Dear Readers,
Good morning and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that comes to you bright and early for a change. Issue 25 is launching on Thursday, and will be with subscribers at the end of the week. Very exciting. If you want to update your address, now is the moment – you can do so on your account on our website here.
We have been dogged in providing a magazine at the lowest possible price, but Royal Mail, under the aegis of West Ham owner Daniel Křetínský, keeps raising the costs of postage, and so we’re having to increase the costs of sending out single issues, but keeping the cover price solid at £7.50.
What this means is that this is an ideal moment to leap into our archives and bag some back issues, and that subscribing to the print magazine will now save you more money than ever.
Let’s get to it. In the mixer today, we’ve got a tour of David Mellor’s crib, a quintessential bit of American scam-artistry, and some glowing reviews for our editor-at-large. But first, are you sitting comfortably?
72 Hour Party People
Conference season has, mostly, come and gone for another year, as the titans of British politics wind down another riotous autumn of centipedal coprophagia. Enough headlines have been generated by each of the parties’ platforms and performance this time out, but TF wanted to get a little deeper under the hood of this most unedifying of spectacles.
The traditional greatest hits of conference cringe are well-storied, of course. Michael Portillo evoking the SAS. Iain Duncan Smith’s turNINGUPTHEVOLUME. Sara Teather’s standup routine.
But turning to such hoary old favourites time and again is beneath us, so we asked as many lanyard-bothering political nerds as we could find: what is the single most mortifying thing you’ve ever seen at a party conference?
‘Sadiq Khan being handed the DJ booth microphone at Dawn Butler’s Jamaican party’ offers another, ‘he said ‘get the party started’ with such a lack of gusto that it seemed like he’d only just encountered the concept of “party” on a hastily-read briefing note.’ Similar scenes erupted several years earlier, another tattle tale informs us, when one charmingly literal Corbyn fan took the mic at Kate Osamor’s karaoke, interrupting her distinctly downbeat rendition of He Ain’t Heavy (He’s My Brother) to shout, helpfully, ‘It’s about Jeremy!! This song is about Jeremy!’
‘SNP karaoke was always wild,’ proffers one anonymous politico. ‘Mhairi Black did an annual rendition of Angels by Robbie Williams every year at karaoke. Four or five years in a row’.
Some parties, of course, are more exclusive. ‘I snuck into the Peter Mandelson party last year in Liverpool,’ whispers one contact, ‘and there was a private section for him, Jon Sopel and Maitlis’.
On the conference stage itself, cringe is just as likely to be found. ‘Dominic Raab was asked somewhere about if he’d take the knee’ reports another interloper. ‘And he said “I’ve only kneeled twice in my life; to propose, and when I was meeting the Queen.”’
Deliberate attempts at humour rarely fare better. ‘At the Conservative conference in 2019’ relates Chris Coates, sporting a 1,000-yard stare, ‘Jake Berry (Minister at the time for the “Northern Powerhouse”, ffs) said: ‘the only homes we are not going to build in the north of England is Sherlock Holmes!’
Off-site, stories of wild carousing and intra-party bonking are conference tattle staples. Decorum insists we include only one such tale this time out, sent to us by a reader named Richard from ‘a toilet stall at a Lib Dem conference’ some years ago. Surreptitious coupling was not the crime on this occasion, but the conversation he overheard, of ‘a couple earnestly discussing whether they should have sex in the next cubicle – which was much worse’.
Many of our correspondents were particularly eager to share the worst merch they’d ever seen ‘at conference’, and the spoils in this oeuvre are bountiful indeed.
How about some Labour frontbench fairy cakes? At last, attendees could achieve their dream of eating Jonathan Reynolds.
Or this charming suite of babywear from the Conservatives in 2016?
Nothing, however, prepared us for the gold that fell in all our laps shortly before this newsletter went to press. Kemi Badenoch’s exquisite, Labour-baiting chocolate bar, which debuted in Manchester this weekend.
Come for some of the worst product design you’ve ever seen faked-up for promotional purposes. Stay for the misspelling of the word ‘Britain’.
If this has reminded you of something, or many things, that are even worse — answers to the usual address.
Can I Nick a Cig?
Ring the bell behind the bar: Antonia Bentel is back with yet another dispatch from the frontiers of desire and the pubs of Zone 2 (which, as she discovers, are the same place). Surveying lustful punters at The Spurstowe Arms, The Faltering Fullback and The Gowlett Arms, Bentel finds that in the pub, ‘there is no strategy, only performance’ in the pursuit of pulling. The result is a smoking area dispatch of real style, sketching in vivid colour the state of modern courtship. We’ve published a lot of pint writing in our time, and this is up there with the best of them. Read for free here.
Bishop’s Move
Newshounds amongst the readership will have learned this week, perhaps for the first time, of the existence of Sarah Mullally, now the Crown’s nominee to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Long-term TFreaders, however, will doubtless recognise the name from her tenure as Bishop of London, and the scandals that marred her leadership.
There has been much breathy response to her appointment, almost none of it couched in a proper investigation of the state of the capital’s diocese over the last seven years. For instance, Radio 4’s Today programme began its coverage on Monday morning with a profile of her from 2017.
Fortunately, The Fence rides to the rescue. The only in-depth coverage of Mullally’s perfidious bishopric – from dodgy hotel rooms to tragic suicides – was written two years ago by Tim Wyatt. Have a read, and perhaps a weep, if you want to see what the future holds for the scandal-riddled Church of England.
Sustained Jubilation
The original Slow Journalism publication, Delayed Gratification,revisits big news stories to offer readers depth, detail and context in an increasingly frantic world. Like The Fence, it’s an independent, ad-free print magazine, and it offers a captivating mix of original longform journalism, photography, humour and award-winning infographics.
Subscribe to Delayed Gratification and once every quarter this beautifully designed and printed magazine will arrive at your door and give you the perfect excuse to slow down — readers of The Fence can use the promo code FENCE5 to get £5 off any subscription. Sign up here.
The Liquidator
Spending time on Rightmove is a pretty depressing activity, but it does occasionally throw up the odd gem, like this £15 million affair quite literally overlooking Tower Bridge. The house, which seems to have been decorated by Dolores Umbridge, is festooned with blackamoor artworks, which made us wonder who the owner is.
Well, step forward disgraced former Tory MP, David Mellor, who has made the Dockmaster’s House his London home alongside his wife, the ‘Quango Queen’, Lady Cobham. As they reveal in this interview, they even went so far as to commission some of the blackamoors themselves. Still, it’s heartening to see that David was allowed to fly the club colours among all the gaudy ormolu.
Von Church (Aa Aa Aa), Too Churches (Aa Aa Aa)
As we’ve relayed before, our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie has a new book out. It’s not laying it on with a trowel to say that Twelve Churches is an absurdly readable and enjoyable tome, as anyone even vaguely familiar with Fergus’ work will no doubt recognise.
Take our plaudits if you want, but the New Yorker – that storied old rag on the east coast of the United States – has listed it as one of the best books of 2025, and we hear on good authority that not one but both Tom Hollands are big fans. Can you hear that, John Julius Norwich? Can you hear that? Buy your copy today, without delay – as they say.
In Case You Missed It
What has David Beckham done to himself?
A harsh farewell message to receive from your colleagues.
An entire wiki dedicated to camouflage patterns.
The Greatest Living Englishman meets The Rock, in a crossover that no NTS listener could’ve predicted.
The missing link in the intellectual history of the US far-right.
Albania has a new AI generated minister.
And Finally
The American Song Poem Anthology is a beautiful thing. Music from the 60s and 70s, borne out of the electric marriage of lyrics sent in by John and Jane Does and then set to music by increasingly depressed session musicians, all for the purpose of a money-making scam. This is high-grade Americana.
The process would begin with ads posted in print claiming to be looking for the next great American songwriter. All you had to do was send in your words and a few hundred dollars, and they would make you a star. There was, of course, zero chance these songs were going anywhere. They were pressed into a limited run of ‘greatest hits records’, sent off to a few record companies to make things look official and then immediately thrown away. But this meant one important thing. The songs were, in fact, recorded.
The practice became known as ‘song-sharking’ and the result is some of the finest works of outsider music there is; insane, unfiltered lyrics mixed with hastily improvised pieces of music. The list of titles on this collection tells you what you need to know. There is Bobbi Blake’s I Like Yellow Things, The Jerrymanderes’ Listen Mister Hat, Milford Perkins’ The Duck Egg Walk, Rodd Keith’s Ecstacy To Frenzy, Norm Burns’ Human Breakdown Of Absurdity and Ramsey Kearney’s, Blind Man’s Penis (Peace And Love).
They are objectively funny listens, but they also manage to contain a strange beauty. Like all forms of outsider music, their lack of professionalism brings a weird authenticity that inspires cult listening. US magician Penn Jillette is one, and apparently uses them for a litmus test on people’s character; if you only see the funny side, he’s not happy.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, there’s a whole word to dig into. The Shagg’s Philosophy Of The World is fantastic. It was created by three teenage sisters on the demands of their father, Austin Wiggin Jr, because his mother had read his palm and made three predictions: that he would marry a strawberry-blonde woman, have two sons after her death and that his daughters would form a popular band. They got to work. Perhaps the most famous of these kinds of artists is Daniel Johnston, whose classics include True Love Will Find You In The End and Walking The Cow. There’s a rather touching short documentary about him that you can watch here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UdezNmtPPY
That’s it for this week; as heady a mix of the mad, bad and fascinating to know as we’ve ever served up. As always, all of it is best in print, so have a gander at our online shop, and experience the untold joy of The Fence landing on your doormat. In the meantime, do be in touch at editorial@the-fence.com – we love feedback, ideas and above all, tidbits of gossip from your part of the world. A single teaspoon of honey represents the life’s work of about 12 bees. Until next time.
All the best,
TF