Dear Readers,
Good afternoon – and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that sometimes lands on a Monday, and sometimes, like today, is a tuesletter. As has been threatened in previous outings, we have a slew of exciting developments to share with you, the first and most important of which is that Issue 12 is landing next Monday, and is, like all the issues that preceded it, the finest one yet. We’ve got some of the most exciting young and youngish names in the Anglosphere in this issue: Rosa Lyster, Clive Martin, Natalya Lobanova and many more. Plus, there are some writers scoring their first byline, too, which is something that always makes us happy.
Right now, an opportunity presents itself for the uninitiated: if you subscribe today, at the price of £25 only, then you’ll get Issue 11 this week, and Issue 12 the week after – and you’ll get three issues following on from that. Two pieces of post in a week from a quarterly magazine? Five issues for the price of four? Yes, yes, this sort of deal only comes around once a year. Sign up today and treat yourself to The Fence.
We’ve got a lot of things to announce this week – including a boardgame – but first, some news from Westminster.
Maverick Sabre
Among the jostling competitors to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, the figure of Tom Tugendhat appeals to those who hanker for a Rory Stewart-style leader: he presents himself as an intellectually capable politician with military experience overseas, all wrapped in a sensible One Nation Tory sheen. The member for Tonbridge and Malling enjoys a reputation for straight talk. But according to a source in the lobby, this talk is not always of his own making: ‘Tom Tug, does business best by asking journos to make up quotes in his name (on the grounds that his views on most topics are fairly predictable) as long as they run them past him before publication.’ Being allowed to make up quotes? It’s every hack’s dream!
Chumopoly Fun for All the Family
It’s now widely regarded as fact that the Johnson government was brought down by three separate scandals: Owen Paterson’s lobbying, Chris Pincher’s nominative determinism and the series of vomit-flecked parties at Downing Street. While it’s sort of satisfying that Johnson is only in office for a short while longer, the manner in which his administration handed out a series of COVID contracts worth millions to their chums is one of the most staggering developments of British political history. So shocking, in fact, that we decided to make a board game, entitled PANDEMILLIONS. It’s a real, functional and very cool board game, and we’re really quite proud of it.
There are some photos here, and you can read up on the rules too. We made a very limited run of them, so if you would like to see one, please do email us here at editorial@the-fence.com and we will come back to you shortly.
Flying off the Shelves
Our first book, Sh*t Literary Siblings, will be published on September 29 with Headline, and you can read up on the book – and the deal that made the book – in this link here, and it was a pleasure to see SLS featured in the Times already.
Now, if all of that has got you pumped up, you can leap over the long lines that will be bending round Waterstones Piccadilly in late September, and pre-order your copy here.
Darjeeling Express
Last week, the chef, restaurateur and author, Asma Khan was interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, where she spoke of her issues finding a new space for her restaurant in central London, suggesting the difficulties in securing a fresh lease stem from the fact she ‘didn’t go to Harrow.’
While the hospitality world may still be powered by the ‘old boys network,’ Khan belongs to a rather more rarefied club still: royalty. Of blue-blooded descent on both sides of her family, she learned her skills from the family cooks at home, and on a recent visit to India, she shared a photo of the shining Rolls-Royce that has been ‘enjoyed by generations’ in her family. Lucky for some…
The Proprietor’s Column
For those of us of a younger generation, it’s a bizarre spectacle to watch the notification-hungry oldsters of the New European thirst for clicks with stories based on unattributed, solitary sources. And so it was on 2 July, when their Mandrake column pompously declared that Lord Rothermere had lost confidence in Boris Johnson, and that his papers should reflect his Lordship’s views on the matter.
Of course, the story was shown to be a whole bunch of cobblers only a few days later, but the eagle-eyed onlooker may have noticed that DMGT titles have been pumping up its coverage of the Rupert Murdoch-Jerry Hall divorce. Given that proprietors do not tend to attack each other, can any informed onlooker with their ear to the ground tell us what’s going on here?
The Member for Uxbridge
Last Thursday, when the government fell – or at least promised it would fall when it felt like it – was a befuddling and confusing time for the outsider. While there were some excellent timelines and explainettes, we felt there were some more general points that weren’t being discussed by the commentariat. In that spirit, we put together a guide to British politics for American readers comprised of some broad-brush viewpoints that you hopefully won’t find elsewhere. It will probably be totally irrelevant in a week, but it still reads well enough today.
The Sue Barker Benevolent Fund
Wimbledon is a wonderful tournament, a glorious summer spectacle, but it is also like a fortnight-long Jack Wills advert, with the spectators striving to be Fabulously British in the sweltering July sun. The editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, went down to SW19 last week and wrote a cacklingly funny dispatch on the crowd on Centre Court, and, you’ll be excited to hear, scored some groovy celeb spots: Cliff Richard, Sir Trevor Macdonald and Prince Michael of Kent – the Queen’s cousin who is, we are told, about to ‘retire’ from public life, having been busted selling access to Vladimir Putin. But even though that report was made public last May, and even though Russians are banned from competing at Wimbledon this year, the elderly Prince is still welcome, of course, in the Royal Box.
In Case You Missed It
Tamara Dean gives a sober but essential overview of US abortion history. Offering a more personal view of said history, actor John Turturro recounts the botched abortion which took his grandmother’s life 95 years ago.
[A reminder, once again, that Donations4Abortion gives a thorough rundown of funding options for affected people in every US state, from anywhere on Earth. If you’re a UK reader, do also remember that thousands of Northern Irish women are still having to travel to England and Wales to exercise their legal right to abortion services, and you can donate to help them do this through Alliance4Choice].
For Air Mail, Henry Schlesinger profiles Sir Hardy Amies, the fashion designer and espionage agent, in The Spy Who Dressed Me.
Justin Heckert tells the sad, strange tale of a multi-million dollar retro gaming heist and the collector it left behind.
Annie Rauwerda pays respects to Wikipedia’s late, lamented ‘you can help by expanding this’ prompt, for Input Mag.
And you are likely to hear more about this story elsewhere but, for the record, Hollywood trade paper The Wrap is reporting that Delia Owens, author of mega hit book-turned-movie Where The Crawdads Sing, is currently wanted for her role in a murder amidst claims she and her husband armed and abetted a militia in Zambia.. The film opens this week, what a novel approach to cross-promotion.
And Finally
With the temperature pushing 32 degrees, this heat is far too much for this dorky political and mediasphere content. London’s summer months are taking on the muggy, magical atmosphere of July in New York City, and so we thought we’d finish up with this ice-cold clip of Harold Hunter skating the streets of Manhattan in 1994 over a Method Man freestyle.
And if you want to be profound about it, the video acts as the touchstone for all the streetwear companies that dominate youth culture today – Supreme, Palace and so on. A billion-dollar industry based on a clip with less than a million views? That’s wild.
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If you’d like to check the status of your subscription, make sure we’ve got the right address and all the rest of it, then you can reply to this email, and we’ll get back to you promptly. Remember that deal we wrote about up top, too, that’s going to expire by the next time we join you next week. Of course, if you’d like to have a chat with a member of the editorial team, then you can do that as well – we do love to hear from our readers. Until then.
All the best,
TF
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