Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, the weekly newsletter that has made promises of a gleaming new website. Today, we are able to show you the fruits of our toil – www.the-fence.com is now completely revamped, with a new design and with almost a hundred new articles from the archive and the current issue. And, as has been mentioned before, a paywall.
Some admin: every single existing subscriber has access to the website. All you need to do is login with the email address associated with your subscription and type ‘forgotten password’ and enter a new one, and you’re all set. If you’re having problems, we will attend to you personally if you email editorial@the-fence.com. You can also manage your account now. So if you would like to change your address or card details, you can do so through the website.
Now, if you haven’t signed up yet, you can either enter your email address to read two free articles a month, but the far superior option is to buy a digital subscription which is just 50p a month for the first three months, and then £2 after that. You can cancel at any time.
A print subscription is now £25 for the first year for UK readers, and then £30 after that, we’re also offering a print and digital bundle as we will be publishing more articles online now that we have this slinky website, and of course, we will still be running this newsletter.
Now, we’ve got some great bits in today’s mail-out, but we lead with a dispatch from our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, who has been hitting the festival scene.
The Bredwardine Memorial
On my way to the festival, I learned that Hay-on-Wye is twinned with Timbuktu. As the taxi drew into the artists’ enclosure parking, one of my fellow performers sighed, wistfully and apparently unironically, ‘it’s the Woodstock of the mind’. Middle England’s Davos might be more appropriate. But sadly for them I don’t think Woodstock, Davos or Timbuktu can boast the presence of Martin Clunes.
He was a cheery constant in the little patio area set aside for the artists and our plus-ones. As I turned the corner to enter it, I nearly bumped into Ruby Wax. She was looking askance at Helena Bonham Carter who appeared to be autographing a child. Danny Finkelstein sat in one corner, glued to Newcastle versus Chelsea on an iPad, while Michael Rosen, his longtime Twitter provocateur, glowered at him from under a trellis. I began to amuse myself by thinking who would be the least likely person to join this melange and settled on Roger Helmer, the former UKIP MEP who looks like an extra from Zulu Dawn.
Not all of the great and the good had arrived during my short stint. Hay has mileage yet to come. Jolyon Maugham was there later on in the week, talking about his exposition on the Davidic Messiah complex, Bringing Down Goliath. The event was sponsored by a company called ‘Nuditea’, which, alas, flogs camomile to Tufnell Park rather than PG Tips to swingers. Mention of the KC’s name brought rolled eyes from some fellow artists: ‘he’ll just wang on about that review in the fucking Times’. Come back Goliath, all is forgiven. Other treats were in store: a special tribute morning featuring both David Walliams and Jack Monroe. Our cups runneth over.
Parliament is in recess and so the wasps of British public life, MPs, had flocked to the picnic. Vast numbers attended the champagne reception and dinner laid on by Sky. John Nicholson, the SNP’s culture spokesman and the man who slayed and was then slain by Jo Swinson, complained. About his hip, about his party’s recent leadership contest, about the state of the world generally. In the artists’ café, Jess Phillips unsubtly gawped at Nick Cave. She suckled a tutti-frutti vape while he toyed with a salad. At the actual festival itself, only two MPs appeared to attend any events. Wes Streeting sat tapping away on a phone whilst his rosé went warm. Thérèse Coffey said that she had enjoyed a talk on artificial intelligence but repeated three times that she was looking forward to the dancing. The previous night she had cheerily turned the airy badinage of the MPs’ Sky-sponsored holding pen to the subject of assisted dying.
Last year, the Sky Arts party had run aground after a local landowning DJ’s phone gave out. He had apparently helped sponsor the do on the condition that he would be allowed exclusive access to the AUX cable, leaving the great and the good dependent on a big retro wallet-book of early noughties pop CDs. So much for that happy ending. This year there were fewer technical glitches. One publisher was overjoyed at having given ‘a voice to the migrants’: fear not though, next year she’ll be ‘doing the same for the working class as well’. Wes Streeting prised himself from his briefing device and danced lamely. One individual talked of Russ in Cheshire as if he was John the Baptist. ‘I am the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness; give it some minge’.
So it was that my brief early summer night’s dream at the festival was over. One of the panels was on how to make sense of the chaos of the outside world. Hay seemed to be doing that admirably: it had drawn upon the example of its twin town and created a comfortable cloister in the midst of the desert. The sun shined and Hay made its attendees feel that the world was as it should be again.
Zooming back through the countryside, my eye alighted briefly on the five names from the First World War carved on the little memorial at Bredwardine. It stands just beyond the bridge and the bathing spot. These former farmhands, now known only as glorious and dead, would have splashed there, ruddy and nude, on just such a baking hot day as these which have blessed late May. An unknown final pleasure before their world crashed into chaos. ‘Give them praise, not pity’, instructed the stone cross. Looking at some of the contributors, perhaps the festival might consider it as a motto next year?
You can follow Fergus on Twitter here
The Octopus’ Garden
This morning, Jane Bradley published an outstanding investigation into how the Financial Times’ editor, Roula Khalaf, killed a piece detailing how seven separate women had made complaints of unwanted advances or groping about the Observer columnist, Nick Cohen.
Many of the aspects of this story were already in the public domain – two of the women had spoken openly, and Cohen had resigned earlier this year following an internal investigation that was covered by few outlets. In the course of her reporting, Bradley confirmed the accounts of these seven women, including the journalist, Lucy Siegle.
While many people working in British journalism were aware of this story, there had yet to be an in-depth piece on Cohen’s departure. What makes the story more impactful is that Bradley is a staff writer at the New York Times, and the piece details how major British publications have a complicated relationship with ‘outing their own’. Bradley reveals new information, too, most importantly that when Cohen resigned in January on ‘health grounds’ that there was a confidentiality agreement and also a financial settlement with Cohen, and that Jan Thompson was the executive at the Guardian Media Group (GMG) who deflected Siegle’s initial complaint.
As the piece relays, Khalaf spiked the story because Cohen did not have a ‘big enough business profile.’ Cohen is an established writer who has won the Orwell Prize, and has written for nearly every major British newspaper and magazine. Whatever her calculations about the elements of risk in publishing the piece, Khalaf probably did not expect that by spiking the story, she was becoming part of the story herself.
Speaking to staffers at GMG this afternoon, it seems staffers are anxious and worried, and point to a series of management errors in how the complaints about Cohen’s conduct were handled. It also appears that Cohen’s behaviour was, to put it mildly, an open secret, with one employee there telling us ‘everyone knew – everyone who’d ever spoken to a female intern anyway – and everyone was really disappointed and embarrassed by how it was handled.’
It stretches credulity that any of this was either unknown to, or deemed insignificant by, the mainstream British press. After the Trojan Horse Affair, the New York Times’ sterling record in publishing pieces about Britain that no British publication will run continues. It’s dispiriting that we should be glad that another nation’s paper of record is around to report them, but here we are.
Mocktails and Weed
The work of Harvey Whyte, a London-based musician who is trying to pioneer ‘piano rap’ has come to our attention recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPTNmlVDYUA
It seems that Mr Whyte is doing this for real, and, if we’ve whetted your appetite, you can enjoy another of his singles below. If you have any information or insight on his career, we would really love to hear from you. We really don’t know what to say apart from that. It’s too pure for analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_gdlekk_2U
In Case You Missed It
In a piece of tightrope sensitivity, Rachel Aviv unpicks the tortured bond between the writer, Alice Sebold, and the man wrongfully accused of her rape.
The man who lives in Maradona’s head (the mural, that is).
Why are the centre-left so cringe? Josiah Gogarty profiles the tribe in a brilliantly funny piece.
The true cost of trying to hold Bakhmut: out of 16 Ukrainian draftees in one unit, 11 were killed or captured. Matthew Luxmoore has the story.
Imogen West-Knights takes a peek behind the plaque for this revealing piece on the Guinness Book of Records.
And Finally
Kudos to the teenagers of Radio 1’s Big Weekend, who gave short shrift to the toe-curling try-hard duo who comprise the band Royal Blood. The rockers then had an onstage meltdown that you can watch here:
They should have handled themselves with a little more dignity, on that we can all agree. Any proper band has had to learn the hard way that, sometimes, the crowd just aren’t that interested in you. Sometimes, they can be not just bored – but hostile. Some of you elderly millennials may recall Daphne and Celeste, and their brand of bubblegum pop that seemed perfectly engineered to split nerve endings. In 2000, they appeared at Reading Festival. The crowd, as you can see below, were not pleased to see them – but Daphne and Celeste performed with an equanimity and charm that Royal Blood would do well to study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hnxies4Wtk
That’s it for this week, and we’ll be back again seven days hence – we hope you had a lovely Bank Holiday Weekend. Do get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com if you have any questions or problems with the new website. And a reminder that you can now read the best of what we’ve done for just 50p a month – there is a link just here.
All the best,
TF