Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence. Over the last month we’ve run a competition to celebrate the print magazine’s acceptance into the golden enclosure that is W H Smith (high street). This competition has now been won by Sam, who sent through a very nice email – the Champagne and copy of the super-rare Issue 8 are on their way to him. On that note, there are vanishingly Issue 9s and 10s left in the warehouse, so if you’re of a completist nature, then do make sure to pick one up today through the webstore.
Today, we’ve got some various little bits across the board, but we lead with a sideways glance at a tranche of barely believable emails.
Sneaky Strawhead
About a week ago Dan Sabbagh relayed a curious little tale: back in 2018, the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, communicated with other leading Brexiteers to ensure that Britain left the EU. The email dump was, in all likelihood, facilitated by Russian agents, who aren’t exactly flavour of the month right now, so the whole story hasn’t been reported fully as it might be. The cast of characters are a strange yet strangely predictable bunch: the historian Robert Tombs, the Labour MP Gisela Stuart, the Marquess of Salisbury, a secretive Jersey-based couple called the Clodes, the Falklands War veteran Julian Thompson, and at the centre of it, the driving force, a military expert called Gwythian Prins, who encouraged the rest of the gang to set up secure email accounts to message each other securely.
You can, and you should, read the exchanges in their entirety here.
While Dearlove has admitted to Reuters that his emails have been hacked, the other players have yet to confirm their involvement, so we don’t want to Trevor-Roper ourselves and say that this cache is the real deal – which it might be – though the other possibility is that Kremlin scientists have somehow reanimated the corpse of Kim Philby to help them imitate the bumptious schoolboy prose of the British establishment in their dotage.
While we won’t attempt to verify these emails, please allow yourselves to have a good giggle at them, mainly at the figure of Prins, whose messages are dotted with intelligence terminology (‘the cousins’ ‘Vauxhall Cross’) and who insists on referring to Dearlove – who left MI6 in 2004 – as ‘C’. The plotting and subterfuge, all written politely enough, are leavened by mentions of lighter activities: there’s salmon-fishing on the Tamar and updates on the welfare of Crunchie the horse.
Obsequiousness reigns: Prins writes to Salisbury ‘Thank you, as ever, for being the indispensable Marquess.’ And what does Robert Salisbury choose for his super-secure email address? The username ‘Robert1611’ – an incongruous number, until you realise, thanks to Wikipedia, that it is a date: 1611: the year that the Cecil family built the palatial Hatfield House, where Salisbury resides today. Power to the people!
How the Sausage Gets Socialed
Like many of you, we are all very big fans of Schott’s Miscellany, so it was very touching when Ben Schott himself – one of the greatest humourists in the game – pitched a piece for the magazine, and you can now read the primest cuts of it on the Instagram. Ben has another piece in the pipeline for Issue 13, and we’re both surprised and delighted that he’s writing for us.
The Great-Crested Grebe Society
It’s a real pleasure to see Richard Smyth’s outstanding essay on the state of British nature writing being widely shared and cited two years after we published it. (If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s available here.) Richard has written an absolutely glowing review of Patrick Galbraith’s first book, in which he tracks the disappearing birds of Britain, and follows the people who are dedicated to saving them. We’ve read some chapters of Patrick’s book, and it’s the ideal gift for the twitcher in your life, and it’s also a brilliant portrait of rural life, written with deadpan humour and cool objectivity. Strong recommend.
Stunting on the Microphone
A few newsletters back there was a celebration of Geoff Dyer, as the essayist, and it would it be remiss not to hail Geoff Dyer, as the pranker, as he sets up glum South African novelist J.M Coetzee with an absolute cracker of a joke at the Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2010, much to Coetzee’s evident disapproval.
Pro Pace et Fraternitate Gentium
Over the last few months, we’ve been asking Nobel Prize winners a series of asinine queries and now the list has been compiled and published right here. It’s certainly one of the best things we’ve done this year, and thank you to all the eminent minds for their brilliant answers, and also to Spy magazine, who first came up with this format many years ago… It's a ‘dynamite’ idea!
And it was one that was celebrated by no less a personage than Ed Vaizey, who shared the article in his newsletter. The Vaizemeister joins Michael Gove in being a regular reader of The Fence – but neither of these Tory culture vultures have yet pledged the miserly sum of £25 to sign up for the year and receive four issues of the beautiful print magazine. If you’re a Conservative politician – or if you’re not a Conservative politician – there’s no time like the present to subscribe, you can do it at this link right here.
Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy
Over the weekend, the Liverpool-raised, London-based fashion designer S S Daley won the LVMH fashion prize, gaining a year of mentorship and a cash prize of e300,000. For Jonathan Anderson, one of the judges, the process was ‘more about the narrative’, and it’s worth having a look at what he might mean by that narrative.
Daley’s work has been lauded ‘for confronting the British class system’: think tailcoats, boaters and pleated cotton-corduroy shorts available at the approachable price point of £392. Daley can, in his own words, ‘fetishise Tory behaviours’ as he comes from a working-class background. But this is nothing new: Ralph Lifshitz, an Ashkenazi Jew born in the Bronx, deconstructed the WASP uniform to build Ralph Lauren – a brand you may have heard of. Though you can’t begrudge Daley his victory, you can only admire LVMH, a corporation owned and operated by the second richest man in the world, for rewarding a young designer so keen to shake up the system.
In Case You Missed It
‘I don’t believe in redemption’. A searing piece by Errol Morris for AirMail, on ‘Napalm Girl’ at 50
Martin Scorsese remembers the mercurial genius of Ray Liotta. Come for the beautiful tribute, stay for the byline photo that conjures images of Marty posing for his staff pic in Guardian HQ.
Miranda Carter charts the inexorable rise of Desert Island Discs into the national consciousness.
In among the screwtop bottles of plonk and supermarket sandwiches, Gus Carter reveals the dreary truth about partygate.
Séamas O’Reilly, features editor of this parish, encountered the band My Chemical Romance on a flight, where they cooed over his son (and rightfully so, he is very cute).
And Finally
At the turn of the millennium, producer Teebone teamed up with MCs Kie and Sparks to release Fly Bi – a garage anthem that still pulsates dancefloors 22 years later. Very sadly, Sparks died prematurely eight years ago, but it gave his friends the opportunity to reunite at his funeral, to perform Fly Bi at his graveside. It’s a truly unique video, one that is both brilliant and charming, and we recommend you watch it in its entirety.
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That’s it for this week, and we’ll be reopening pitches on Friday, so keep your eyes peeled for that if you’re keen to write for us, but if you’d like to talk to a member of the editorial team, you can reply to this email and we’ll get back to you promptly. There is some very exciting news around the corner, news that we can’t wait to share with you all. Until then.
All the best,
TF
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