Dear Readers,
We commend your faithfulness and bid you welcome, once more, to our free weekly newsletter, Off The Fence.
Today's offering comes to you from our sweltering Soho office, where keeping cool really is the primary business of the day. And cool, we have been, this past week. In fact, Issue 20 has really been taking flight as of late. In the Georgian capital, our latest offering has also been papped, in addition to this camping holiday snap. With markedly less holiday vibes, it also took a trip to one particular landmark in The Hague, and there’s been some appreciation for the Nishant Choksi artwork. Patrick Radden Keefe praised our back cover on Instagram, which is pretty cool, and the magazine was snapped enjoying a cocktail in north London, which is about as unsurprising as it gets.
Remember, there’s a competition going on – the fizziest snap of the magazine will win a bottle of Bollinger champagne, a very good prize as these things go.
Please do remember that you can subscribe to the magazine for a year with 20 percent off. All you need is click that beautiful big red button below or click on the image, whichever you prefer.
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This week, we’ve got a video that we guarantee that none of you have seen, and some other choice curios. Let’s get it going.
Vlad On The Liffey
Christopher Steele, author of the widely refuted Steele dossier, is back in the news, after claiming that it is ‘clear’ that Russia had links to the far-right disorder that has recently troubled this country. Yes, this is the same Christopher Steele who retired from MI6 in 2009, and two years ago declared that Vladimir Putin is ‘quite seriously ill’.
It’s all guesswork on Steele’s part, because the Russians have largely left London – the Highgate Hill compound is almost empty, as are the residences around N6 and NW5 (including the one on the street that Ed Miliband and Benedict Cumberbatch also live on).
Where have they headed to? A permanent base is required, given the proxy war that Britain and Russia are entangled in. It has been widely detailed that the Russian Embassy in Ireland has been extended lately, but we hear that there is more to this story than has been reported.
Oh, Reilly?
Cromwellian rule over the heart of one particular Irishman is the subject of John Phipps’ latest piece. He travelled to historian Tom Reilly's hometown of Drogheda to meet the only Irish member of The Friends of Oliver Cromwell Society and find out, simply: why?
A Flask Walk McFlurry
Sometimes, a story just reaches out to you from beyond the grave. So it is with the campaign, ‘Burger Off’, in which the residents of Hampstead launched a 12-year legal battle to prohibit McDonalds from opening an outlet in the sacred groves of NW3.
Some of the correspondence is just too good to be true, with lawyers for the fast food chain accusing residents of ‘bordering on hysteria’, while novelist Margaret Drabble declared: ‘my loathing of McDonalds is intense.’
The Hampstead outlet, which opened with piped classical music in a bid to pacify outraged locals, shut down in 2013, and is now a Le Pain Quotidien.
Were you part of the torch-wielding mob that comprised ‘Burger Off?’ Do you know anyone who was? Anything you have, anything at all, will be welcomed – message us at editorial@the-fence.com and hopefully there’ll be a bonza follow-up piece in the weeks to come.
I Need To Return Some Videotapes
It is great to see Peter Geoghegan launch the first long read about links between the lobbyists and the Labour Party in the LRB, and it inspired us to have a dig around Hakluyt’s website. Hakluyt, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a ‘strategic advisory’ firm founded by ex-MI6 operatives that came to prominence after its managing partner, Varun Chandra, was rumoured to be in advanced talks for a business liaison role in Number 10.
Perusing their EMEA team, you’ll see that it comprises former spooks, HBS grads, retrained consultants – and one particular young employee with a proven track record in mergers and acquisitions.
Bulls On Parole
An anonymous probation officer in London tells us about their working life this week in this eye-opening, excellently written piece. ‘Judging by me, they would take anyone,’ says the author, who was employed for the role untrained, as is standard practice when dealing with offenders that are not deemed ‘high risk’.
We are always keen to publish ‘insider’ looks at underreported industries, so if you do or have done a career worth writing down, do drop us an email at editorial@the-fence.com.
Dropping Off The Keys
Fergus Butler-Gallie’s dispatch from James Martin’s Broadway boozer reminded Jamie Fewery of the time he suffered under the TV chef on Saturday Morning, where Jamie was one of the punters in the studio. On the show, the live television format allowed Martin to lord over his guests, Andrew Fairlie and Michel Roux Senior, both of whom were in a different galaxy with regards to culinary talent.
As Jamie tells it, backstage after filming, Martin sat sprawled across a large armchair, talking to anyone who would listen about his Audi R8, a £130,000 sports car which had been loaned to him by the manufacturer, before listing all the celebrities that he had met recently. Yuk.
We are keen for further stories about this grizzly, ghastly Yorkshireman. Do reach out via the usual channels.
It’s BBL Time
For a juicy dose of the Big Barons of London (both real and imaginary), look no further. No, they are not just the ‘rural land magnates, shagging the wives of their miserable villein tenantry or bullying King John into signing Magna Carta’ of old, Andrew Hunter Murray writes. They're modern men and women who are everywhere in addition to being, coincidentally, more likely than the average person to know Boris Johnson.
Pay Nothing
Yes, as was signalled up top, legendary New Yorker journalist and scourge of the Sacklers, Patrick Radden Keefe, is a fan of The Fence, and he joins Marina Hyde, Graydon Carter, Craig Brown and Richard Osman on our ‘squad’, which has grown even bigger just over the weekend with Barnsley poet Ian McMillan praising the ‘superb writing’.
While humility is a virtue, we’re very proud of the direction of the project, and we’ve got a lovely shiny new website landing soon. On that note, we are going to raise the price of digital subscriptions, so this is the ideal moment to save yourself a tenner by signing up with the promo code, ‘5YOFENCE’.
In Case You Missed It
For 1843 magazine, Sue-Lin Wong goes on a highly contested holiday in the South China sea.
Can novelists really write sex they've never had? Yes, says author Kate Weinberg.
Could Mary Gaitskill kill her badly behaved cat?
Tim Anderson asks the important questions, namely: why we're all eating katsu curry all the time.
Woodstock revisited: Was it all free love and dancing naked in nature? Mark Beaumont finds out.
And Finally
We were really, really hoping that this particular story would stay under wraps, if only so we could keep it close as a little treat. Alas, annoyingly, the Olympic Games are something of a popular global phenomenon, and so the world has already been introduced to Australia’s leading breakdance prospect, the irrepressible Raygun. Too right they should be.
It would be tempting to say that if there was an Olympic medal for being cringe, Rachael Gunn would win gold. Gunn, or Raygun, or Dr Gunn as she is known at Sydney’s Macquarie University, looked like a shoo-in for breakdancing’s athletic debut in the games just past.
On her way to Paris, she competed at all manner of international tournaments before scooping the title at the 2023 Oceania Breaking Championships, making her the winningest woman in the southern hemisphere. Concurrently, she has done her bit to elevate the sport in the eyes of the academy, penning a PhD thesis on ‘Deterritorializing gender in Sydney's breakdancing scene’ – a topic she now lectures on, away from her star turns on the mat.
In advance of the games, the Paris Olympics’ website declared that the 36 year old Raygun ‘is proof that age is just a number’ in the sparkling new sport, a surprisingly withering assessment on ageing which makes half of our editorial team very sad indeed. Nonetheless, Raygun took to the floor like Hannah Gadsby in khakis, replete with an arsenal of Antipodean moves, kicks and spins that she hoped would win the day over younger, more flexible rivals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO2JXfrMrmM
In both her performances, sadly, she received nil points from the Olympic judges, and prompted an audience of millions to wonder quite how her kangaroo hop found its way into the pantheon of sporting excellence.
What she loses in medals, she has gained in viral fame, with Aussie columnists already positing ‘a very lucrative career’ awaiting her back down under. Moving to quell the virtual hordes already mocking her b-girl steez, Australia’s deputy prime minister Richard Marles lauded Raygun for ‘having a go’ – a nugget of faint praise that would make you switch careers if you ever heard it about yourself.
We could end this by saying that you haven’t heard the last of her, but with breakdancing already sidelined for the 2028 games in LA, you probably have – that is, of course, unless you’re doing a cultural studies degree in New South Wales. In which case, if you see a lecturer crip-walking into the common room, that’ll be her.
That’s all for today, you greedy bunch. You've made it all the way to here – the very bottom. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, the best thing to do is email support@the-fence.com and we’ll get back to you.
Warmest wishes, while the heatwave persists.
TF