Dear Readers,
Good morning and welcome to Off The Fence. Right about now, the last lightbulb is being hung on the blazing chandelier that is Issue 11, our brightest offering yet – and it will be with subscribers in the first week of April. We’re pretty pumped about it.
One of the most exciting features in the magazine is a piece by Mina Miller, who has written a brilliantly funny exposé of a much-vaunted London institution where she had the ill fortune to work. The article was commissioned in collaboration with Vittles – a food newsletter for people who don’t like food writing.
With over 25,000 subscribers, its fans include Nigella Lawson, Jeanette Winterson, Nigel Slater and Jay Rayner (but not Giles Coren). Laced with humour and sparkling with clarity, Vittles covers the culinary sphere in the best and broadest possible way. If you want a taste of what they offer, have a read of this fascinating feature on the terroir of Scotch whisky by Robbie Armstrong, or this bravura group effort on the different match day rituals for fans of famous football teams across the British Isles – from the matzo sandwich of Manchester City’s Maine Road to the Chinese chippy tea devoured by the Redmen at Anfield. It goes without saying that you should subscribe to Vittles today.
In this week’s mail-out, we lead with a feature from Charlie Baker – who may have written for this newsletter once or twice before. We’ve also got some more news about Josh Jackson, Putin’s young Lord Haw-Haw, and some bits about a dodgy school and a very dodgy swan. And let’s get to it!
School for Scoundrels
In a five-storeyed stucco mansion on Regent’s Park, a young man with an easy charm and a comically double-barrelled surname was briefing me on how best to proceed with my new client.
‘It would be best if you are firmly behind the wheel.’ He said, gingerly.
‘What do you mean by that exactly?’ I replied.
‘Well, so far, I’ve been writing the essays for him, and I think it’s best to continue with that practice.’
It was 2013, and like many recent graduates at that time, I was working as a private tutor to supplement my income. After a few months of heading out to the further reaches of London’s suburbs armed with some perfunctory GCSE worksheets on Macbeth, I was looking for a more reliable position, so when the opportunity to work with ‘a young undergraduate at a leading London university’ at £50 an hour I leapt at the opportunity.
I had an inkling my new charge was Russian – and given the secrecy of his identity – that he was seriously rich. Some light googling revealed that his father was a billionaire (he still is a billionaire, and is also on the 2018 US Treasury list of oligarchs).
His son – who I’ll call Pavel – had a certain gawky charm, and he smiled while I was briefed on the task in hand: to make sure that Pavel scored a distinction in his first-year course.
We had to write an essay on a general subject, and I began the task of researching and note-taking from various dry academic tomes. The subject that was chosen – and I promise I am not making this up – was ‘Civil Society and Vladimir Putin: An Impossible Relationship?’
I have to reiterate: I really quite liked Pavel. He was funny company, and the hours in the great barn of his father’s sitting room slipped past easily, as I tried to teach him a few things about paragraph structure and footnoting to little success, while also trying to teach myself enough about recent Russian history to write the essay convincingly.
Even though I was nominally in charge, the power lay very much with Pavel. When Boris Berezovsky died in suspicious circumstances, I emailed him to ask what he thought about the affair. I received a gently chiding email by reply, reminding me of the importance of scoring a distinction. I returned to my task with a new vigour.
After a month or so, we had a pretty strong essay – but I had become aware that Pavel’s skills in English were around the KS2 level, so I went through the piece removing any unnecessarily multisyllabic terms, and even went to the trouble of drafting the covering email to submit to the university.
Unfortunately, the essay scored a middling 2.1. We were both disappointed that my hard work had been for so little reward. I flagged this up with the head of the tutoring agency. Perhaps the university was aware that Pavel had more than a helping hand? It was very possible, the head told me.
I tried to help Pavel with an appeal – again, taking the precaution to draft all email correspondence before he sent it from his account, but alas the university was firm. The final score was 65.
I went on to teach in more conventional circumstances and abroad, and Pavel went back to Moscow. The tutoring agency who hired me is still very much up and running. And I re-read the essay this afternoon – I swear it was better than a 2.1.
Charlie Baker is The Fence’s editor. You can populate his newly formed Twitter account (and by new, we mean literally moments before this newsletter was published) right here.
Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit
Last Thursday, on what Bostonians would unceremoniously call ‘Patty’s Day’, we ran a feature of such outstanding and voluminous Irishness that even President Michael D. Higgins, the gentle Gandalf of the Hibernian tribe, got in touch to commend it. Or he would’ve done, if his press team had gotten back to us in time.
Anyway, if you want to find out just how Irish an Irish luncheon between Irish DJ and novelist, Annie Mac, and Irish author and colleague, Séamas O'Reilly, in London’s most progressive Irish restaurant, Daffodil Mulligan (owned by the UK’s most prominent Irish chef, Richard Corrigan) could be, hop to it now and find out what all the fuss was about.
And in case you were worrying if we’d changed our ways: no, we didn’t pay for any of it.
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano
The current Private Eye carries a real rib-tickler of a report into Summer Fields, the turbo-posh North Oxford prep school whose alumni include Field Marshal Wavell, Prince Sébastian of Luxembourg and Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea.
Helmed by David Faber, the grandson of Harold Macmillan, the school has recently unveiled the Mark Shvidler library, funded by the largesse of Eugene Shvidler, who is often described as Roman Abramovich’s ‘right-hand man’. While not the subject of sanctions from the UK government at the time of writing – and the article suggests why that might be the case – Shvidler’s private jet was impounded at Farnborough Airport a fortnight ago.
Alongside the oligarchs, David Faber has also consorted with child traffickers – he reputedly enjoyed a brief romance with Ghislaine Maxwell in the 1980s.
SW16 Psychodrama
One of our dear subscribers, and soon-to-be darling of the latest issue, Mark Blacklock, got in touch with us to expose what may be a wholly novel line of enquiry in the British cultural sphere: the influence of oligarchic capital amongst grime artists: Dave in particular.
In the opening verse on Screwface Capital, from his superb 2019 debut, Dave boasts of having ‘made a link with the Russians/ Six figure discussions, dinners in public/ My linen all tailored/ My outstanding payments SWIFT like Taylor.’ We’ve seen protests and police patrols around Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Kensington – might we have been ignoring Streatham as a hive of illicit rubles?
All the same, Blacklock was moved to ask Dave directly over Twitter, before his 16-year-old daughter counseled him away from the notion, and so the scoop came our way instead.
Stop Looking at Me…. Swan!
A lurid tale has emerged among the sylvan realms of Hampstead Heath. After the death of her partner in a freak window accent, Mrs Newbie – who is a swan – pined for her lost lover for a number of years. Enter Wallace – who is also a swan. After love bloomed between the pair, they raised four sweet little cygnets, much to the delight of the crowds who gather to Instagram the brood around Highgate Number One Pond.
In an unexpected twist, the Camden New Journal report that after Mrs Newbie’s death, Wallace chased off his children – all except one: his daughter, who he is now currently dating.
When we first heard this story, we wondered what had driven Wallace to this rank act. Might the effluence from North London dinner parties have driven him around the bend? Alas, incest is common among swans, and Wallace is currently swanning around – literally – with his daughter-slash-partner, who has been called Willow.
Trouble Down The Mill
It’s very hard explaining to people why there’s a paper crisis at the moment, so thank you to Malin Hay, who has made a very boring – but very important – subject interesting with this fluid little explainer at the troubles facing the magazine world.
Even the gilded principality of the London Review of Books is shuddering at the disruption to the supply chain, so you can be assured that things are pretty damn scary for an upstart publication like ours. With costs rising at a terrifying rate, we are still committed to keeping the subscription price at £25, but we are reliant on people signing up so we can keep the show on the road at an approachable sum. So, if you’ve been enjoying what we do here, please do subscribe today. Otherwise we’ll have to send our editor back out on the tutoring game again.
Joshua Jackson’s Heal the World Foundation
Last week, we brought you a sketch from our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, recalling his time booting fringe firebrand Josh Jackson out of his theological college bar; a dispatch on a dispatch, if you will.
Jackson earned quite a reputation for his matriculatory antics while reading HSPS at Queens’ – a contemporary got in touch to let us know of his expulsion from the Cambridge University Labour Club, after a bizarre attempt at a coup d'état where he seized the society’s Facebook page, doctored messages with other members, and declared himself the tribune of the people.
It didn’t work, and Jackson was forced to form his own group, the ‘Cambridge Momentum Society’, which even Momentum’s national spokesperson was moved to disavow. A transformative few years for the Putinite rabble-rouser, no doubt, although his interactions with Fergus may not have been his first with a Fencer: here he is interviewing TF newsletter subscriber, Michael Gove, for campus TV (Secretary of State, if you have any gossip, please get in touch through the usual channels).
He Tucks It Up, His Massive Gland
We’ve all been there: pondering the image of the solitary curmudgeon, Philip Larkin, eschewing the pretensions of literary life for a more modest and provincial undertaking at the University of Hull, stacking shelves in accordance with the Dewey decimals. You picture him at his desk, glasses all boxy, face all sullen, a hand resting under his cheek as he limply pores through a tatty hardback, dreading the next freckly undergrad to rouse him from his focus.
But have you ever pondered what was under his desk? According to Nicola Shulman, writing in the Spectator, it was in fact an enormous chopper, so large that it necessitated clothing alterations, and so cumbersome that it marred his ability to form relationships.
Once you read his works with one eye on Larkin’s member – the elephant dick in the room, so to speak – Shulman argues that one can spot traces of his penis torment writ through his entire oeuvre, manifest in a multitude of ways, both comic and tragic. Some people can’t ever be pleased, can they?
In Case You Missed It
Patrick Radden Keeffe asks how Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London.
What does it take to turn a TikTok influencer into a movie star? Vox’s Rebecca Jennings sees how the sausage gets made.
Justin Ling goes deep on the neo-Nazi satanism underpinning two recent anti-Muslim attacks in Toronto.
Wright Thompson stirs the heart and plucks the eyelid with this engrossing and tender account of France/PSG star, Jean Pierre Adams, whose wife never left his side during his 39 year coma.
And Finally
From Manezhnaya Square in the very heart of Moscow, 25,000 writhing bodies wreak havoc under the light of the moon, thrashing their limbs under the spell of the same unified message of anarchy transmitted from a vaulted stage above them – the whole world watching as they collide and cavort, realising the extent of their collective power. We are not, of course, describing any popular uprisings past, present or future in the Russian capital, but instead The Prodigy’s barnstorming MTV special, recorded in September 1997: a simpler time, when history had ended, the Third Way ruled supreme, and the Federation’s Premier was merely a syphilitic drunkard (who owed his strength to the West). There’s chaos and there’s chaos – this is in the latter category.
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Now, we have to return to the tortuous task of fine-tuning our beautiful next issue, which you can – and should – subscribe to, with the button below. Amongst the archives, too, are some jewels that are begging to be snatched up – we only have 20 copies of Issue 6 left, and it holds up magnificently. In the meantime, should any of you have any tips, tidbits or thoughts too libelous to broadcast on a public forum, send them our way by replying to this email, because we are never too haughty to gossip, and we know our way around media law. We’ll catch you again next week.
All the best,
TF
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