Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter which is arriving at the same day as the print magazine, and we are delighted to see Issue 13 pushing through letter boxes online – thank you to Alex Christian and Adam Becket for these winning snaps. This issue has taken three months to put together, and there is nothing that our harried team of contributors, editors and illustrators like more than seeing the magazine ‘out in the wild’, so please share them on Twitter and Instagram. If you have 7 followers, or if you have 700,000 – we welcome all photos from all comers.
Owing to Royal Mail strikes and delays at the border, we’re going to extend the price-rise-deadline one last time. From tonight at 9pm, the cost of a subscription will go up to £30, so that means that there are a few hours for you to sign up at the cost of £25 for the year. Do it now and save yourself a fiver at this link here.
Today, we’ve got some great bits on Harry Enfield, Bananarama and Jamie Oliver’s poker night, but we start with a dispatch from the local neighbourhood.
Pony for a Whistle
Around the streets of Soho, you will find an advert for a tailor called Mark Powell. The advert shows a portrait of Powell with the slogan ‘An M.P You Can Trust.’
Powell – who makes suits for Martin Freeman and well-refreshed DJ, Seth Troxler, makes much of his connections with organised crime figures, boasting that he used to make suits for the Krays when they were in prison.
But Powell’s connections to the underworld are more than synthetic. In Michael Gillard’s classic piece of journalism, Legacy, we meet the ‘dandy gangster’, Jimmy Holmes, who became infamous for falling out with the ‘untouchable’ David Hunt.
In 1990s Soho, Powell rented his first shop from Holmes on Archer Street, and agreed to be the front of house for a bar called Violet’s (named after the Krays’ mother).
Powell then fell out with Holmes in an extended episode that involved bleach, locked doors and a meeting with David Hunt. Some of our readers will be comforted to know that Holmes’ revenge entered the literary sphere, with the publication of a novel which has become something of a cult classic.
Most of the characters within are based on genuine villains, and there is a tailor called ‘Johnnie Peacock’, ‘a balding, bolshie egomaniac’ who is known as ‘Cocky’. It’s a fascinating portrait of Soho in the 1990s – you can read a chapter here, though we will warn you that it is unbelievably offensive.
On a night out, the reader meets Phil Dirtbox, ‘a six foot six pipe cleaner in a black bowler hat’ who is ‘the coolest man some doughnuts will never get to meet’.
Dirtbox is very much a real-life figure, and ran illegal shebeens around London, which were covered in a Channel 4 arts programme you can watch here. Last seen working at Gerry’s Bar, Dirtbox had his nose broken by Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray at Soho House after he started to recite his spoken word poetry at them.
And you know what? Fair enough to the Hollywood heavy-hitters. Dirtbox’s poetry really is fucking dreadful.
Michael Gillard’s Legacy is one of the great books about London. You can buy a copy here.
That Harmless Bloodsport
Alongside strikes, inflation and power cuts, one of the most irritating aspects of Britain’s current political ‘situation’ is the cavalcade of self-styled satirists gleefully harvesting clicks with a dirge-like wit. We will say nothing on Fence unfavourites Led by Donkeys and Russ-in-Cheshire for the time being, as we were fascinated to learn that Tom Walker, the actor who plays Jonathan Pie, has ‘been offered a part in a US film’.
In an interview with Keep Colchester Cool (not a joke), Walker relays that he is returning to his first love – the theatre. Alas, a peremptory glance at Jonathan Pie’s Twitter shows the character is still very much unretired. Might some helpful casting director send another job in Tom’s general direction?
First Flight from Santo Domingo
So, farewell Boris Johnson – for now, at least. What prompted last night’s unexpected withdrawal? His allies insist that he had the requisite 100 votes, and speaking to a number of Westminster insiders, it does seem that there were a few MPs who had privately assured Johnson of their vote but did not publicly declare their intentions.
So why did Johnson slink back to the Caribbean? It’s unlikely to have been an act in the national interest. Could it have been that he had failed to secure the support of the right-wing press who had been so instrumental in helping Liz Truss to Downing Street (see the current Private Eye for further details).
One of the key texts in the discipline that one might call ‘Johnson Studies’ is the chapter he wrote in The Oxford Myth in 1988 (a collection edited by his sister, Rachel). Within the book, he expounds on what he has learned in his incipient political career as a union hack, and how he relies on ‘stooges’, writing that the ‘The tragedy of the stooge is that . . . he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth.’
And that ‘The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.’
Looking through the list of candidates who declared for Johnson, you can see that he was marooned with a bunch of loyalists, ultras and lunatics – only the ‘stooges’ still supported him. It would have been particularly galling to Johnson’s ego to see that only one of the 20 or so Old Etonian Tory MPs supported him – Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Stuck with a bunch of people for whom he has little admiration or respect, it’s likely that Johnson decided to call it quits while he could. For now, his political career seems over. The after-dinner circuit awaits.
Slick Literary Siblings
As some of you will know, we have a book published with Headline which makes for the ideal present for a jocular uncle or morose mother-in-law. Tracking 101 forgotten siblings of the canon, it’s available to buy at a very reasonable price indeed, and makes for a reasonable acquisition for those of you currently ‘in the market for presents’. Jade Angleles Fitton – a woman of immaculate taste – has shared some photos of the book here, so you can get a handle on the really very funny jokes that lie within.
If you’d like to get your hands on a copy, then the easiest and most agreeable way of doing so is through Waterstones’ online store, or there are some on the shelves at Daunt’s. A jaunt to Daunt’s – how exciting.
Dealer’s Choice
There’s nothing wrong with middle-aged men getting together to play poker – but there is something a bit strange about a group of middle-aged celebrities getting together to play poker and declare that their poker night is ‘cool’.
We have long heard rumours that Giles Coren and a crew of former child actors are hosted by Jamie Oliver for a poker night, and we have found the evidence in Dexter Fletcher’s Instagram. We’re hoping for even more extended social media coverage the next time ‘The Crazy Pineapples’ link up for an evening.
Dizzy Gillespie on Trumpet
Many people who really should know better are claiming that Rishi Sunak is the first ethnic minority Prime Minister, neatly forgetting that Benjamin Disraeli was in Number 10 on more than one occasion.
Fergus Butler-Gallie imagines Disraeli as the tedious freelance hack he would be if he was alive today. It’s a cacklingly funny piece that we commend to you all.
The Love Box in Your Living Room
Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, who have been funny on TV since before we were born, made perhaps the most brilliant work of satire in the last decade with the Story of the Twos, a sketch-review of 50 years of BBC 2, which is loaded with so many moments of genius it really is hard which one to pick first (okay: here is their takedown of Monty Python with the best John Cleese impersonation you’ll ever see).
So the happy news that the BBC centenary is to be marked with a special programme from Enfield & Whitehouse has us all aflutter: you can be assured that we’ll be watching it on Thursday night – you can check out the trailer here.
The Pablo Escobar of Stamford Hill
While the BBC gets a beating from both extremes of the ideological spectrum, permit us to be a little bit cheesy and say that their output really is very, very, very good – and definitely something for the nation to be proud of. One of the joys of iPlayer is having some jewels brought up from the archive, and there is a particularly brilliant series by Vanessa Eagle now available for your viewing pleasure.
Filmed in 2008, it looks at contemporary Jewish life, and starts with a profile of Samuel Leibowitz, an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jew, who has multiple convictions for drug smuggling.
The episode tracks Samuel as he leaves prison and returns to his community in north London. It’s an absolutely stunning piece of journalism that really should be more widely known. You should watch it here.
In Case You Missed It
Friend of the mag, Imogen West-Knights sets sail for adventure and intrigue and sends us this thrilling message in a bottle from her time on a Gone Girl Cruise.
The Associated Press’ Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman and Claire Galofaro tell a stomach-churning tale of kidnap-as-adoption in Afghanistan.
Frank Landymore says boffins fed the Fibonacci sequence into a quantum computer and created a new phase of matter.
Jacqueline Keeler breaks the story of Sacheen Littlefeather, the recently departed Native American actress and activist, whose family say was not Native American at all.
Amid the welcome news that Adnan Syed has had all charges against him dropped, Twitter user and legal activist @ismarygp chimes in with the eyebrow-raising story of Melvin Ortiz, an unheralded, and convincingly argued case, for his wrongful imprisonment.
And Finally
While the current crop of parliamentarians are a mixed bunch (to say the very least), it’s a myth that the Palace of Westminster once drew the nation’s best and brightest to shuffle down its corridors. In that vein, allow us to share with you a scarcely believable video from the 1980s, in which the-then chart-topping pop duo, Bananarama, hire a posse of MPs to lip-sync to their hits. The gruesome sight of Cyril Smith in sunglasses may be the most shocking bit (and how ironic that Geoffrey Dickens makes the cut, too), but if somebody could make a gif of that dead-eyed hand gesture Norman St-John Stevas executes here, then we would be much obliged.
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That’s it for this week, we’ll join you next Monday with a special piece from Father Alex Frost, the Vicar of St Matthew’s, Burnley. In the meantime, you can get in touch with a member of the editorial team by replying to this email. And do remember that at 9pm the price of a subscription goes up to £30. There’s a link just below. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF
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