Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that serves as a digital amuse bouche to the main platter of the quarterly print magazine. And it is our great pleasure to inform you that dinner is about to be served: Issue 11 is snaking its way across Europe from the printer from Lithuania, and should be with us by Friday. If you’re the type of person who enjoys receiving two pieces of post from The Fence in a week, then we have a proposition for you – subscribe today at the very agreeable price of £25 only – and you will receive Issue 10 and Issue 11 at different points over the next seven days. That’s living!
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Today, we’ve got a dispatch from Prince Philip’s memorial service, courtesy of an anonymous hack whose identity has to stay secret… for the time being.
Dieu et mon Droit
The Duke of Edinburgh’s memorial service was my first gig as a stand-in royal correspondent, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I felt like an imposter as I sidled down the queue of ticket holders, sheepishly announcing myself as a member of the press, before being ushered into Westminster Abbey.
Dotted among the sea of dark blue suits (Rishi Sunak made a faux pas by turning up in black) were clusters of extravagantly outfitted soldiers. During the service, the light kept catching on their black leather straps. One officer was wearing a cloak-cum-tabard, worn over his khaki dress uniform. The garment was purple and made of a shimmering fabric of many strands, like a tasselled flapper dress. I described it as best as I could to a friend in the military, hoping he’d be able to tell me what it was called. ‘Sounds weird,’ he replied.
The clergy, who are usually the best dressed on such occasions, had to take second place to the armed forces in the fashion stakes, though their clothes were certainly under scrutiny: as I passed through the security checks a bald man in a dog collar was being asked to unzip his bag, and a policeman was inspecting his cassock. The next time I saw him he was wearing the well-vetted vestments and leading the prayers. The order of service indicated that he was the Chaplain to the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Windsor Great Park. Presumably, if he’d wanted to assassinate a member of the royal family, he’d have done so before now.
I was in my seat almost two hours before the service began, and it was a longish walk from the north transept to the toilets in the cloisters – which involved crossing the aisle. When I tried to make my way back, I found that the clergy and the choir had taken their positions by the door ready to receive the European royalty that were arriving imminently, and the TV cameras were rolling. There was no other option but to nip across, right in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury as he waited to greet the King of the Belgians.
From where the press was seated, it was impossible to see much of what was going on, as our view was mostly obstructed by a pillar. The Sun’s royal correspondent griped about our seats on Twitter, and then spent the entire service watching the BBC live stream on his phone. I don’t think he opened the handsomely printed order of service once, instead using it as a desk on which to balance his phone and his notebook.
The royal correspondents were working so collaboratively that at first I assumed they were all from the same paper. They were in constant conversation, conferring on the all-important details that are their trade. Were the Queen, Camilla and various other female royals all wearing ‘forest green’? That seemed to be the consensus, before someone realised that they should call it ‘Edinburgh green’, as this was the official hue of the Duke’s livery. Sure enough, almost all the papers included this description, notwithstanding the fact that the royals in green were all wearing different shades of green.
An Abbey functionary with whom I got chatting gave me a useful tip as to where the Queen would be sitting, and I was able to get the scoop of at one point glimpsing her hat (forest green, at least in my book). It wasn’t much of an audience with the monarch, but it’s probably the best I’ll ever get. As the Abbey employee observed: ‘The next time she comes here it’ll be in a box.’
Supposedly the Queen had ruled out arriving in a wheelchair this time, but questions about her mobility and whether it would be good enough for her to attend were not the only topics of speculation before the service. What would Prince Andrew’s role be, on his first appearance since settling the sexual assault lawsuit? Both of the big questions were answered at the same time when the Queen entered through Poet’s Corner on Andrew’s arm. The decision to cast the Duke of York in a crucial supporting role was a clear message: the Queen stands by her favourite son, and can still just about walk by him too.
While most of the attention was on the presence of the Queen and Andrew, there was one notable absence. In the order of service we were told, in the present tense, that ‘The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Boris Johnson MP, and Mrs Johnson, are received. Presentations are made and they are conducted to their seats.’ Except Mrs Johnson is nowhere to be seen, and Mr Johnson marches in alone. As you may recall, the memorial service was on the same morning that 20 fixed penalty notices were issued at Downing Street for illegal parties held over lockdown.
Johnson’s figure was the only famous face I got more than a glimpse of during the service, due to his propensity to be the first to stand up at the start of a hymn, and then the last to sit down at the end. There were only three hymns though, plus the national anthem, and we were finished in 45 minutes. Perhaps the service was short to make it easier for the Queen, or perhaps because long services were not to the late Duke’s taste. According to John Sentamu, former Archbishop of York: ‘That’s what got his wick’.
As we filed out of Westminster Abbey I saw Cressida Dick and Tanni Grey-Thompson deep in conversation. Perhaps Dame Cressida was seeking advice from Baroness Grey-Thompson of Eaglescliffe before her predicted elevation to the House of Lords and bumper pay-out from the Metropolitan Police.
As I stood around in front of the Abbey afterwards, Dame Cressida spent some time chatting with the police officers on duty, before walking towards Parliament Square down the cordoned off pavement. A few moments later, a man in a red cassock came rushing out of the Abbey carrying a pair of black gloves, which Dame Cressida had apparently left on her seat.
Hardly the presence of mind one might expect from the most senior police officer in the country who, it is thought, spent several years working for MI6. The cleric handed the gloves to a policeman in a custodian helmet, who set off at a run after his soon-to-be former boss. As I walked down the pavement he was jogging back to his position after having returned the gloves. ‘You couldn’t make it up!’ he chuckled to one of his colleagues.
John Cheever’s Lonely Hearts Club
Every issue, we carry an original work of fiction from an established author. It’s the crown jewel of the print magazine, and we’ve been lucky enough to publish some of the most exciting young and youngish British authors: names like Sophie Mackintosh, Claire Lowdon and Rebecca Watson.
We’re opening up submissions for a brief window. One of the joys of the fiction slot is there are no real guidelines, but if you’re looking for inspiration, then why not read Tanjil Rashid’s bitingly funny story ‘Baby Donald’ from Issue 6? Fees start at £200, and the deadline date is 18 March. You can follow the fiction editor, John Phipps, on Twitter here if you want to get in his good books.
Divine Retribution
The government’s latest u-turn on a u-turn touched the headlines briefly: Boris Johnson’s much-pledged vow to ban conversion therapy might finally come to pass – though transgender people will be exempt from legislation. You should read Harry Shukman’s investigation into the True Freedom Trust, the evangelical outfit who practice conversion therapy on the sly. Harry spent three months undercover, and his dispatch is one of the more ambitious things we’ve put out – the piece still sadly stands relevant today.
Published in December 2020, it was our first outing into the cloak-and-dagger world of legal advice. When Harry approached the True Freedom Trust for comment on the piece, one of the directors bought a copy of the magazine through the webstore using a numerated pseudonym, but made the purchase using his True Freedom Trust email, which rather spoiled the subterfuge on his part. We weren’t expecting this plangent, moving piece to give us a laugh – but it just goes to show you never can tell. Anyway, please do dig into Harry’s piece, it’s a sterling piece of journalism and deserves a wide audience.
Houston and Holborn
Last week, we stoked the fires of debate with a totally authoritative and independently verified op-ed on the similarities and differences between London and New York. A number of people – quite correctly – congratulated us on our acute observations about the two world capitals. (If you missed it, the piece has been helpfully screengrabbed here.)
Inevitably, there were a few party-poopers, with one particularly wild claim that Bruges, Paris and Amsterdam are easier to reach from London than the Cotswolds. There were a few other mad comments which we chose not to dignify with a response, but there was one shining moment of brilliance courtesy of Ezra Marcus, who tweeted ‘People in New York seem crazier when you first meet them, but people in London reveal greater, subtler depths of craziness over long periods of time’.
It was perhaps the most perceptive thing we’ve read all year, so we were hono(u)r-bound to ask Ezra to enlarge upon his theme via email, and we print his reply below:
‘Americans, especially in New York, tend to make their aberrant quirks a feature of their personal brand, because we are marketers at heart. The British of course repress this stuff, especially if they went to a fancy school. So one of the joys of being friends with a Brit is watching their fine-grained neuroses and weird hang-ups unfold over many years.’
And on that conclusive note, our NY-Lon debate comes to an end. We mean it. No more suggestions.
Kings Place Ransom
In recent weeks, we’ve aimed to be a bit more covert about hawking our wares, attempting what Blairite civil servants would celebrate as Nudge Theory, with gentle, targeted prompts that might give some of our fans inside 90 York Way the appropriate shoulder-in-the-right-direction. See, to help incubate a more hospitable Grauniad atmosphere inside this here bulletin, we’ve strategically scattered a suite of typos, fumbles and spoonerisms across the last month of newsletters – all absolutely intentional, of course.
This stunt has, unfortunately, wiped us out a bit: first, with the agony that comes with abandoning our previously spotless standards of copy, and second, for the £5,000 we spent on behavioural economists to advise us. So if you want to keep us from the world of micro-marketing that we are so clearly unsuited for, buy our sensational little quarterly for the miserly sum of £25. Seriously, though, this newsletter is free to read for students and twenty-somethings labouring under the cost-of-living crisis, not for the media executives, landowners and scions of industry who merrily skip past the panhandling section every week. Please do sign up, so we can keep paying our writers, editors and illustrators fairly.
In Case You Missed It
M.H. Miller explored the demise of the artist-addict for T Magazine.
TF’s Free Lunch Editor sacrificed himself for the craft of reportage by going to The Wolseley’s final breakfast.
New York was present at the last hurrah of Vanity Fair’s glory years, at the book launch for Graydon Carter’s dearest lieutenant.
Few issues have split the Transatlantic media world like Serial’s exploration of The Trojan Horse Affair. Nesrine Malik discusses its meaning and implications with the podcast’s co-host, Hamza Syed.
Simon Hattenstone squeezes black pudding from a lump of granite in this excellent profile of a mostly uncooperative Shane MacGowan.
And Finally
Among all the responses to Will Smith’s slap, perhaps the purest came from One Directioner, Liam Payne, who offered his views with his heart on his sleeve.
He’s not the only British tween heartthrob to commandeer the Yankee airwaves with a certain breathless élan. Back in 2009, Daniel Radcliffe appeared on MTV’s Alexa Chung programme, to a crowd of screaming American girls, and proceeded to monologue about Top Gear, the applause at Lord’s cricket ground and the shape of his penis. It’s a clip for the ages.
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At the moment, we’re conducting a little inquiry into the body politic at Westminster, and we hope to share the bounty next week. In the meantime, please do get in touch with any queries or pointers you might have, and we hope all is well with you on this particularly grim Monday. Speak soon.
All the best,
TF
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