Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, the UK's wettest newsletter. An upright sea hovers over us here in Soho, rendering us greatly ensogged but no less desirous of your company.
Issue 22 is, of course, OUT NOW and has been spotted anywhere that class reigns and decency pervades. So far this week we’ve seen it paying penance in Soho and in the hands of its featured fiction contributor Lucas Oakeley, but we must reserve special mention for Patrick C and the appearance of his copy in Puglia, bringing a load of old sense right to the boot heel of the Italian peninsula.
By now, it should be in your arms too, crisply packaged to avoid the undying rain, or else sitting pride of place in all major retailers. If you’ve not yet received it, please let us know, and if you have yet to sign up for the doorstep option, then you can avoid the soul-crushing regret you are no doubt experiencing right now, by buying the current issue here, and why not sign up for future issues while you’re at it?
Click this big red button, and in return we will deliver you four issues over the next year for just £29.99. We shouldn’t, really, but who would dare stop us?
Before that though, we have Wi-Fi-busting amulets, two cool guys on a moped, and a call-out for your worst-ever Christmases. But first, some inquiries as to Alex Salmond’s last public engagement.
Moonies Over Macedonia
This weekend saw the passing of Alba – and former SNP – leader Alex Salmond, who died shortly after delivering a speech in North Macedonia. Tributes to him, quite rightly, paid tribute to the man who bore the SNP to their recent heyday of political relevance. Less was said about his latter-day trajectory, which saw him ousted from the party in 2018 under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, and the 2021 forming of Alba, a sort-of ersatz SNP for voters who split their time between lobbying for Scottish independence and protesting their local library’s Drag Queen Storytime.
However, nothing at all, so far as we can tell, has been said about the curious event which brought him to Macedonia in the first place, namely a speaking engagement with the Academy for Cultural Diplomacy, a nebulous organisation spun off from the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, more widely referred to as the Unification Church, or Moonies.
Best known for mass weddings, anti-communism, and a nebulous connection to the assassination of Shinzo Abe, the Moonies are also big on political outreach. The ACD is one such part of what VICE Germany calls a ‘tangle of hotels, real estate companies and associations’ running a diploma mill-cum-propaganda outlet for the church.
A name that comes up time and again in the above report is that of ACD director, Mark Donfried, who’s spent much of the last few days tributising Salmond as the last person to see him alive. He also lauded Salmond, who attended the event with Alba Party chair Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, as ‘an active member’ of his organisation, who’d discussed plans for an event in Scotland next year.
It all adds up to a mildly mysterious Moonie matrix, so if you have any information on the ICD, ACD, FFWPU and its curiously outsized role in education, politics and diplomacy on these shores – do let us know.
A Plate of Shortbread
As his political career shrunk a little, Salmond enjoyed a blossoming career as a broadcaster on TV and radio. He is remembered fondly by some of his younger colleagues, who say that he was ‘extraordinarily generous with his time and money’ and would demolish Lucozades and ‘an entire pack of chocolate caramel biscuits’ over a two-hour session.
There are, however, different recollections, with some junior staffers recalling Salmond’s rage and ‘existential fatigue’, which would seem the then 60-something man ‘screaming during ad breaks’.
Over a period of four-and-a-half years, Salmond presented the eponymous Alex Salmond Show on Russia Today, production on which was halted in February 2022, and the invasion of Ukraine.
Yesterday, he was hailed as ‘a brave, Russian-like fighter’ by Margarita Simonyan, the chief executive of the channel – in the current political climate, some may consider this a fitting epitaph.
Small Plates-o-Matic
Our Instagram account has been active for some five-and-a-bit years and deputy editor, Kieran Morris, has engineered our most popular post yet. It really is very funny and has already occasioned a number of pale imitations.
But don’t worry, we won’t pivot to operating a meme account, at least not yet. But do give us a follow on IG, our most beautiful social media account by far.
Knives Out
It’s no secret that social media is warping taste in restaurants, and making a small cadre of people who are able to manipulate and master the algorithm into overnight celebrities. Might this sudden fame be going to their heads? If you look at the coverage it garners in the national press, you might be forgiven for thinking that The Devonshire is the only pub in Britain. Our near-neighbours on Denman Street have had a great year, and rumours of £300,000 per-week takings abound in the hospitality industry.
At the helm is Oisín Rogers, the 56-year-old landlord, who gives an interview here about a culinary tour of San Sebastián, in which he fills with so much effing and blinding that you might think its a Gallagher brother giving an interview about another Gallagher brother, rather than a Richmond-based pub manager talking about the practicalities of the TGV.
If you’re feeling lightly embarrassed, then nothing will prepare you for this video, in which butter impresario, Thomas Straker – who was able to set up a Notting Hill restaurant from his TikTok lucre – rides a motorbike down a pavement without a helmet, before announcing twice to the camera that he’s had quite a lot to drink.
Straker, who has an influencer by the name of ‘Schooner Scorer’ riding pillion, is far from popular in London’s culinary world.
He’s not even well-liked among the moneyed denizens of W11 – at last year’s Portobello Panto, a traditional community pantomime, the role of the ‘baddie’ was very obviously based on Straker, much to the delight of the watching audience.
Brand Partnerships
Russell Brand is back, baby! And this time he’s selling something. Following his recent conversion to Christianity – with a Bear Grylls-aided dip in the Thames for his baptism – the Dalai Lama of Dagenham has steadfastly continued his ascent up the totem pole of evangelical paranoids that serves as a sort of alternate-universe TED circuit for disgraced right-wingers. With this comes a steadily lucrative income stream at conferences alongside the likes of bridge figures like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray and, of course, the mandatory leap into commercial products, designed with your new, captive and credulous audience in mind.
As covered by Henry Jeffreys in the pages of TF Issue 9, Brand’s main saleable commodity has always been himself but now he’s accepting outside offers, namely by partnering with leading lights in the world of tinfoil-millinery, Airestech, flogging an amulet that wards off the ‘corrupting and corruptible’ signals from airport Wi-Fi and makes you, in his words, ‘more powerful.’
All of this is very embarrassing, not merely for Brand but for what it says about the continuing prevalence of this parallel track for rehabilitating right wing figures; allowing them to match, or even vault, their previous earnings through direct appeals to their gullible marks. But it’s all still very small beer compared to the true ne plus ultra of pest-turned-preacher right wing remontadas: when Milo Yiannopolous started hawking Catholic tat on the Church Militant web channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz_4nI1tZ3M
The bar is high, Russell, and you’d do well to remember that.
Small Hours
Another five-star feature is live on the website. Lauren Bensted traveled to Barnard Castle for the annual John Martyn festival, an event dedicated to the late, troubled singer. As you will discover, the event is freighted with importance for Lauren, who has recently recovered from a life-threatening illness in which she relied on John Martyn’s music to carry her through her darkest days. If that all sounds a bit heavy, rest assured this piece will spark joy on a grey Tuesday afternoon.
Christmas Callout
Christmas is coming earlier and earlier every year, and never sooner than when you’re prepping a spanking new December issue of The Fence. Last year, our Fencepost section featured readers’ bleakest midwinters, with a cavalcade of great submissions (some highlights collected here).
It was such a smash that we’re repeating the trick this time out, so please keep sending us your worst Christmas experiences, to editorial@the-fence.com
In Case You Missed It
Heidi Blake on the Texan doctor and the missing Saudi Princess.
Intelligencer’s Tess Owen takes us inside the jail block run by January 6th protesters.
The wonderful Kathy Burke on Steve McQueen’s new film Blitz, in which she stars with… Paul Weller.
Shaun Walker digs into the case of Pablo González and asks whether he was an intrepid journalist or a Russian spy?
Cullen Murphy utters a dispatch from Point Nemo the remotest place on planet Earth.
And Finally
A dip into the archive – whatever else? – but one freighted with particular significance. Threads, the seminal 1984 docu-horror-drama that warned of the perils of nuclear winter, was broadcast last week for the first time in two decades.
It now sits happily on iPlayer (which had not yet been launched when the film was last screened on the BBC) and so is primed and ready for a whole new generation to be traumatised. For overseas readers, YouTube mirrors are, of course, also available.
If you’ve never actually seen the film – and our own staff here were split 50/50 – it really is worth a watch. The first thing that might strike a newcomer is the unflinching naturalism of its performances, the humdrum horror of its poorly lit apocalypse. There are no stunning vistas of ruin, no artful shots of terrible beauty. This is an ugly film, in the most complimentary sense of the word. And coming to a cultural object so remarked-upon as Threads,and discovering it to be worth the hype after 40 long years, is a truly rare thing.
It also led us to discover this fascinating time capsule from that same summer, in which a Newsnight panel of experts go over the ins and outs of nuclear war, fallout, and mutually assured destruction, with a degree of equanimity that suggests they’re discussing grain prices and metered parking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0VcT-XWb7M
Things could always, one feels, be worse.
Well readers, as our rain-soaked bodies scream once more for the pleasant eternal dryness of the grave, we bid you adieu. Please be in touch with any and all tips and tickings-off to support@the-fence.com please. May your day be ‘slay’, your week ‘chic’, and if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the mag, which is a trillion times better in print, far superior to this newsletter. Until next time.
All the best,
TF