Dear Readers,
Good evening once again, and welcome to the one-hundred-and-fourth edition of Off The Fence: the greatest Tuesletter on God’s green earth. We have reached that point in every issue’s life cycle where first and second drafts are now inching toward completion, as Issue 15 of our frankly stunning magazine begins to take shape. It’d be silly to give away too much ahead of time but already, we’re set to be swinging into 2023 as strongly as ever, with explosive investigations, incisive essays and outright slander galore – trust us, you do not want to miss it.
We are also, excitingly, putting the final touches on our new website, which is looking fantastic, and will allow us to bring you even more primo content – old and new; short and long – for years and years to come. Heads up, though: it will be coming with a paywall, which you should move to avoid now by signing up to the print mag before the end of February. Get on the right side of the Fence, in every sense, for the low, low price of £30 a year. We’re giving it away, honestly, so snatch it off us while you can!
For your delectation this week, we have some light luvvie bashing, a tray of toecurlers from our elected representatives, and a generous handful of media discourse to toss all over everything like so much curly parsley. But first, George Walker writes of the undignified public battles between two titans of Teesside.
I’m Only Teesing
Stop all the clocks: Johnsonism lives on in Teesside! The Tories might be set for electoral devastation in 2024, but in the north-east, acolytes of our third-latest Prime Minister are still squatting on the area: there’s former Levelling-Up Secretary, Simon Clarke, in Middlesbrough South East and Cleveland; Parmo populist Matt Vickers in Stockton South and the baby-faced Jacob Young in Redcar. But leading the charge for Borisismo is Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley Mayor, whose brand of localist, interventionist Conservatism swept him to re-election last year with 73% of the vote
Caught in the middle of the dawn of Tory Teesside, however, is Labour’s Andy McDonald, the MP for Middlesborough. McDonald – an old-school Labour man, and member of the Socialist Campaign Group – has found himself fairly disenfranchised, locally and nationally, against a turning political tide and a leader dead-set on moving away from the left. So, faced with this purgatory, he has put his gloves up and decided to go after the blue-badged arrivistes dominating the northeast – with a particular hate for Houchen.
The first big flashpoint between McDonald and Houchen is the Teesworks freeport on the site of the area’s former steelworks. Houchen and the South Tees Development Corporation bought the entirety of the land back in February 2019, with a bid to create a deregulatory, tax-lite freeport for businesses, in what would become known as Teesworks. By October 2021, Houchen confirmed its development, with the project pointing to economic regeneration and that ever-nebulous promise of ‘jobs’.
McDonald was straight on to the freeport after its announcement, jamming a thorn into Houchen’s side by lambasting its potential for drug smuggling through the zone. Next, he took to the Yorkshire Post to demand proper union representation on the freeport’s board, before calling for an inquiry into the freeport’s purportedly shadowy ownership. Finally, Houchen was rattled. Responding to McDonald’s article and proposed investigation, Houchen announced on his Facebook page that he had blocked the MP on Twitter, calling him a ‘taxpayer funded troll [who’s] lying and trying to smear me.’ Ding ding, round one.
Obviously, McDonald couldn’t let that lie, and he took to Twitter – where else? – to call Houchen’s conduct ‘an utterly pathetic way for an elected representative to behave’. Oof, tasty. Houchen spat back that ‘Andy’s wild conspiracy theories’ were ‘random baseless accusations without foundation’, before intoning that the right honourable member was getting the same response any online troll might expect: a block, from the Mayor himself. Gentlemen, please! You’re making a scene!
Spats have erupted once more over the freeport’s expansion, and the mass die-off across the Teeside coast that some scientists are suggesting are owed to the scheme. McDonald brought the issue up in Parliament in October, using the grand old arena to accuse Houchen of ‘pumping out false and misleading information’ about the amount of material being dumped into the sea by the freeport river dredgers.
Of course, Houchen had been spoiling for a fight, and could barely contain his excitement. Quick as a shot, Houchen announced that he’d be submitting a formal complaint about McDonald’s lies, going as far as to say that ‘this is not the first time he's said things that are untrue in Parliament and I have no doubt it won’t be the last’. McDonald continued hot on Houchen’s tail, calling for a pause on the dredging; Houchen, in turn, decried how ‘frightening it was’ that an MP could be so ‘ignorant’. Their rivalry rumbles on, and will do so for at least another year, but at this point, you’d hope they could break a pool cue in half and settle this tit-for-tat properly so we don’t have to hear any more of it.
George Walker is a writer from Middlesbrough. You can find him on Twitter here.
Actors Are Essentially Tarts
Richard E Grant is indelibly linked with Withnail and I, in which he played the lead role some 35 years ago – and he hasn’t been in anything good/ good in anything since. In the soigné luvvie stakes, Jeremy Irons has more velvet sexiness; Bill Nighy more genuine acting chops, yet Grant (born Richard Esterhuysen) has somehow crept up the National Treasure League, with his giggling trips to expensive hotels, unnerving fangirling about Barbara Streisand and his bizarrely successful self-promotion on social media, where he’s big into the front-facing camera videos.
So allow us to shine a light on the actor’s Instagram grid – where he munches panettone by a roaring fire, broadcasts his delight with the Oscar nominations (he’s just happy for all his friends), does a performative jig to a Tina Turner classic in Carole Bamford’s house in Barbados (did his stay overlap with Boris Johnson’s?) And so on and so forth.
What do you think of his shtick? Reply to this email and let us know if you buy it. Or not.
The Butler Called
Kudos to Mic Wright, who has published a map of the dynasties in today’s British mediascape, and so managed to irritate quite a fair few people. The map misses out a couple of dynasties who we won’t be crass enough to name, but it’s decent cartography, nevertheless – you can zoom in and out to your heart’s content at this link here. (Though we were fascinated to learn that Violet Powell edited The Oldie. Impressive work from beyond the grave.)
It set off a few, shall we say, animated discussions, the vehemence of which surprised us a little – hasn’t pointing them out been an outsider pastime since time immemorial? Haven’t connections always been a feature of this whole shebang?
Broader questions arise: Is having supportive, wealthy parents arguably more useful than having family contacts in the media? And is nepotism really the worst thing in British media?
To be honest, there are a few other chunky issues in British media today, and, for the sake of it, we’ll list some of them: the fetishisation of bluechip American publications; the culture war crusades; the low wages; the collapse of digital media; the SLAPPs, the libel laws; the inexorable influence of right-wing billionaires; the editorial influence of left-wing billionairesses – there’s a lot going on, and there’s a lot to get angry on the internet about (and at dinner parties, too, if you go to them).
Most of these issues are arbitrary to us. Our biggest problem has been making people subscribe to the magazine and stop people enjoying all our content for free. Thankfully, we’re about to have a paywall in the next fortnight, which will do the trick, we reckon. So if you want to keep reading The Fence, subscribe today.
Korma Korma Chameleon
Many of you will remember Sejal Sukhadwala’s classic piece, In Search of Memsahib. In the 1980s, it was ‘the place to be’ in East Putney, thanks to a particularly brilliant – and very politically incorrect – marketing campaign that made fun of Indian restaurants in every conceivable way.
As Sejal wrote, it seemed that the restaurant had sunk without trace, but we have got a new tranche of documents from Lytisha, whose grandparents used to live next to the Nawab of Memsahib, the patron himself, who was called Ron.
And if you think that’s a funny thing for a suburban tandoori impresario to be called, you are right (in your own kind of snobbish way). But if you want to see real comic genius, have a look at this advert that Ron wrote, which we are now able to republish, thanks to Lytisha.
What the World Needs Now, Are Tweets, Sweet Tweets
Today is, of course, Valentine’s Day. What are our normally hashtag-happy political representatives firing out into the Musk-osphere on this loveliest of days?
As befits people with, er, often complex romantic relationships, most MPs simply avoided the occasion altogether: Damian Green issued perhaps the most gloriously boring tweet of the day as he announced that the unemployment claimant count in his Ashford constituency had fallen by 550 in the last year. Similarly, the less famous Eagle, Maria the MP for Garston, has spent the entire day exclusively retweeting variations of an article about the Champions League. Others have been closer to the traditional Valentine’s custom of sending unsolicited messages to people you admire from afar: Simon Hoare, MP for North Dorset’s sole tweet so far is a faintly simping quote tweet of Dr Bendor Grosvenor (sometime politico, current art historian) and his recent BBC trip to Cardiff. Some did name Valentine’s Day explicitly: SNP MP Jon Nicholson decided to share what he maintained was a ‘secret’ valentine with his 56,000 d followers. Meanwhile, MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield used the Valentine’s Day hashtag to randomly link to a campaign to improve our rivers (as well as, of course, to retweet a Suzanne Moore Article on the Tavistock clinic).
But the hopeless romantic prize goes to the MP for Chorley, Sir Lindsay Hoyle who decided to mark Valentine’s Day by retweeting a video of The Four Tops. Reach out, The Speaker will be there (haha.)
In Case You Missed It
Joel Golby bids farewell to his years-long London Rental Opportunity series, with an appropriately angry final entry, Landlords Are A Scum Class.
From the badlands of York Way, Sam Edwards explores the world of art behind bars in Mexico’s toughest prisons.
In interviewland, Harrison Ford seems extremely sound in the Hollywood Reporter and Walter Mosley thinks America is getting dumber.
Ben Sixsmith tears into Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell’s boring but terrifyingly popular podcast – we dread to think how many of you listen to it.
For GQ, Francisco Garcia pens an extraordinary dispatch from mafia-controlled Calabria, in conversation with the turncoat scion of the fearsome ‘Ndrangheta.
Otessa Moshfegh pens this week’s most spouted about piece for the Paris Review. Summer Brennan does a close reading of the same.
Dan Charnas talks about Another Batch, the 1998 J Dilla mixtape that changed music forever, for Pitchfork.
And Finally
With love in the air, you might want some suitably romantic watching for the occasion. Perhaps you’ll find your drug of choice on the Hallmark Channel where, as Laura Barton reports this week, their patented Loveuary series will unfurl six new Valentine’s themed schmaltzfests for your perusal in the next few days. (If this seems like an alarmingly fecund slate of brand new original fare, consider that in 2021 alone, the channel developed, produced and released 41 Christmas movies).
Or maybe you prefer things a tad more old-fashioned, in which case we can heartily recommend the match-making festival at Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, where the great and good of Ireland (mostly, but not all of them, farmers) have been gone to find prospective matches for 182 years.
But for a more recent delve into the historical record, you can’t go wrong with the Found Footage Festival’s peerless compilations of 1980s Video Dating Testimonials, which stand as good a testament to the ceaseless search for love as anything ever committed to film.
Whether you’re an executive by day, and wild man by night or just an everyday research mathematician with extremely high verbal skills, there’s something here for everyone.
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Time to clear up the plates and finish the last dregs of wine, as it’s a wrap for this week — your Uber’s on the way. We would be remiss if we did not say once again that if you have any question or query, seriously anything at all, about any topic that you like (although preferably something about the magazine), please ping it back to this email and we’ll endeavour to get it answered for you.
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All the best,
TF
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