Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence. This week, we can’t think of a pithy introductory line, but we have got a bumper edition lined up for you – we’ve put in some junior investment banker hours to collate another edition that will leave you thinking: ‘why are you guys giving this away for free?’
We’ll tell you why. If people keep subscribing to the quarterly print magazine at the zany, zany price of £30 for the year (again, practically giving it away for free) then we’ll keep bulking and broadening out this mail-out. If you’ve been reading this for a while, and you look forward to its arrival every Monday/Tuesday, don’t be a cheapskate, do the right thing and sign up today. It goes without saying that the print magazine is pretty good, too.
Some admin stuff: new website’s on the horizon, hold tight, but the old one’s still working just fine. Issue 15 is going to come out in mid-April and is looking sumptuous so far. Lots of great pieces, very few of them about London, and at least eight pieces from outside the M25 (we do listen to what you say).
Aux armes, citoyens! For your delectation this week we have Lineker (of course we do) along with John Galliano, Boris Johnson, and Hanif Kureishi – it’s the Groucho toilets in 1995 up in here. But first, a featurette on the voice of the voiceless, Sir Paul Marshall.
Kelvin MacKenzie’s Gunboats
When GB News was launched in July 2021, some people felt ‘Gbeebies’ would prove a poor imitation of Fox News, while others thought that it was a much-needed alternative to the BBC, a broadcaster that would finally provide value for underserved audiences outside of major cities.
Almost two years later, the near-immediate resignation of the-then chairman Andrew Neil, seems like a distant memory as GB News is roiled in multiple controversies as its presenters have fielded thousands of complaints from Ofcom. Last month, Laurence Fox interviewed Tina Peers, who claimed that 58 percent of women on the Pfizer vaccine had suffered miscarriages. Neil Oliver, the former chairman for the National Trust for Scotland, has echoed antisemitic tropes with his dark monologues. And just over a week ago, infamous tabloid editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, suggested that Rishi Sunak should send in the Special Air Service to shoot ‘12 or 20’ illegal immigrants in the English Channel.
While GB News has achieved some success in ratings, it has also recorded a loss of more than £30 million this past year, set against a turnover of £3.6 million. Which does beg the question: what is the channel’s purpose? What is animating its investors – money? Or something else?
The original backers of GB News have been bought out by Legatum Ventures and Sir Paul Marshall, who is also the proprietor of UnHerd, a digital platform which shares contributors with this very publication. So far, Marshall has lent almost £5.7 million to Unherd, on top of his tens of millions of investments in GB News.
Marshall has made fortune as a founder of Marshall Wace, one of the country’s leading hedge funds. Looking through his Twitter timeline, one can see retweets in support of Russell Brand, denials of climate change and the ‘hypersexualisation’ in Sam Smith’s latest music video.
Does Marshall truly believe these various political views? Yes, he does – according to his former employees. We are told that the only topic that cannot be broached is attacks on evangelical Christianity (though there are plenty of hitpieces on Justin Welby).
Marshall is a key member of Holy Trinity Brompton, an extraordinarily influential church that was helmed by the redoubtable Nicky Gumbel (and once counted Gumbel’s fellow Old Etonian, Justin Welby, among its flock).
Prior to the Brexit referendum, Marshall was a member and backer of the Liberal Democrats, and a co-author of The Orange Book, which helped push Britain’s third party away from ‘soggy socialism’ and towards a pro-market position. And, in an act that is often forgotten, Marshall campaigned for ‘pupil premiums’, a piece of policy that was introduced in 2010 by the coalition government, a grant given to schools with a high number of disadvantaged pupils – a piece of legislation that is still in place today.
Marshall is one of the most powerful men in the country, and has a record of achievement that few other titans of industry can lay claim to. Does he want to push the country further rightwards? Or has he got too much time on his hands?
According to a number of sources, at the UnHerd summer party, Sir Paul Marshall made a speech, in front of the editors and writers, claiming that some of the best writing comes not in the commissioned pieces, but in the comments, where Marshall himself had an account, albeit briefly.
Like Elon Musk, it seems that all Sir Paul Marshall wants to do is to be good at posting.
Some Porky Pies
Last week, we suggested that Isabel Oakeshott and Michael Ashcroft made up the story about David Cameron fucking a pig because they had nothing good on him, and so they recycled some details from the last Oxford haute monde scandal. However, a correspondent writes in with an intriguing email. It’s worth bearing in mind that Oakeshott claims their source was an Oxford contemporary of Cameron’s, and also a Conservative MP. We publish the message in full below.
‘An incidental follow-up to the item on Piggate, though perhaps you're aware already: shortly after the publication of Call Me Dave, I went out for drinks with someone who had spent the afternoon at a junket near City Hall in the company of mid-level political hacks and some thirsty Conservative backbenchers. The event involved a lot of claret and a longer-than-fleeting appearance from the-then Mayor of London, who – our source swears blind – was overheard boasting about how he himself had provided Oakeshott and the book's ‘author’ with the only anecdote it will ever be remembered for. The account is all-too-believable, which, given the future Prime Minister's casual relationship with factual accuracy, would alas suggest that the events recounted never took place.’
Tell it to Me Straight
Now, we’re looking to commission pieces for Issue 16, and there’s a general feeling among the editorial team that we would like to have more first-hand accounts. So, if you work in an industry that you feel is misrepresented or misunderstood by the media and you feel you’ve got some ‘lived experience’ to share with our readers, then do get in touch with us at the usual channels and it’ll be taken from there. Don’t worry if you’re not a writer – no one cares about that. Send us an email and we’ll make magic happen together.
A couple years back, we were on quite a good run: there was this timeless number from a former BBC employee tasked with maintaining balance during the Brexit debates, and we had a really quite funny piece from a senior book publisher (which is loaded with genuine insight) and then there was this short by a youngish Master of the Universe.
So, we’d like stuff from the financial, legal or medical worlds, but there’s no real strict rules or guidelines, anyone is welcome. We look forward to hearing from you.
The Time is Now
£30 really isn’t that much money – it’s a round of pints when you’re out, or if you’re feeling fancy, it’s two bottles of Aldi champagne. (And they don’t last very long, and you’ll look like a bit of a sad act if you’re leaving them hanging around your sitting room.)
If you’re getting a low thrill of joy from this weekly newsletter, and it’s setting you up nicely for the week in regards to pub anecdotes and weekly viewing material, then please do subscribe to the print magazine, which is rammed full of writing from the best youngish authors on the block and beautiful illustrations. (And you will look very cool when you leave the mags hanging around your sitting room.)
£30 allows us to produce 50 newsletters and four magazines, and we’re a lot cheaper than our peers and quite a few Substacks. Subscribe today and help us grow.
A Passage to India
Celebrations were heard from Chandigarh to Chennai as RRR triumphed at the Oscars, winning the award for best song with Naatu Naatu – a rollicking thumper of a tune with some truly mind blowing choreography.
On a side note, the clip above is a relative low point in the three-hour film, an action thriller that makes John Woo’s work look like a Merchant and Ivory number, and we really can’t commend it to you enough. It’s also a bracingly acute piece of anticolonialism, presenting the British Raj in Trumpian terms, all gaudy architecture and vain posturing; so it is, in some ways, the perfect partner piece to a Merchant and Ivory number. It’s available on Netflix.
Après le Déluge
So, the scores are on the doors and it is, decisively, Lineker - 1 and the assembled forces of state malfeasance - 0. What was the takeaway from all of this? Well, the affable former footballer can now return to his usual weekend activities – seducing young Sloanes at Electric House on the Portobello Road; TV hosting – with renewed vigour, having left a black eye on pretty much just the chairman of the BBC and also, sort of, the government.
But the big wheel keeps on turning. Sunak, under cover of a media storm, nipped over to Paris to go and get continental assent for his new solution to the migrant crisis. There is a junior doctor strike that can’t get an inch of column coverage; ditto the latest round of rail strikes, which seem destined to rumble on forever. There’s a budget coming up, too, which will, in the spirit of its author, Jeremy Hunt, barely register with you as it emerges but will somehow make every aspect of your life worse for the next 12 years. Oh, and energy bill support runs out next month.
By no means are we whatabouting a stupid bit of partisan overreach by the imperilled state broadcaster and its successful resistance by a coterie of beloved household names. Good on them, it was great to watch a bit of solidarity in action. We have, however, not witnessed the dawn of a new age of liberal dissent; we’ve watched an entertaining play where our guy – an elfin crisp enthusiast worth millions of pounds – won the day this time around. Back to work; there’s a million other things to strike about.
Baghdad Bad Dad Bags With Dad
The great, great novelist and screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi, had an accident on Boxing Day, and remains bedbound and lacking mobility in his arms and legs. But his brilliant mind is still sparkling away, and he has been publishing some of the most fascinating threads on Twitter – threads that will go down as some of the best work ever published on that platform.
Yesterday, as part of a personal series on drugs, pornography and the death of liberalism, Kureishi wrote that he had enjoyed some ‘great cocaine nights with my children.’
While passing a joint around the generations is an infrequent but ultimately unremarkable sight, crunching down on Class As with your parents really is a rare beast; in some ways, one of the last taboos (from a cod psychology level: something about an act of merry destruction with the people who created you? Something like that?)
Now, if you’ve done hard drugs with your mum and dad, we’ll presume that you don’t really want to speak to us, but you should probably speak to a therapist – and on a weekly basis. Nevertheless, if you would like to reach out, or even tell us some tales second-hand, wing through a reply to this address.
In Case You Missed It
Recurrent guest of this section, Clive Martin, has another cracker of a piece in The Face’s latest edition on the tyranny of organised fun.
For our friends over at the Gray Lady, Rory Smith profiles the brightest new star in European football, Napoli’s Georgian wonderkid Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
The London Review Bookshop have announced the launch of the Martha Mills Young Writers’ Prize, set up in memory of Merope Mills and Paul Laity’s daughter who passed away in 2021. You should check out the details here.
Our very own editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, has had his brilliant memoir serialised this week. We’ll be banging on about it much more in the weeks to come, but get yourself a taste now.
An oldie but a goldie: Susan Orlean writes on two restaurants called Centro Vasco, caught between Havana, Miami, and competing visions of Cuba.
And Finally
Unlike the media-sphere and film and TV, the fashion world remains almost impervious to cancel culture. In the grand scheme of things, this is perhaps not entirely a good thing; but if the hot faucet of terminal online justice had come for John ‘I Love Hitler’ Galliano, then we would not be blessed with this video, in which we take a tour of his ‘treasure-filled hideaway’ in northern France.
Forget Anthony Blunt. Forget Brian Sewell. No British homosexual man has ever operated at this level before. The whole thing is worth watching in its entirety, but allow us to direct you to this part, as Galliano, his face sheened with Botoxed pleasure, shows the viewer his ‘Salon Jaune’.
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Done and done! That’s it for this week – if you’ve made it this far, you’ll know very well that any message, query, question, tip, tout and tale can be sent to all of the editorial staff by responding to this here email. And if this is your first time getting to the bottom of this email, welcome aboard and be sure to keep to the same guidance. And look outside, the sun is out! Catch you next week, as spring comes into its own.
All the best,
TF
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