Dear readers,
Hello and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter from The Fence magazine. We come to you from our Soho office, where we are being besieged by hordes of tourists in matching backpacks making TikToks.
We are about to launch Issue 20, and what an Issue it is. It should be hitting all good retailers and landing on your doorstep very soon, and there will be an announcement about it on Thursday.
And that’s an appropriate note to remind you all that we are now celebrating a half-decade in the print media maelstrom, and we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the button beneath it to get after it there. If you subscribe today to the print magazine today, you’ll get five issues for the year, too. Possibly six if we publish the 2025 summer edition a week earlier.
But before all that, we’ve got a particularly tasty newsletter to tide you all over. Because everyone else is sick of politics we thought we’d pile in a load more, just to really overdose you with the sunny optimism which has taken the country by storm. The less said about Ms Strimple and Ms Moran's more direct expression of this feeling, the better we feel. Expect shitting Z-listers, longheaded child MPs and a brace of perma-tanned maniacs as we dissect Tony Blair’s insatiable obsession with ID cards as well as the chemical makeup of the late Silvio Berlusconi’s face. But first, some Tory scandal. A throwback, if you will.
More Headlines, Vicar?
Well, well, well, welcome to a new Labour government who are making strenuous claims to moral probity. When will the first Ecclestone-style scandal hit? Media insiders reckon it might have something to do with the lobbying industry. The current media honeymoon will be very short. Of which more below.
At the same time, there are still reams of unreported scandals from 14 years of Tory misrule. There are whispers that there is still a lot more to be told about the COVID VIP lanes, ‘Partygate’ and various House of Lords appointments.
With hundreds (thousands?) of former parliamentarians, Spads and researchers now looking to cling onto relevance, it might not take long for these stories to surface.
The question is whether there will be much public appetite for them. We think there will be.
Keir’s Kiddies
As Sir Keir herds his merry band of weirdos through the lobbies of the House of Commons for the first time, the spotlight is already beginning to turn on the people actually making up that governing gaggle. Doubtless there will be further developments on this matter: some party insiders predict ‘up to 12 by-elections’ in the first couple of years.
However, we have to start somewhere and, inevitably, first under the spotlight is the child MP for North West Cambridgeshire. Attention has been drawn to the great supporting pillar of Sam Carling’s CV: his tenure as debates officer of the Cambridge Union Debating Society. Debates organised by Carling during his Michaelmas Term in charge culminated in two real doozies. The shot: ‘This House Believes New Labour Saved Britain’, the chaser: ‘This House Believes Western Intervention Has Been a Force for Good’. Things can only get better!
Attention of quite another kind has been directed towards new, also youthful (but in an Y Tu Mama Tambien sort of way, rather than a Mars Attacks! sort of way) MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire, Henry Tufnell. His good looks speak of modern noblesse oblige, partly because, coming from the family of landowners after whom Tufnell Park is named, they are. He’s not even the first MP called Henry Tufnell: his ancestor was the Whig MP for Ipswich and then Plymouth Davenport, all the way back in the era of Lord John Russell.
However, as a sign of progress, the dead Henry Tufnell MP went to Eton, whereas the living Henry Tufnell MP went to a far more modest school. Rah, rah, Radley – all the way.
What Rhymes With Goop?
It is sheer poetry that social sherpa, Derek Blasberg, has met his Götterdämmerung at the hands of Gwyneth Paltrow, who leaked the story that Blasberg shat the bed – quite literally – in her Hamptons manse.
Blasberg is not just a professional best friend of celebrities, but also pals around with some of the richest people on the planet, like David Geffen, Barry Diller and Dasha Zhukova, like a modern day Truman Capote, if Truman Capote had no talent.
Karlie Kloss is a longstanding chum of Blasberg’s, and there were rumours he was being lined up for the plum role of editor of i-D.
Whatever happens on that front, there is something endurably fascinating about ‘normal’ people who dedicate their lives to befriending those in the public eye. The former ‘Katekeeper’, Fran Cutler. Jonathan Wilkes and Robbie Williams. Have you ever been friends with an A-Lister? If you have, you probably wouldn’t send an email to us about it, but there’s definitely an article in this somewhere…
Bin-laden
This week, NYC Mayor - and one of our favourite childlike fabulists – Eric Adams announced the next step in that city’s ‘trash revolution’, revealing to a waiting press the incredible innovation of… a wheelie bin.
That the great, grand city of New York had never yet encountered wheeled waste receptacles came as news to some of our editorial staff, and led us to query what other common-or-garden necessities our American cousins have been suffering without all this time. We hit on kettles, Easter Eggs and teletext – a technology so advanced it came, decayed and died without ever arriving stateside – but if you have any other suggestions, let us know.
ID ID ID Hoe
For roughly the quintillionth time this century, Tony Blair has taken his eyes off a press release drafted for an autocratic regime, so he can once more say bro just one more ID card bro, bro I swear just one more ID card and it'll fix society bro please bro. His statements to this effect this week – almost instantly rebuffed by the Starmer government – echo a long line of monomania stretching back to the early 00s, during which they garnered little enthusiasm among the population, negligible success in various trials, and several rounds of zesty protest from cheeky photo-call era Britain, as in the case of these nippy activists in 2005.
A coherent timeline of these interjections would be prohibitively difficult to reel off in the space available, but suffice to say they number in the high teens since his regime’s plans were cancelled by Cameron’s coalition government in 2010 – it is, indeed, the second time he’s done so in the past 18 months – but he has variously proffered his pocket-sized plastic panacea for fighting COVID, illegal migration, benefit cheats, and underage drinking and smoking.
The fact that an era-defining Prime Minister has been reduced, like Cato screaming Carthago delenda est on the floor of the Roman senate, to constantly bleating about these Orwellian rectangles, ranks as one of the strangest obsessions in modern British political history. Why ID cards, and not any of the more useful achievements his government have had snuffed out by subsequent governments, have become Blair’s ‘one that got away’ is hard to parse. Unless he has significant shares in polyethylene chloride futures, we’re at a loss. Perhaps you have some insights?
Cakes and Candles My Brother
Not sure if we have mentioned this enough recently, but we’re celebrating five whole years of The Fence right now. Happy birthday to us! To raise a toast to a half decade, every day this month we’re posting some gems from the archives.
This week we revisited one of our biggest longform investigations in which Francis Martin lifts the lid on Brompton Manor (Boris Johnson’s favourite state school), a searing gossip-y dispatch from the London Library by Gus Carter and a return to our favourite sex tree in Hampstead Heath. That one you do fucks on. There’s also Tom Nicholson’s report on what it’s like to be one of the men inside Mr Blobby and Bethany Elliott’s ode to streaking, just in time for the Euro semi-finals.
If you want to savour all of these, just hop over the paywall with a lovely little subscription, which are, if we may remind you, currently discounted.
In Case You Missed It
Ed Zitron surveys Goldman Sachs’ ruling on AI and hears the sound of a bubble bursting.
One for the ‘is that good?’ case file, as scientists tell us that the Earth’s inner core might stop rotating soon.
Will England love the real Jude Bellingham? asks Clive Martin.
Staying with football, the story, and incredible coincidence, behind this photo of Lionel Messi bathing a baby.
James Butler ponders what Starmer’s majority will mean.
David Remnick – for it is he – makes the case against Biden running.
And Finally
We are thinking of Silvio Berlusconi in the office today. Not just because he’s about to have one of Milan’s airports named after him – we’re just often thinking of Silvio Berlusconi.
And so we are sharing with you our trip down memory lane to the heyday of Bunga Bunga proper, and a stellar example of deeply and quintessentially Italian protest.
Back in 2009 Silvio was leaving a rally when he was attacked by a man holding, of all things, a little souvenir statue of the face Milan's Duomo. The gargoyle collided with the gargoyle and immediately destroyed Berlusconi’s face, which at this stage (pre much later edition of face) was presumably held together by prayer and several litres of derma filler and was primed to collapse at the slightest provocation.
‘I only had my eyelids retouched slightly,’ he once told a press conference. ‘They wrote that seven doctors operated on me but there was only one. If you want I can give you his name.’
Watch the chaotic but undeniably kitsch attack, which left Berlusconi dazed and with ‘a significant bruising trauma from this blunt instrument that was hurled at him’ here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O57mWsCB_MQ
*
That’s it. We’re back on Thursday with the Issue 20 launch. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, email us at support@the-fence.com and we’ll come back to you promptly. For blind items and legally questionable intel, hover over to editorial@the-fence.com. If you’re ever caught without a pencil eraser, please remember that soft white bread will remove graphite quite handily. And buy a sub – 20% off all summer with promo code ‘5YOFENCE’.
All the best,
TF