Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once more, and welcome back to Off The Fence – a newsletter that teems with energy and pulsates with life. As advertised in the header, we’ve got our biggest story of the year here. Those of you who follow us on Twitter might already have read it, but for the rest of you, we do recommend following us here, especially as we’ll be publishing three, sometimes four articles a week between now and the end of May.
Issue 19 is right around the corner – it’s landing next week – so please make sure your address is correct on your account on the website if you’re an existing subscriber. If you’re not, then you can partake in the licit thrill of receiving two print magazines from a quarterly publication at the link below.
Let’s get on with it. On the docket this week, we’ve got some cutting transatlantic media analysis, a dispatch from a fancy restaurant and some uncut IRA propaganda. Before we get there, though, a note on one of the biggest stories we’ve ever published.
Unholy Orders
Last Thursday, we launched the lead story of Issue 19: a full-scale investigation into Martin Sargeant, fixer for the former Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. Across a decade, Sargeant defrauded the church of over £5 million, before disgorging a sweep of vicious allegations toward 42 vicars on his way out of the door. The subsequent investigation into Sargeant’s slanderous gossip, directed by the current Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, induced a bitter fallout between the diocese and its clergy, with fatal consequences. You can read the article here.
Over the years, this story has been covered in the pages of Private Eye, and on the occasion of Sargeant’s sentencing, in the broadsheet press too. But a scandal of this magnitude should really be part of the news cycle – and we can certainly imagine that if this story was in Parliament, or the NHS, or concerned some BBC executives, then it would be splattered all over the headlines.
It’s worth bearing in mind how powerful the role of the Bishop of London: a position of almost monarchical influence. It’s not just an automatic seat in the House of Lords – the bishop is the biggest landowner in the City of London, the Square Mile itself. There is a lot of money.
Congregation numbers, unlike other parts of Britain, are booming. Bishops have the power of hire and fire over the vicars in the diocese, with complete control over their income, housing and livelihood. And this is why whistleblowers are so reticent to talk. Here you can see how central to the ‘Establishment’ Chartres and Mullally really are.
We will have a follow-up piece very soon. If you’ve got a tip or a comment, please send it through to editorial@the-fence.com, as we would love to hear from you.
Pass the Collection Plate
It’s a truism we do not tire of drumming home: good journalism costs money, and the better it is, the more it costs. Now, we don’t wear the hairshirt of investigative journalism out of solemn civic duty – we love collaborating with brilliant writers on gigantic stories that necessitate lots of care and attention. We also love it when those stories are celebrated by the best in the business, as with the imperious Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times who described our Church of England story as ‘out of this world’.
We want to do stories this big at least once per issue, and to do that, we need plenty more subscribers through the door, so that we can fund the work that keeps our plucky little outfit jostling with the bigger boys. If you value what we do, consider signing up today. And if you’d be minded to go a little further, might you share our subscription drive? Hit the button below to keep the campaign moving.
All Aboard The Samantha Brick Express
Nobody does a viral essay quite like The Cut, you can't argue that. Although there's perhaps something to be argued about the fact that the majority of their viral essays are produced by young female writers, and that the way these young female writers go viral is by being summarily and brutally made fun of online for days after publication. This weekend's instalment, a piece on the case for marrying older men by Grazie Sophia Christie, was no exception to this rule.
Christie's essay made her both the spokesperson for age-gap relationships but also the ‘Main Character’ of the internet for several days, with an endless run of tweets making fun of her bad writing and worse feminism. The actual facts of the essay might have been the impetus for the venom: the fact there was only 10 years separating the 27-year-old Christie from her husband, the fact she seems confused as to whether she is being feminist or not (she's not), the fact that her essay is more of a jumbled critique of capitalism (as one person wrote on Twitter, her husband is simply rich, not old). But soon enough the vitriol passed the usual digs about how bad and waffling and self-indulgent the writing style is and became focused on personal information about the writer, what she looks like, what her parents do and where she went to school (she went to Harvard).
As Olivia Petter wrote in The Independent, it began to feel a little like bullying, or deciding through mob rule about ‘how we respond to female storytellers – the kind of voices we accept and those we wilfully tear apart.’
The whole thing raises some interesting questions about editorial responsibility on an essay like this. For every comment about how stupid Christie's essay was, there were more congratulating the editorial team at The Cut for their uncanny knack of ‘finding completely un-self aware women who feel the deep need to write about themselves.’ You can't argue they do a good viral essay, but you could well argue that this is an Americanisation of the Samantha Brick model of journalism, the old hack for hacks that if you let beautiful women write insane things online, a lot of people will read it and get angry about it, and that will be good for the publication that pays your wages, and in turn for you.
You could also argue that in the current media climate, as freelancing becomes even more precarious than before, salaried editorial teams have some sort of journalistic responsibility to avoid these kinds of stunts, rather than deploy them for clicks.
The Auld Alliance
Issue 18 saw the return of Ed Cumming’s famed genre-bending interview column, Lunch for The Fence: a spot so cushy that it warrants keeping a ‘free lunch editor’ on staff, despite said editor filing his column only twice across two years. Long-time readers will know, however, that a free lunch can find its way past any of our editorial team at any given time, and are always gratefully received.
Which brings us rather elegantly onto the following full-throated shoutout for Stuart Ralston’s Lyla in Edinburgh – the jewel in his blossoming Caledonian empire. Set in the sort of gorgeous hilly townhouse that leaves you pricing up a move northwards, Lyla makes a confident claim for putting out some of the most thrilling dishes in the entire United Kingdom, cooking at a level that finds little comparison in the capital and beyond.
Two dishes really stand out as genuine, Andy Hayler-style twenty-out-of-twentys: the delicate langoustine kataifi course, and the KFC veal sweetbread that came with the main. But nothing dipped below a strong two star level, from the wine to the service to the petit-fours. We’re not sure if PaddyPower are running odds on next year’s Michelin Guide, but we would wager our physical extremities that Lyla will be going straight in there next time around.
Jailhouse Rock
It’s all over the press: the art fraudster Inigo Philbrick is out of prison, and he’s the subject of an embarrassingly fawning profile in Vanity Fair. Just as the cell doors sprang open, so Inigo’s private Instagram has been unlocked, and it really is worth having a good old pore through: stand by a cavalcade of puerile jokes, performative veneration of bloodless house music DJs, sensuous selfies and the odd comment from Princess Eugenie’s finsta.
If you’re looking for a longer-form treatment of the unbelievable Inigo Philbrick story then you don’t have long to wait for Orlando Whitfield’s memoir (they both have silly names), which we know is going to be one of the books of the year. It’s out – just like Inigo is – in early May.
In Case You Missed It
Rachel Connolly declares her love for Maradona, in the Paris Review.
Long cars! You just don’t get ‘em anymore! Laments the unmissable John Saward.
Is it worth moving to London anymore? John Merrick investigates.
Rounding out our John hattrick, John Herrman with the most infuriatingly obvious but well-executed investigation of the week: what exactly happens when you click on one of those Pussy In The Bio links?
Sophie Elmhirst, who is demonstrably not named John, heralds the death of the trad wife.
Post-Garrickgate, Joy Lo Dico comes through with a silver dish of clubland history, which is best accompanied with the brandy snifter that is Fergus Butler Gallie’s sideways glance at the denizens of St James’ and Soho.
And Finally
It is quite difficult to return to work after a long weekend glued to your sofa. Allow us to gently deliver you into the short working week with a fascinating watch from BBC filmmaker Darragh MacIntyre. The Secret Army tells the stranger than fiction story of a documentary (meta), created in 1972 in Belfast and Derry.
That documentary – the brainchild of American academic J Bowyer Bell and Nazi hunter Zwy Aldouby – had astonishing levels of access to the IRA. It featured footage of Martin McGuinness handling guns, car bombs being planted and detonated and unmasked members being taught about semtex and handling sub-machine guns. But despite being purchased by Viacom, the film was never distributed and has remained largely unseen for half a century.
MacIntyre tracks down the men who were featured in the film itself and travels to the US to find out why the footage disappeared seemingly without a trace, leading him into a murky world of CIA operatives, Mossad agents and some truly terrible art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_97W0Pfqgws
That’s not it for this week. We’re going to be back with you on Friday. If you’ve got any questions about admin, please email support@the-fence.com. We look forward to joining you in 72 hours. Until then.
All the best,
TF