerge in the 2020s – Vittles, the wildly successful food newsletter edited by our friend and contributor, Jonathan Nunn. In a short space of time, Vittles has upended British food media, incorporating a chorus of new voices into what was previously a staid and narrow field. Not only have they brought these voices to prominence, they have uncovered stories and perspectives that would have otherwise been ignored by commissioning editors, and developed an audience that is proud to read, share and learn from what they publish. They have also set standards of fair and transparent pay, funded through their subscription model, in a manner scarcely seen at any other British media outlet. It is a pleasure to join up with them.
Beginning with Issue 11, which is due out in April, The Fence and Vittles will be sharing stories from both of our platforms, in print and online, under a joint banner. In banding together, we hope that our combined efforts will allow us to grow further as we carve out our corner and serve our readers better. We’re excited, they’re excited, and we hope you’re excited, too.
If you want to have a gander at the sort of thing Vittles publish, then why not start with their exhaustive compendium of the worst value restaurants in London? And then pair it with this collaborative effort on the hyper-regional chippy traditions of Britain and Ireland. At £4 per month, it’s excellent value for a twice-weekly mail-out of the best food writing in the country. And don’t take our word for it, Nigella Lawson gifted Jeannette Winterson a subscription for Christmas. You should sign up today.
Last week, we promised you a feature on butlering Britain. That will come soon, but today we chatted to a government insider about why Russian troops are floundering in Ukraine, and we thought that was a bit more topical. And that’s what we’re kicking off with.
No Chickens in Kyiv
When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on the morning of 24 February, UK and US intelligence estimated that the country would fall in five hours, worst-case scenario. 19 days later, the resistance of PM Zelensky and his people has surprised and inspired the Western world.
Speaking to a source inside Whitehall, we learned that the losses sustained by Russian troops have been jaw-dropping. We are told of an assault on a maritime city – which we assume must be Mariupol – in which only 46 out of 600 Russian marines survived.
While the logistical issues facing the invading army have been well-documented, communications is another massive obstacle for the Kremlin: according to our source, they have been using mobile phones and other unencrypted devices to communicate with each other, which are easily intercepted, and possibly one of the reasons why three of their major generals have been killed on the battlefield.
Morale has been sapped, which is why so many senior Russian officers are on the frontline. There are reports of troops refusing to advance into Ukraine, as Moscow has been unable to hide the true toll of its ‘special military operation’.
Despite all this, our source is very anxious about what the future holds. The Ukrainian resistance is formidable – and assisted by some high-tech Western weaponry. But for the sake of his reputation – and his own future – Putin cannot back down, and has a number of his own weapons at his disposal.
I Heard It On The Trews
As the publicist for his first book – which has a title too stupid to write here – Henry Jeffreys played a helping hand in Russell Brand’s rise to ubiquity in the early ‘10s. Back then, the tousle-haired comedian was starring in Hollywood vehicles and was married to Katy Perry. Fast forward ten years, and he’s become a YouTuber, spouting conspiracy theories from a hut in Henley-on-Thames, where he decries NATO expansionism while hawking tickets to live shows at The Globe in Stockton-on-Tees – which could be read as a rather clever interpretation of the final act of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. Anyway, do have a read of Henry’s piece here, if you haven’t done so already, and if anyone can help us with any tips on why Brand’s A-List career floundered, then we’re all ears.
Monet! Monet! Monet!
Back in December 2020, we published a mid-to-deep dive into the murky world of patronage in London’s leading museums. One of the institutions we featured – the Tate – has just severed associations with Putin associate Viktor Vekselberg. It seems the Salisbury poisoning was not quite far enough for the Tate’s ‘ethics foundation’. If you’d like to bone up on the other tycoons using the art world for a spot of reputation laundering, then you can read the whole piece here And if you know anyone – anyone at all – who works in this world, then we would love to hear from you.
No Change from a Twenty
To celebrate our collaboration, we’ve decided to slash the price of an annual subscription to £20 only, which really is too low for a whole year of writing from the best young and youngish writers on the block. We’ll ramp up the subscription cost back up to full price at lunchtime tomorrow, so do sign up right now if you're one of those people who likes bargain deals and funny magazines.
The Sarawak Report
After a brief decade of dithering, the Conservative Party and its supporters in the media are asking themselves a big question: is it a good idea to have millions of pounds of foreign money swishing around in British politics? Recent investigations into the influence of Alexander Lebedev – while bringing new information to light about the minigarch’s attempts to wine and dine the head of MI6 – are recycling stories that were published three years ago. The awkward facts have been hiding in plain sight all along, but they’ve been mainly reported on by smaller media outlets. In that spirit, why not read this deep-dive into the recently ennobled Lord Sarfraz? There does seem to be something of a story here.
In Case You Missed It
Keith Gessen looks to the increasingly grim landscape of Ukraine and asks, Was It Inevitable?
David L. Ulin thinks about Jack Kerouac on his 100th birthday, for Alta.
What does it take to get fired by that client asking you to make branded content for social media? YouTube veteran Thomas ‘TomSka’ Ridgwell tries, and fails, to find out.
The truly exciting news that the Endurance had been discovered gave us many heartening paragraphs in a dark week for news, but only *one* truly great Twitter thread from marine biogeographer, Huw Griffiths, about all the weird little critters that now call it home.
Jean H Lee tells us Kim Jong-Un Is Just Getting Started, in a sobering account of what the dear Leader might get up to next, albeit with a headline that suggests he’s a promising young ingénue with a BAFTA in his pocket and his sights set on Hollywood.
And, because we’re never slavishly topical here at TF, we invite you all to reacquaint yourselves with one of the greatest cultural long-reads ever written, simply because there’s never a bad time to do so. We speak, naturally, of Chris Plante’s 2013 opus, Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong?
And Finally
Our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, has led a peripatetic life, full of stories and encounters. He has a particularly choice episode for you today.
I keep an eye on what people from my time at Cambridge are doing today – a civil servant here, a teacher there, the odd (and they are odd) clergyman. All fairly mundane. Josh Jackson, however, has taken a different career path, and is now a full-time Twitter shill for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. History, of course, repeats itself: first as tragedy then as farce. Where Cambridge once produced the tragic Guy Burgess or Donald Maclean, it now gives the world the clown Jackson.
Folly marked our only encounter too. I was in my rooms at theological college one evening, pretending to understand the Summa or the Dogmatics, when I received a call from a fellow trainee cleric who had been at the annual dinner of the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA). He asked whether I would consider opening our small theological college bar to those who had been at the dinner: the port had run out, and it being the policy of whichever college they’d been in to boot them out before 11.
I agreed, on the proviso I could charge them double – on account of student politicians universally being pricks. So a braying mob of black-tied students descended on the small bar at Westcott House. Amongst them was one individual who loudly proclaimed to all and sundry that he was, despite the company he was in, ‘not a Tory’. Conversely, he could also be heard bellowing about how much he preferred CUCA to the University Labour Club. He wasn’t so much engaging in conversation about these points of political difference but just bellowing – no, it was higher pitched than that, screeching – into the ether. All this cut above the lechery and the bellowing and the fnarr-fnarring. It was a room in which to be noticeably the most obnoxious person was an achievement in itself. That person was Josh Jackson.
It soon became clear he was very drunk. He lolloped over sofas, he spilled wine down his front, he barracked and ranted and demanded more drink. Even the spotty gaggle of his fellow diners were beginning to tire of his company. As bar manager, I made an executive decision that for this dribbling Commissar, bedtime has come.
Jackson is much taller than me but his wine-impaired motor impairment made it easy to grab his shoulders and march him out the bar. It was a short stroll for me and stagger for him to this departure point. It was past midnight by this point and so the main gate was closed, leaving just the smaller door within for entrance and exit. I sort of folded Jackson through the door – he was still wanging on about politburos at this point – and pushed him through the door, aiming a good kick towards his rear for good measure. So it was that I left Putin’s great Twitter lion garbling away in evening wear down a moonlit Cambridge side street. He’s not the first or the last to stagger so – as I said, first as tragedy, then as farce.
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We hope you enjoyed this newsletter, and if you have any thoughts on it, please do reply to this email, as we would love to hear from you. If you fancy buying one of the back issues – or a cut-price subscription – there’s a link just below. Looking forward to joining you again soon.
All the best,
TF
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