Dear Readers,
Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to this post-coronation edition of Off The Fence, once again voted the World’s Greatest Newsletter by members of our print mag’s editorial team. And speaking of our print mag, if you are still waiting for your copy then please do hold tight – we’ve had a wellying this time around from the Royal Mail, with some issues showing up quicker in San Francisco than in leafy North London, or Glasgow, or Liverpool, or the Fens, or all the places our lovely subscribers live. You would think that a service that has existed since the age of Caroline England (the first one) would be capable of doing the one bloody thing it was built for – delivering post – but hey, such are the state of things these days.
Anyway, we won’t gripe any longer, and you didn’t come here for postal recriminations – you came here for fun fun fun and we’re shovelling that to you in spades this week. First up, we’re extending our little competition for the best snap of Issue 15 in the wild – Diyora Shadijanova and Peter Christian remain the hot contenders for the bottle of Aldi Champagne, but as soon as your copy lands, grab a snap and send it our way and soon you may have some modestly-priced fizz in your glass.
Beyond this, we are throwing promo to the wind this week and giving you nothing but the good stuff, all killer no filler, a barrage of bangers to keep you occupied in the final hours of your first day back at your desk. We’ve got the Boss in Barcelona, discourse-dodging Danes, and some baffling old poshos down at the bottom. But right up top, we’re leading with a juicy scoop: an interview, by Charlie Baker, with one of the Republic protestors jailed on the day of Charles’ coronation.
At His Majesty’s Pleasure
I was on the train to Dorchester when I got a text from a pal showing Matt Turnbull being led to a police van in handcuffs. While some of the comments below were quite funny, with one wag commenting that Matt ‘should be arrested for the turn-ups on his jeans,’ I was obviously quite concerned to see a friend arrested, and for non-violent protest. Yesterday, I met Matt near his house in Stoke Newington, where we spoke for an hour or so about the weekend’s events.
Both of us came of age in a time when political activism – at least for young people – was considered slightly uncool, so my first question was how Matt came to join Republic’s ranks.
‘I’ve always found the monarchy a bit cringe’, he told me, ‘but it was the Prince Andrew pay-off that really radicalised me’. After reading the news that the late Queen’s second son had paid a financial settlement rumoured to be around £12 million to Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew at the behest of the paedophile billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein, Matt emailed Republic’s CEO, Graeme Smith, offering his services as a freelance strategist.
For Republic, the aim is to make anti-monarchism relevant to liberal Britain, in the same way that Brexit had unified socially conservative Britain. In order to do so, there is no real purpose – at this stage – in doing anything illegal. So, the group planned a protest on the day of the coronation in Trafalgar Square, safely away from the action in Parliament Square, and had signposted their intentions to the Metropolitan Police. A miscellany of equipment had been ordered for the day, and a number of luggage straps had been procured to fasten placards bearing the legend ‘Not My King’.
On Saturday morning, Matt was driving the placards in a van to St Martin’s Lane. Winging through central London, he was worried that not enough people would turn up for the protest. Exiting the vehicle, Matt was immediately met by 25 officers from the Territorial Support Group, who immediately saw the luggage straps, and promptly put the handcuffs on Matt and his five fellow protestors. Under the new Section 2 of the Public Order Act 2023, passed last Wednesday by the Conservative government, there is an ‘offence of being equipped to lock on’ – that is, fasten yourself to the ground or an object. In the police’s view, some luggage straps were in breach of this rule, and the protestors were arrested for ‘conspiracy to commit a public nuisance.’
As a handcuffed Matt was talking to a BBC interviewer, the arresting officers led him to the van, telling him ‘you look a bit cold, sir.’ He was taken to Walworth Road police station, where he spent 14 hours in a cell, with only the ornate prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter to keep him company. Matt was anxious and worried, thinking of how he could be in the pub with his friends, and wondering what the point of it all was. ‘If you follow the letter of the law and you still get arrested – why bother?’
At around 11.30, he was released on bail pending investigation, with his phone confiscated. Meeting fellow activists, Matt was cheered to see that there was outrage in the Spectator at the arrests.
Indeed, there is anger across the political aisles and throughout the country at the chilling overreach of police powers.
After our conversation yesterday, Matt was visited by the police at his house, where they told him that he is released from bail, and that they would be taking no further enquiries. They personally apologised to him and returned his iPhone – a step which anyone familiar with the Met will consider remarkable for its rarity – so it looks likely that no further legal action will be taken against him or the other members of his group. Republic CEO Graham Smith, also visited, has already confirmed their apology is not accepted, and they ‘will be taking further action’ themselves.
Indeed, the Met has spent most of Tuesday ‘clarifying’ Saturday’s behaviour, insisting on Twitter, and via a published statement, they had no intention of impeding protest, an explication that seems wildly at odds with widely available footage of the arrests themselves. And then there was the op-ed published by Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley this afternoon, whose headline Protest Is An Important Right, But It Is Limited, may well have been written by RoboCop.
It would seem very likely that negative headlines spurred the police into this PR response, which implies we could be looking at an ‘arrest now, apologise later’ policy for the foreseeable. It remains to be seen whether this will apply to less prominent protesters, for less popular causes, but we feel fairly confident in predicting it will not. The chilling fact is that the Met’s actions seem a perfectly predictable application of the policing laws that were passed last week, and which even Labour’s shadow cabinet won’t commit to overturning. At its first conceivable hurdle, the Policing Act has shown its true face, and it is every bit as ugly as we thought.
You can follow Charlie on Twitter here.
It’s Cultural Appreciation!
Thank you to Clive Martin for introducing us to the work of ‘Isabell Afro’, a Danish TikToker currently resident in Zanzibar in Africa, where she is a keen (but not technically outstanding) dancer. Isabell is producing content as if the last ten years of cultural discourse have never happened – and in this day and age, it’s compelling to see a young thruster come through with an old-fashioned white saviour act. Her whole Instagram account makes for compelling viewing – this clip gives you a fairly clear picture of her whole vibe.
Brucie Bonus
If you’ve spoken to your dad recently, you might already know that Bruce Springsteen has just started another European tour, and with it, sightings of rock’s most saintly man have sprung up all over the continent. He first appeared, in what must’ve been a downright hallucinatory vision for guests of Barcelona’s Palace Hotel, at dinner among the public with a couple of his friends: namely, Barack Obama and Steven Spielberg. Then, in Dublin, the Boss arrived present and correct at Leo Burdock’s for a portion of fish & chips, dressed so identically like a rural pintman that you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d gone in disguise.
And seemingly right after, he took a trip to visit the home of Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, in a charming meetup that produced one of the strangest memento snaps we’ve ever seen – Bruce peering over MacGowan like a psycho bailiff who’s just accepted that he’ll be getting his money by the end of the week. If you see any snaps of Springsteen getting a pie & mash from Manze’s with Stevie Van Zandt this summer, send them our way.
In Case You Missed It
Claire Dederer’s essay on the ethics of David Bowie fandom is, to our minds, one of the best bits of writing published by the Guardian this year (and it’s a book extract, so that’ll probably be a good read, too).
If you’re confused by goings on with the WGA in the US, Max Read has penned one of the most lucid and readable accounts of why he, and they, are striking.
For the BBC, Jamie Bartlett and Ruth Hayer address the disturbing case of a fake cancer sufferer who hoodwinked celebs and met an untimely end.
One anonymous former contributor tells iNews what happened to VICE exactly.
Ben Davies asks how we ended up in a world of Quantitative Aesthetics for ArtNet.
And Finally
We’re cooking up a feature on 20th century British architecture for the next issue, and so we’re very grateful to Tim Abrahams for bringing this video our way. Made by the experimental novelist B.S Johnson, it is a half-hour interview with the Posh and Becks of British brutalism, Peter and Alison Smithson, as they discuss their vision for Robin Hood Gardens, a council housing scheme in Poplar, east London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5thwHTYNk
And as you watch the film, it really is obvious that Johnson should have stuck to the books – it’s one of the most baffling documentaries ever made. Filmed in close-up, the Smithsons sweat on camera, and Alison’s make-up is terribly applied, as they pontificate about their aesthetics and their politics without a modicum of self-awareness.
Interestingly, the Smithsons lived in slightly more rarified surroundings, at 24 Gilston Road, Chelsea – in a Victorian house that’s now worth £25 million. Thankfully, not all British architects of the period were given to such grandiose displays of hypocrisy – but if only all acts of hypocrisy could be as funny as this, we’d be much obliged.
That’s it for this week. If you have any question about orders, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com where the editor will personally see to all queries. And we look forward to joining you next Tuesday, and we hope you’re enjoying the new issue – please do keep sending the photos through.
All the best,
TF