Dear Readers,
Hello once again and welcome back to Off The Fence, the sumptuous weekly Tuesletter from the UK’s Only Magazine. We are now a week away from Issue 17’s arrival on these beautiful shores, and from there, we will once more venture down the content mines to pack up and ship the thousands of magazines that our subscribers clamour for.
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Onwards! This week, pour votre délectation, we have some bellyaching about Americans, some spy nonsense, and a short documentary on everyone’s favourite trailer park supervisor. But first, a short update on Mark Blacklock’s exposé of Queen Ethelburga’s College, which we published earlier this year.
Mr Martin Bought the School
In April, we published the most comprehensive investigation to have ever graced our pages. As detailed by Mark Blacklock, a convicted paedophile by the name of Brian Martin first bought, and then subsequently ruled over, a prestigious private girls’ school in North Yorkshire, Queen Ethelburga’s College, moving the school’s grounds to his personal estate, and then exploiting this access in the most unpleasant ways imaginable.
Sadly, it appears that Mr Martin was not the only figure in a position of power at Queen Ethelburga’s to prey on students. Per the Daily Mail, the school’s former deputy headmaster, and former deputy child protection officer, Alexander Ralls, has now been convicted of a further forty-four offences against students at the school between 2012 and 2016 – all happening concurrently within Mr. Martin’s self-styled tenure as ‘Provost’.
We can only hope that questions continue to be raised, by both the press and the public, about how this school was able to be so co-opted and exploited by such nefarious figures, so that the institutional failings that enabled these abuses can be highlighted and rectified.
On The Lash
In February, we linked to Ben Taub’s searing account of Wirecard, the biggest fraud in German history, and are pleased to report that the man at the centre of the storm, former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek, is back in the news. No, he has not been apprehended, and remains a fugitive at this very moment, but he has been implicated in a further, stranger web of inscrutable intrigue.
Der Spiegel now alleges that the Austrian fraudster, long known to have connections with Russian intelligence agencies, was directly involved with the Russian spy ring which was last week reported to be active in Britain. The ring comprised five Bulgarian nationals in deep cover in the UK, most notably Vanya Gaberova, an award-winning, and agreeably glamorous, beauty therapist based in West London.
We await further details with interest, since it involves so many of our favourite things collapsing together in one handy jumble; international espionage, industrial grade fraud, and the pleasingly odd image of a Russian intelligence cell operating out of an Acton beautician’s studio.
The case has thrown up small moments of amusement already. As when the Times’ well-researched scoop stated that “Gaberova had taken part in several eyebrow extension competitions in London and Bulgaria”. We presume this was meant to read eyelash extension, and surmise that knowledge of beauty therapy and international spycraft remain, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, non-overlapping magisteria.
A Secret Garden
Fence deputy editor Kieran Morris has forsaken his existing responsibilities yet again, by penning this fascinating profile of the watch-sellers of Hatton Garden for The Face. Come for the bling and braggadocio, stay for the mammoth tusks and mummified human remains.
It’s a tale of fast money and stacked cash, among the mega-rich willing to spend eye-watering sums for second-hand second hands. And all the more impressive considering we in the Fence’s editorial team happen to know that, colossal fraud that he is, Mr Morris does not even own a watch himself. So much for knowing your subject — editors, do not hire this man.
Impraxical Jokers
Have you heard of Praxis? No, not the formerly academic term for doing stuff instead of thinking about stuff, or the formerly political term for leafleting instead of tweeting, but the mooted city-state of Praxis being plotted in the scuzzy dive bars of Manhattan.
Alex Fleming-Brown was almost co-opted into the movement after being lassoed with a dog-tag by a girl in a cocktail bar; thankfully, he resisted, and has lived to write up the tale of Praxis and its innumerable spurious funders for us. It’s a fascinatingly weird story, one part Davos and one part Jonestown, and you can read it right here.
Hedge Funds for Goalposts
Friend of TF, Simon Childs penned a thought provoking piece on the Disneyfication of football this week, centring on the queasy sense that Wrexham’s rags to riches fairy tale may not be quite so enchanting as commonly depicted. Its core thesis is that supercharging small clubs with outsized investment of American dollars – while morally preferable to takeovers by rights-abusing petro-states – still represents a gaming of, well, the beautiful game.
Some below-the-line reactions were predictable enough, opining that Childs, as a fan of a rival team in the same division, was merely peddling wine made from the sourest of grapes. But his charge is a sticky one. For one thing, while the more outwardly malign influence of the aforementioned oil barons has, rightly, dominated headlines, less has been written about the fact that American owners now predominate in the Premier League.
Last season, ten of the League’s twenty clubs were fully or part-owned by American owners. That campaign’s promotion and relegation churn didn’t change those maths all too much, as Leeds, Leicester and Southampton (American, Thai and Serbian owned respectively) were replaced with Luton, Burnley and Sheffield (British, American and Saudi). Caveats abound, since many of these owners are hedge-fund-shaped consortiums made-up of international financiers, but the fact remains: the median owner of a Premier League club is a vastly wealthy American man.
Now, they’re not all bad – take Liverpool’s sustained success under the Fenway Sports Group (themselves displacing previously monstrous American owners), or the lavish spending of the Kroenke family at the heart of Arsenal’s recent resurgence. But such arrangements have been thrown into recent relief by events at Chelsea. The club’s owner, life insurance billionaire Todd Boehly, maintains an approach to club ownership that seems like a heavy-handed satire of mega-bucks cluelessness.
In February, Popbitch reported that he had been working on the principle that Chelsea had a permanent place in the Champions League, and had to be put straight while watching the game from the directors’ box. In the past two weeks, Boehly has ruffled feathers for suggesting a North v South All-Star Game, and spoke openly about the necessity of “more money for the pyramid”. While this kind of “quiet part loud” candour may single him out for chagrin, it speaks to a wider sense that football lost a moral battle in its quest for billionaire’s lucre a long, long time ago.
For Boehly, however, the real mettle test is the apparent industrial-sized failure of his all guns blazing approach. Having bought one of the richest properties in world football while they were still (for a few weeks or so) reigning European champions, he’s spent over a billion dollars in the transfer market and sold or released 38 of the club’s players, all while recording just six wins in the last calendar year. His determination to lose his personal battle of finance v football may offer small comfort, a sense that some part of the game has not yet been gamed. It’s just we can’t help feeling like the wider war may already have been won.
In Case You Missed It
Friend of TF, John Lanchester talks lies, damn lies and statistics, at the LRB.
John Paul Brammer gives an unexpectedly deep and fascinating exegesis of the Mex-traterrestrials presented before Mexico’s congress last week.
Chef and union organiser Eric Jeffers offers a sober account of food and labour precarity in London’s restaurant biz.
Hannah Dreier profiles the kids on the night shift, minors working dangerous jobs under America’s relaxed child labour laws.
Margaret Talbot uncovers the Austrian villa where a doctor experimented on children.
And Finally
Very, very few comic performances have ever reached the heights of John Dunsworth’s turn as Mr. (Jim) Lahey, the drunken ex-cop turned trailer park supervisor in Canada’s greatest comedy export, Trailer Park Boys. Over twelve seasons, spanning from the turn of the millennium to his passing in 2017, Dunsworth oscillated violently between sober, patrician tyranny and fall-down, pants-wetting disgrace, eternally foiling the schemes of the show’s layabout protagonists.
Outside of the show, however, Dunsworth was an altogether different cat. He wasn’t a drinker at all, for one, making his depiction of extreme drunkenness even more astonishing. He was also, as it turns out, the man who discovered the young Elliott Page, who would play a small part in the show before moving onto Hollywood as the star of Juno.
But way before all of it, he was a would-be progressive politician in Nova Scotia, and his underdog campaign was covered in this batty little documentary short from 1988, which follows Dunsworth on the election trail, doorknocking on trailers that look not too dissimilar from the ones he would later supervise at Sunnyvale. If you know the show, you’ll love it. If you don’t, then here’s your notice to check it out this week.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/108079008?autoplay=0
Wow, here we are again at the end of another newsletter, and all that remains to say is that if you have any queries – or crucially, and we’ll stress this extra hard, ANY ADDRESS UPDATES — then please reach out to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll sort it. See it, say it, sorted, if you will. Oh, and subscribe to the magazine. £25 for four issues. Go on. Right here. Catch you next week.
All the best,
TF