Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that lives for the moment. We do have some wares to hawk, but we have got a particularly satisfying edition for you all today, one that we hope you will enjoy.
Some important business: this is your last opportunity to update your address if you’re a subscriber to the print magazine. You can do so on your account on our website, and please email support@the-fence.com if you’re having any problems.
Issue 24 is scheduled to arrive in the next seven days, and we look forward to telling you all about it in due course.
If you haven’t signed up for a subscription to the print magazine, now is the optimal time, and there is a link just below.
Our new ‘vertical’, Capital Letter, continues to delight, and last week returned to London’s most embarrassing art gallery.
For those interested in advertising in this mail-out, we do have a media pack available – please email cb@the-fence.com and one will be forthcoming.
This week, we’ve got a bit of a scoop about the latest reality TV star with unlikely political designs.
Nothing But a Grafter
Two men from Essex have become famous lately for saying the word ‘bosh’ a lot. One of them is ‘Big John’ Fisher, an uxorious middle-aged man who orders an excess of Chinese food. The other is the much younger Thomas Skinner, who has been skirting around the parapets of celebrity since his appearance on The Apprentice in 2019.
Skinner has become a breakout star on social media, and has pivoted towards politics, hinting at a run at the London mayoral elections, and recently appearing on stage with the politician Danny Kruger and the historian-turned-Brexit-jihadi Robert Tombs at a conference hamfistedly titled ‘Now and England’.
There was also a particularly excruciating appearance with another Tory MP here, with both Skinner and Robert Jenrick, sun beating on their faces, pints in hand, visibly uncomfortable in each other’s presence and promising to end ‘tool theft’.
Many were quick to point out that Skinner was convicted in 2011 for handling £40,000 of stolen goods. He certainly seems a risky ally for an anti-crime politician, and it seems bizarre to say the least that he is mulling a run at County Hall.
Skinner is an unguarded presence on social media, where he posts regular updates across Twitter and Instagram. One pair of eagle eyes managed to capture the moment when he did a bit of promo for Stevie Hunt, the owner of Hunt’s Waste Management.
While there is no suggestion that Stevie Hunt is in any way connected with crime, he has inherited his recycling business from his uncle, David, regarded by the Metropolitan Police as ‘too big to bring down’. If that all sounds a bit too heavy for you, here’s a photo of Big John with some grapes up his nose.
The Name’s Bond, Jemima Bond
The digital footprint for the wonderfully named Blaise Metreweli, the incoming head of MI6, has increased significantly in the last month, not least after it was reported that her grandfather was a Nazi and that she attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
As the new ‘C’, Metreweli is now an international figure, and Tom Whipple has looked for breadcrumbs of her former life online, making much of her CMG and her passion for rowing, though leaving out her now-hidden entry on Companies House.
Well, if you recall the case of Gareth Williams, an address in Pimlico is a bit of a giveaway for a spy.
Leave Me in This Field
Even just 20 years ago, the coverage of Glastonbury used to be confined to the late-night slot on BBC2 and some agreeably revolting photos of the melange of crusties, hippies and ravers who used to throng the festival. Now, with round-the-clock coverage on the box and updates on the Guardian live blog, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to be resident in Britain in late June and not consider yourself a moral and social failure for spending the weekend getting off your face in Somerset.
Well, after the grid photos and five-star reviews gave you a burst of FOMO, allow us to present a series of videos that will unleash a profound sense of JOMO: that’s Joy of Missing Out. So enjoy not being woken up by the Stone Circle at 10am, avoiding this ‘wine stall’, sleeping through these Ends of Days scenes and not having to talk or interact with any of these people.
That Stone Circle video is just haunting. It should be used in PSHE classes.
Money Money Money Money Money
Everybody’s got a price. How much are you worth? If you are ever kidnapped, your captors will certainly have one idea – but in the City of London, one little-discussed sector of the insurance industry will have another. Hopefully, for your sake, they’ll meet in the middle.
An anonymous desker at one of these firms, who would negotiate hostage fees between episodes of Escape to the Country, tells us precisely how your value is established, who is bargaining on your behalf, and how tangential shifts in the global economy can lead to spikes in kidnappings. This insider piece is one of the most extraordinary things we have ever published: you can read it here for free online, and can use the handy table to work out your value on Instagram.
Pre-Orderly Cues
We have a book called The Pub coming out on August 14. It was mentioned briefly in last week’s newsletter, but if you’re nervously returning to your stack of unread Off The Fences after several months away, we’ll give you a quick primer. It’s a star-studded miscellany in homage to Britain’s finest institution; an antidote to gallery-shop guidebooks and ale-stained CAMRA directories. It’s the best book ever produced about the pint, and will serve as a steadfast companion to your drinking habits forevermore, wherever you happen to find yourself in the British Isles.
We want you to snatch it off shelves when it comes out, naturally. But more than this, we want you to pre-order the thing, for a couple of reasons. First, because we care about you, and can only predict the devastation that seeing it in others’ hands will cause when you do not have your own copy on launch day. Secondly, the mechanics of publishing are such that a pre-order is almost twice as important as a sale: the more pre-orders we get, the more love we’ll get from our publishers, who’ll give us more of a push, leading to more sales, more books and overall, more from us in future.
That’s why we are already fantastically appreciative to the hundreds of you that have pre-ordered your copy already. Everyone who orders through Backstory will be entered into a raffle: ten of you will bag two issues and a tote; five will get a year’s free subscription; and one lucky soul will win a pub crawl with our pints correspondent Jimmy McIntosh (seen here bothering a Brewdog on TikTok). You’ll even get free delivery if you use promo code UKSONLYBOOKSHOP. Click the button below, or any of the seven hyperlinks crowbarred into this section, and snag your copy.
Crosstown Traffic
Wearily, we look once more across the Atlantic to the dons at New York, the very best mag in the game (present company excluded). Clearly not tiring in their efforts to put out an agenda-setting banger every fortnight, their latest lead feature tackles a subject dear to our heart: the web traffic apocalypse, and what that means for digital – if not all – publishing.
Like all great pieces of this kind, nothing is observed that isn’t already screamingly obvious to anyone who has used the internet recently; which is to say, everyone. Twitter is dead, Bluesky is Bluesky, Google is ditching links and articles for a full pivot to AI. The infrastructure of modern media, already hastily cobbled together in the 2010s to counteract the untimely passing of print, is poised to collapse at any moment. The old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; in this interregnum, you should subscribe to The Fence.
Very fortunately, our model is one of the few that isn’t completely imperilled by the next sea-change in how we consume information. For that, we have our subscribers to thank. As long as we have you, we’re golden. And if we have even more of you, we’ll be strong enough to weather any storm that may come our way. In return, you get four phenomenal issues of The UK’s Only Magazine each year, this newsletter, the other newsletter, podcasts, books and all other forms of wonderment that we can cook up in our office. Subscribe today for only £29.99 a year – cheaper than a round and better than the rest, always.
(No) Fashion Victim
For many years, we have heard the fantastical rumour of a canicidal fashion designer; of a leading figure in the world of international style who, in a pique of rage, murdered an employee’s puppy before hushing it all up with waves of NDAs.
We hoped that we would burrow down to get to the truth. To unmask the dastardly designer to the world, and watch the Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame grow priapic with traffic. Now we have found out what actually happened all those years ago, and it’s much more boring than we could have ever anticipated.
Rather than kicking an employee’s dog to death and covering up the murder with legal eagles, the designer in question merely replaced a recently deceased dog with a new dog that was exactly the same breed, then gave the new dog the same name as the dead dog – which, while a bit odd, is broadly fine when you think about it.
More of a Fashion Victim
A recent survey by Kaiaa has found the ten most unfashionable celebrities in the year 2025 are as follows, in ranking order: Miley Cyrus, Heidi Klum, Pamela Anderson, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Doja Cat, Ke$ha, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Whoopi Goldberg and Julia Fox.
Which is unfair on Lizzo, and also on women in general, as there are no men on the list. As such, may we humbly nominate Paul Mescal to the top of the list as the most unfashionable celebrity? The ensemble below is luminously awful and is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his fashion crimes.
In Case You Missed It
The dark world of an ayahuasca guru.
The (relatively) recent EU summit in Albania was deeply childish, from the welcome video where all the leaders were turned into AI babies to Erdoğan trapping Macron’s finger in a new form of diplomacy.
The real story of The Salt Pathis as fascinating as it is popular. You may not have missed it, but ICYMI, here it is.
Incumbent New York Mayor Eric Adams has tweeted a video of him ‘getting things done’ in which he fails to complete a single task.
The story of two Alabama lawyers who got rich selling easy Mexican divorces, including to Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra.
And Finally
For some reason, several nations' army orchestras find Russia’s (objectively brilliant) national anthem very tricky to play. The Saudis made a good start of it before the wheels really fell off 37 seconds in, which is still a better performance than the Egyptians who never seemed up to the task.
Worst of all, though, is a rendition of the Russian anthem by the Syrians during then-president Dmitry Medvedev’s visit in 2009, the most listenable part of which is when the news anchor is still talking over the top of the first few notes. Russian politics is not quite the rich source of comedy it once was and yet we feel that there is still a value in pointing and laughing at these awful anthems, if for no other reason than the fact they are an obvious embarrassment to Putin – who really does care about this sort of thing – as well as all those who cosied up to him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apo-AMTetbU
There we are, all sorted. Should anything you read here prompt some kind of follow-up, send your queries to support@the-fence.com and we will attend to them, and you, as promptly as is humanly possible. The Hyde Park Cinema in Leeds is the world’s last remaining gas-lit cinema (for gaslighting cinemas, try Peckhamplex). Speak soon.
All the best,
TF