Dear Readers,
Hello again, and welcome to the eighty-first edition of Off The Fence. It’s a Bank Holiday Tuesletter this time around, with enough fluff and flotsam to keep you away from your work for just that little bit longer. Would you believe it, we are already on the home stretch for Issue 13; drafts are receiving final polish, art directors are being briefed, and we are once again exceptionally excited to share it with you in early October. Buy yourself a year’s subscription for the LOW, LOW, LOW LOW LOW price of £25, and avoid disappointment when it flies off the shelves again – Issue 12 sold out in a scarcely-believable three weeks!
We’ve got a nice little selection this time around – which you can now find out about ahead of time on our Instagram stories – and we open this week with a fine debut from Fred Skulthorp, who’s been infiltrating the clandestine pub meetups of Britain’s increasingly barmy conspiracist movement.
Apocalypse Club
Shortly after the afternoon tea is cleared, a withered man in a tweed suit makes his way to an impromptu stage before the audience of the Vauxhall Teahouse Theatre. While the PA is being sorted out a cat follows him onto the stage and curls up, rather erotically, against the leg of his corduroys. A hefty well-read wad of notes shoos the feline away and a nervous laugh follows. Then the audience settles down, and the man in a tweed suit is finally allowed to speak about the dark and sinister forces that really run the world.
‘The Covid-19 scamdemic’ makes its way into the opening gambit. Too much for some of the stragglers at the back who quickly pay for their cream tea and leave. These days I barely bat an eye when I hear this sort of talk. Since the lockdowns, I’ve become accustomed to hearing people talk about the causes and processes of the ‘scamdemic’ in the many environs of middle-class respectability. I’ve had the world-dominating motives of the World Economic Forum explained to me on a Surrey village green, I’ve had someone explain to me that the mRNA vaccine is a mass genocidal depopulation programme on a local recreation ground while the under-11 football team warm up for their Sunday game.
But this evening feels different. It’s one thing discussing this on the internet, or in the twilight zone of the English suburbs, but quite something else in London. In all honesty, since moving back I haven’t had the time to worry about the Great Reset or vaccine induced infertility. But of course that makes me part of the problem, one of the sheeple, and it’s this admission of guilt, this cowardice, that reminds me that someone once longingly referred to these meetups as ‘apocalypse club.’ This isn’t about me, it’s about something bigger. It’s about the end of the world.
This much seems confirmed by the nervous energy of the waitress, who surely never has never had a shift like this. Sat in the corner with his entourage is Piers Corbyn, veteran of lockdown protests and heroic receiver of fines. Then there’s a smattering of young people with screen-glazed eyes, and finally, and most importantly, the Home Counties set I’ve become all too familiar with - the ladies who used to lunch and the men in retirement who have found themselves with nothing much else to do apart from go on the internet.
The man speaking is called Peter Ford, a former UK ambassador to Syria, and very much the establishment-angel-fallen-from-grace needed to lend this audience the credibility it feels it deserves. Tonight, Peter is not just talking about the scamdemic, but also about recent events in Ukraine: underlying the many tangents -- from the Rothschilds to the ‘puritanical pigtails’ of Greta Thunberg -- is the sense that we have broken free from the strictly guarded confines of public discourse to form, as Peter describes it, a coven of dangerous thought.
The organisers of the talk have been going since 9/11. In the two decades since, they’ve kept a steady stream of seemingly unremarkable literature on everything from how Britain started both World Wars to the false flag operation that was the 2005 London bombing. But tonight, there is a decidedly new crowd brought in, and with it an unmistakable buzz of curiosity about the room.
Someone in the audience is heckling Peter. A comment about the fabricated Syrian government war crimes has turned onto the vaccine programme. Vaccines are a ‘chemical war crime against us,’ says a man in a gilet who has been intensely standing at the back since Peter started talking. Peter disagrees. What ensues is a free for all, a bidding war of random studies and anecdotes dating back to covert CIA programmes in the 50s.
For the ‘pandemic cohort,’ this is a state of mind I find increasingly bizarre. The people lured here by the White Rose and other viral Twitter accounts are not outsiders to ‘the system’. On the contrary, it’s one they have heavily bought into for decades through mortgages, pensions and the annual holiday abroad. The great irony of course, is that many of the people pushing these ideas surely aren’t in any way under threat from the system they purport is taking over the world. Doctors, business owners, engineers. Comfortably comfortable. In other words, what on earth are they doing here?
At half time this is a question I am desperate to ask John, a Kiwi in London, who, after a bit of polite conversation, tells me his Victorian terraced home is about to be repossessed. After ‘doing some research,’ John has decided that the mortgage agreement between him and his bank was never officially verified and that he refuses to make payments to a bank whose own liquidity is completely fake. He tells me there is a court case, but it’s one he is likely to lose.
Why?, I ask him. Why do this?
The truth, he tells me. Because I know I’m right.
The pub is full of people like myself, perhaps drawn to the novelty of conviction in a time of extreme cynicism. For every believer there are now a hundred Jon Ronsons and Louis Therouxs who follow the many local ringleaders gathered in villages across the country, almost willing on the madness through their endless prodding and questioning. As one of my fellow onlookers put it, we go along because it is an extreme metaphor for living in extreme times. In many ways we are looking for our own paranoia, our own outlandish fantasies to be laid to rest by refuting the madness of others.
After Peter finished talking, Piers Corbyn stood up and made a prediction that millions would die from the Covid-19 vaccines. Some people applauded. I tried to catch John on the way out, but he had snuck out, back to a home that would soon be gone. Outside, in the darkness, was a part of London I no longer really recognised. Twenty years ago I remember it as an inconsequential stop from Waterloo on my way home, now an array of creeping change in the form of anonymous glass Jenga towers, the sinister fluorescence of global capital and relentless march to the future. Tonight, they had risen so high they loomed in the late evening cloud.
You can, and should, find Fred over on Twitter.
Tony Blair’s Riefenstahl
12 and a bit issues deep, and the biggest mark we’ve left on the media landscape is a newsletter from last year, when we worked out that Will Thacker – Hugh Grant’s character in Notting Hill – is based on Richard Curtis’s Oxford chum, Will Sieghart, who enjoyed a brief relationship with Uma Thurman in the mid 90s (and, yes that’s who Julia Roberts’ Anna Scott is based on).
In the film, the lusciously-maned Will Thacker works in a travel bookshop and lives in a flatshare. In real life, the balding William Sieghart is an old Etonian who made a fortune from a business publishing company, and as a TF staffer (not the editor) discovered, a proud member of a men-only private members’ club at the age of 23. They should have put that in the film, too!
All Of This Could Be Yours
We’re so proud to have played a part in helping a number of brilliant new writers in the early steps of their careers – we’ll spare them their blushes but if you’re a regular reader, you’ll probably have noticed us banging on about them, and we’d like to bang on about a few more. Right now, December’s issue is already coming together, but we’ve got a few more Facts and Features slots that we’re looking to fill; it’d be brilliant to fill them with some writers that we haven’t worked with before.
Whether you’re a first-time writer altogether, a writer in a different industry who’s been itching to do some more editorial work, or a seasoned pro that fancies doing something a little bit left-field, we will lovingly receive every last one of your ideas. We have a pitch guide here, if you’re into that sort of thing, and can be contacted en masse by emailing editorial@the-fence.com – seriously, we all get the emails at the same time, and your pitches will not be left to languish. Send us your best and let’s do something fun together.
Gummo Dimbleby
It was a real joy last week to see people take so quickly and so keenly to ‘Columnist or Corrigan?’, our daft old quiz from Issue 12. We threw down the gauntlet to see if anyone could get thirty out of thirty in spotting which howlers came from Apollo House and which came from The News Building – there were plenty of valiant efforts in the high twenties, but only one quizzer verifiably managed top marks. Bravo, Jake Procter! Try it yourself and see how you manage; anything less than 25, and you will be under strict orders to revisit Series One and watch it all again.
Our Booky Wook
At the end of September, a new era will dawn for British publishing with the release of our first book, Shit Literary Siblings. Not to raise expectations too highly, but we’re firmly expecting it to sell better than anything published in the last decade, and to spawn several spin-offs, a Netflix series, and a shiny new glass office for the hard-toiling TF staffers. We’ve been encouraged in this endeavor by the feedback from those lucky few who got their copy early – our beloveds Ian Martin and Marina O'Loughlin in particular. In previous decades we might’ve said “go to your local library and demand they reserve a copy”, but this is 2022 and we don’t have libraries anymore, so get yourself over to Waterstones and pre-order a copy today.
In Case You Missed It
Ash Sarkar challenged thirty private landlords to explain why they’re opting to pass the cost of living crisis on to their tenants.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes its first appearance in Off The Fence with the incredible story of how a fake Rothschild conned their way into Mar-a-Lago.
Over at the New Yorker, Adam Nayman discovered (amongst other things) that John Carpenter couldn’t get his head around mounting a horse on Red Dead Redemption.
From a couple of years ago at VICE, David Hillier dug into how much money drug dealers actually make on a weekly basis.
Thu-Huong Ha profiled the inimitable Sayaka Murata for WIRED, and it’s predictably fantastic.
Our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, is in the New Statesman with yet another skilful and forceful critique of the crumbling welfare state, and the church’s efforts to redress its gravest impact in Liverpool.
And Finally
Rishi Sunak has taken a lot of pelters this summer for his uber-slick yet utterly ineffective Prime Ministerial campaign, which has seen the once-anointed political princeling swallowed up into the Westminster ether by dint of the fact that he’s just too bloody polished for the job. It wasn’t always like this for the Conservative Party. Just five short decades ago, the Tory machine was ruthless enough to take a bumbling, frosty, sinister old bachelor like Edward ‘Ted to his mates’ Heath, and make him Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Take a minute of your day to watch this clip of Tedders making a Christmas stop in his hometown of Broadstairs, where he is first presented with an occultish pig’s head cake for reasons lost to time, and then is tasked with conducting the Christmas carol service, which he performs with the stiff bonhomie of the animatronic George Washington at Disney World. Try and spot the bit where he whacks the sheet music off the stand, to see a man writhing desperately in front of his audience, praying for his hell to end. You’re going to hear a lot this winter about the 1970s, inevitably, but at least things will never be this profoundly strange again.
*
That was the Tuesletter that was, and we are back off down the content mines to chip out the remaining precious metals for Issue 13. As ever, if you would like to message us about pretty much anything – complaints to confessionals, and everything in between – reply to this email here, and we’ll all have a read of it.
We would be remiss if we didn’t urge you to smash that subscribe button below, too, should you have made it this far down the email and found yourself quite taken with this plucky magazine; with your support, we can only grow stronger. Catch you in either six or seven days: same time(ish), same place.
All the best,
TF
We are also delighted to offer a subscription service. For £25 you will receive all four copies of the magazine per year, delivered to your door.
