Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once more, and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that now has a sibling.
You might’ve heard (since we launched #1 through this channel five days ago) that we’ve just launched something new: the Capital Letter, a gleaming prospectus of spots, shows and watering holes for you to visit in London. We are wrenching open the gates – sorry, Marina – letting you know about the places that the tastemakers won’t mention. If that sounds like a bit of you, then sign up today. There’ll be reviews, featurettes and we have an appearance next week from our anonymous critic, Secret Chef.
Just when we think we’ve found a winner, another week rolls by and we receive yet more contenders for our quarterly Bolly raffle, whereby readers can nab themselves a bottle of overpriced champers for taking our last issue somewhere strange. First was a snap from Girender M, who hauled us all the way to western Ghana – how much further can you get? Much, much further, it transpires, as Adam S brought The UK’s Only Magazine to the Falkland Islands’ only microbrewery. Now, sticklers for the rules will be quick to highlight that Issue 21, not Issue 22, was the copy flaunted southward; to which we say, get yourself to Tierra Del Fuego and then we’ll talk.
A reminder that you can score yourself the deal of the century this February: buy a print & digital subscription for £34.99, and we’ll give you Issues 18, 19, 21 and 22, plus a tote, and the next four issues. It’s a financially insensible deal that we really shouldn’t be offering, and you can take advantage of us by clicking the button below or on the photo. Remember, it will be expiring soon.
To business. We have got something really special for you today, and a lot more besides. Without further ado, we present a piece from Caitlin Barr.
The Priapic Princess
Lauren Spencer will not reveal her OnlyFans subscriber count, but she will tell me she is in the top 0.3% in the world. At 52, Spencer has a unique calling card – she impersonates Diana, Princess of Wales.
Lauren Spencer (not her real surname) has been impersonating Diana Spencer (her real surname) since the first lockdown, when the former started her camming career, and the latter had been dead for 23 years. Many of the living Spencer’s punters told her she looked and sounded like the late princess and requested special videos and live roleplays in which they took on the role of a butler or a chauffeur, ‘cuckolding Prince Charles and getting one up on him.’
She set up her OnlyFans account in December 2020, and during livestreams on social media promoting her site, she frequently received comments enquiring if she was a relation of Diana. Requests for custom content continued to flood in and she has been fulfilling male (and they are all male) fantasies ever since. ‘Nine times out of ten, they want me to dress like her, and then strip down to the sexy lingerie, because of course they were never going to get that opportunity to see Diana like that, even though they would have liked to.’
Spencer is over a decade younger than Diana would have been if she were still alive today, but her subscribers don’t seem to mind. Everything else about her is practically a carbon copy of the late princess. She is the same height (5’10), shoe size (seven) and dress size (ten) as Diana was, and her voice, husky and clipped, is so similar that I have to ask her if she’s putting it on. ‘It’s my voice. I grew up in the southeast,’ she assures me. Perhaps as a result of her alarming similarities to Diana, Lauren doesn’t feel the need to get into character before recording content – she just ‘launches into it,’ often in a homemade revenge dress that she mocked up using ‘a Bardot top, a skirt, and a sash to disguise the joints.’
Lauren has never advertised herself as an impersonator or posted any Diana content publicly – for this aspect of her work she relies on word of mouth and organic recognition of her likeness. At £80 for a 10-minute personalised video, her act is certainly lucrative. A ‘bad month’ for Spencer is one in which she rakes in a mere £10,000. Her customers also have the option to buy her gifts on a site called Throne – items on her wishlist include a personalised brownie slab, a dog-shaped candle, a bottle of Remy Martin, and an LED face mask, as well as penis plushies, a ‘clone-a-pussy’ kit, and a silicone tentacle sex toy. It’s hard to imagine that Princess Diana never craved a tub of Quality Streets (which one can purchase for Lauren for the bargain price of £12.46).
Despite the perks of the lifestyle, Spencer says that her work has taught her that ‘98 percent of the male population is safe and normal, and two percent of them are really not.’ She once received a request from a man to interact with him as Diana as if he were Prince Harry. She declined, and the customer settled for a striptease instead.
It’s a world away from the housekeeping business Spencer ran before the pandemic hit and she started camwork in order to stay afloat. Her new job is no less rigorous, however – Spencer films ‘each and every day’, and posts her regular content on the platform 28 times a week, alongside promoting her site on social media with lewd-but-classy shots and frequent references to ‘the wankend’ (which is the weekend).
Roleplay content is her favourite, and her Diana act allows her to flex her creativity. She prides herself on being ‘very tasteful’, approaching her work with respect for the late princess who she remembers fondly as being ‘very grounded and relatable.’ Spencer is a self-described ‘royalist’, but has reservations about Camilla, though she concedes that the Queen and her husband are ‘in a unique situation that most of us can't relate to.’
Impersonating a beloved philanthropist and mother – unclothed – is sure to raise eyebrows. Spencer is largely unfazed. ‘I didn't set myself up as a tribute. I literally responded to a demand and, in a way, what I’m doing helps to keep her alive and relevant. No one owns her memory,’ she says. ‘And let's not forget, Diana was fun. She was no prude.’
Many actresses have tried to emulate the late princess, with varying degrees of success. I wonder what she would have made of Kristen Stewart gulping down pearls in the 2021 drama, Spencer, or Elizabeth Debicki’s well-rehearsed gaze at Charles in The Crown.
Lauren Spencer has no doubt that her own simulation of the late Diana Spencer would have amused the late princess. ‘She would have smiled, I'm sure, and thought that if somebody else is making money, and it's not harming anybody else, that’s good. She would want to support other women. She was a real woman’s woman.’
We can be sure that Diana is surely looking down from heaven, proud of Lauren’s hustle – and her decorum.
You can follow Caitlin here. We won’t tell you where to find Lauren, you can do that yourself.
(Look Up the Number)
Every time we put out the call for cartoonishly daft names, you respond in droves, and we are compelled – compelled! – to reprint them in this newsletter. We want to move on but they keep getting better and better, stretching the very limits of nominative credulity. It’s starting to feel a bit uncool to own a perfectly normal name, given that seemingly every fourth person our readership knows is called Dick Packer or Patrick Devine-Wright (thank you, Patrick M, for those two).
Thanks to Francis Wheen, who dropped a metric ton of silly names on us from the pages of the Observer in 1975: among them, Alfred Moron, Jiminez Fraud, Violet Organ and Thomas Pigg-Strangeways. This week’s winner, though, is Digby Warde-Aldam, submitted by longtime TF reader Digby Warde-Aldam, who notes that however silly it reads written down, it comes into its own when spoken into plain air.
‘As a Kiwi restaurateur I once interviewed so charmingly put it,’ he writes, ‘my name sounds like Boris Johnson gargling port’.
New York Channel Number 38
Bless her heart, after the whole Justin Baldoni entanglement, poor Blake Lively must’ve had her fill of viscerally unpleasant men fending for her attention. Just as well that she never encountered one of her unlikeliest fans: the irascible Mark E. Smith, dictatorial frontman of The Fall. 2011’s Ersatz G.B. – the band’s 28th studio album – came and went with little fanfare, being beaten in the album charts by Rihanna’s Talk That Talk and around four thousand other records in the week it was released. Take a listen to track three, Nate Will Not Return – yes, it’s about Nate from Gossip Girl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Vctn0Pin0
We could fill a whole newsletter with oblique references to the wonderful and frightening world of The Fall but linger for a second on the mental image of the stooped, speed-sniffing MES on his sofa in Prestwick, captivated by the travails of Blair Waldorf & Serena van der Woodsen on the Upper East Side. Nate Will Not Return was not the band’s only drift into metatextuality: enjoy this track from 2000, Dr Buck’s Letter, which ends with Smith reading out a magazine feature of Pete Tong’s favourite items.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W9IcDCZggY
A Package from Cyprus
Asil Nadir, who died earlier this month was a fraudster and huckster who gulled legions of investors – not to mention the Conservative Party – into backing him. We asked a City veteran about their encounter with him, and his infamous firm, Polly Peck:
‘I only met him once, but it was a memorable occasion. I was a fund manager and analyst at a merchant bank, and I had been writing an analysis of Polly Peck for a couple of colleagues. As an investment firm, we regarded ourselves as having principles. We were against investing in dubious companies like Polly Peck. The whole nature of the investment world is to keep an open mind.
Polly Peck started as a rag trade company somewhere in the East End, and then expanded rapidly. Now, that kind of paradigm was quite usual in the 80s and 90s, taking a company and building a conglomerate through a series of rapid acquisitions, once you had got a reputation as being a good builder of corporate businesses – or, at least, fooling people into thinking that you were.
John Ashcroft did this in the home decorating and furnishings world; he bought rapidly and created a company called Coloroll, which most people completely forgot about. It was a glamour stock back in the day, until it fell apart.
Polly Peck expanded from citrus packaging in Cyprus, and then later in Turkey. What the skeptics always thought was that those boxes didn't so much contain oranges as something else altogether.
The office was somewhere in Mayfair, just off Berkeley Square. There were tapestries everywhere, and my overwhelming memory is that it felt like a lair. I found he was perfectly friendly, quite shy, soft-spoken, not at all aggressive. But still, I felt a sense of unease. It was a bit like one of those Bond films when you ushered into the presence of Mr Big.
The conversation was perfectly cordial, but he just didn’t answer a single question with a direct answer. We came away none the wiser about what it was, what the company was really about, and all the visibility or otherwise of its operations, cash, generation, profitability.
And we didn’t invest. And thank God for that.
You would think those days of the shysters – of Robert Maxwell and Asil Nadir – are over. But I think there’s a parallel with Phillip Green, who also started out in the rag trade, and he was someone we wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole. I know other investors who said they’d never dealt with a more unpleasant and aggressive man.
These people were encouraged by the press, by the idea of a “good story”. Back then, there were lots of journalists like Jeff Randall, whose job was to write puff pieces on how Philip Green was such a marvellous person, that he is so underappreciated and all the rest of it.
Nowadays, there are more rigorous standards, particularly with regards to financial analysis. Though I’m sure there’s some new Nadir out there, probably in tech.’
You Absolute Beast!
Lots has been said about the original punk princess, Vivienne Westwood, who, among other things, was a decades-long resident of Clapham. The brand she left behind after tripping the light fantastic two years ago hit the pages last week for the ousting of longtime CEO, Carlo D’Amario, after years of his tyrannical, often homophobic abuse toward staff came to light.
It’s incredible enough that a brand so closely associated to queer culture could be rocked by such a scandal; more extraordinary still that… well… How can you even be a homophobe in the fashion industry? It’s like Moby managing an abattoir. These revelations are, however, somewhat commonplace in fashion; in Issue 15, we sent Clive Martin onto the atelier’s floor to uncover some of the nastiest stories of abuse faced by young couturiers. We are always, always open to more insider pieces from the industries that seem to evade accountability. No matter where you work, if something rough is going down, we want to know; editorial@the-fence.com, please.
Splendide Mendax
It’s always a pleasure to see the names for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year roll in, especially as 40 percent of our editorial team are now too venerable (old?) to be nominated. Ralf Webb is up for the prize for his book Strange Relations, which examines the brave new queer world of 1950s America through the lives of four literary giants: John Cheever, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, who all led busy lives away from the typewriter.
Ralf also wrote the short story for the current issue, which is available for you all to read here, and you should because it really is excellent.
If you’d like to support The Fence as a fulcrum of young talent, the longform La Masia if you will, then do consider supporting us today with a subscription.
I Am The Lizard King
Fans of deep weirdness will doubtless enjoy this picture of newly ennobled Health and Human Services secretary RFK Jr, touting a lizard with shirtless celebrity medic Dr Oz, and clothed deviant Russell Brand.
The path from public disgrace toward the loving bosom of the American New Right is, by this point, well-trod, but there remains something profoundly rankling about Brand’s dramatic stateside pivot.
One tipster, who commended the lizard pic to us, made an apposite comparison: south Florida is to the 2020s what the Costa del Crime was to the 1980s for these two different eras of Essex boy, a place to put two fingers up to the authorities over the water trying to bring you to justice.
A sense given greater urgency by this week’s news that the Trump administration is working to bring British-American kickboxer Andrew Tate stateside to escape sex trafficking charges in Romania. If you’ve got no home to go back to, for a certain kind of miscreant, there is always Mar-a-Lago.
In Case You Missed It
Three British men share a bunk on an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf – six weeks on, one’s dead, the other in hospital, the other in jail. What went wrong? Will Coldwell has the answers in the Guardian.
Whatever happened to the Spectator’s man in the Middle East, John R. Bradley? Lara Prendergast tracks his extraordinary tale and tragic end.
Alex de Waal asks how we measure famine in Gaza, for the LRB.
Emily Gould ends her beef with Lena Dunham.
Rebecca Traister says woke is not to blame for Trump
Alexis Petridis speaks to one of the most enigmatic men in music: Serge Gainsbourg’s true paramour, Jean-Claude Vannier.
And Finally
The looming likelihood of World War Three does give us pause for concern, especially if you look at the parlous state of the British armed forces. The British Navy now runs on slender means, but these reduced circumstances make it all the richer as the subject of humorous observational documentaries.
The 2016 series, Royal Navy School, has been rebooted on YouTube, and we are all the more thankful for it. Within the show, we watch as young recruits adapt to the rigour of the British Navy, learning those same ironclad disciplines that made it the envy of the world, though it seems that some old hoary clichés about sailors are hard to shake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g9TjH0up_Y
No matter, this is the 21st century after all. As long as we have men like Recruit Harland defending our shores, our security is assured:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1-AF_1RATA
On that note, we do have something of a ‘grail’ to score: the 2005 documentary, Studs of Suburbia, is something of an obsession of ours. Broadcast on Channel 4, it follows a number of regional playboys detailing their sex lives in gruesome and hysterical detail. There are, alas, no clips of it online – but it was made by IFC Media. Do you know anyone involved in the programme? It is our most fervent wish to share it with our readers, to share it with the world. It would win the Grierson Lifetime Achievement award, if only for this slot of the newsletter. Any ideas or tips are very much welcomed.
Ring-a-ding-ding: that’s the sound of the closing bell we’ve had installed in our office, transcribed as accurately as our software allows. We hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, and last week’s new newsletter (the Capital Letter) – if you did, give us a like below, or send something pleasant to editorial@the-fence.com. Is that everything? It seems like everything.
All the best,
TF