Dear Readers,
Hello, thank you, welcome, greetings, and welcome again to Off The Fence, the world’s greatest, most successful, popular and influential weekly newsletter. God, it’s hot! Anyway, as you are reading this, the final file of Issue 16 is shooting through the information superhighway, over to our printers in beautiful Estonia (a country we celebrated in Issue 13). And we can say in all candour that this issue is by far and away the very best edition we have worked on together – stay tuned for more.
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To business! We’re heralding the return of late night Soho, trumpeting our long-awaited foray into national news, and passing on the primo links and vids that you have all come here to peruse. But first, a dispatch from this year’s Paul Foot Awards.
Stepping To Top G
Last Wednesday, the editor was very kindly invited to the Oscars of hackwork: the Paul Foot Awards, Private Eye’s annual ceremony for the best piece of investigative journalism. The winner for 2023 was David Conn, for his excellent work on the Michelle Mone PPE scandal, where he uncovered that the Conservative peer and her husband had made more than a £100 million profit through COVID procurement contracts, all filtered through their company, PPE Medpro, which had been a beneficiary of the ‘VIP’ lane set up in March 2020.
Interestingly, in his speech running through the shortlist before announcing the winner, Ian Hislop paused when mentioning VICE World News entry, a documentary by Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea, entitled The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate, which has since been bought by the BBC.
Hislop then told the story of how, when visiting a school recently, he was asked specifically by the staff not to mention the name of Andew Tate, the Anglo-American kickboxer who has used social media to accrue a global fame for vicious misogyny. As you would expect, the editor of Private Eye wasn’t planning to discuss Tate that day, but it shows how insidious his reach is – 8 in 10 British teenagers have viewed his content, and in one poll, 45 percent of 16-24 year-olds hold a positive view of the prematurely bald Lutonian.
Right now, Tate isn’t in Bedfordshire, he’s under house arrest in Romania, where he faces charges for trafficking and rape. Michelle Mone, despite the NCA investigation, is still living a life of luxury.
But Tate’s toxic influence still bubbles over – Matt Shea told us how he is stopped three or four times a week by Tate’s acolytes in London streets. He was even buttonholed by a member of the serving staff that very night, at the awards ceremony at a private club in Piccadilly, where a waiter came up and told him ‘I disagree with what you did.’
Tate is so wildly unlikeable and so grimly uncompelling that it’s easy to zone out from how extraordinary his sway once was, and how he still holds a concerning degree of power. Tahsin and Shea’s brave journalism shines a light on something the rest of the media ignored for far too long.
At Queen Ethelburga’s
Many of you will have read Mark Blacklock’s investigation into Brian Martin, the Yorkshire paedophile who bought a private school. It’s the most important story we’ve ever run, so we were delighted to see that it has finally been picked up by a national publication, with some excellent new reporting from Tom Ball in the Times. There is still lots to come out – other journalists would do well to follow the story.
Club Tropicana
If you value independent journalism and you’d like to see more stories like this, then please do subscribe – no other small outlet in the British mediascape is running at this level of complexity and ambition, and we can only publish them if we have the funds to pay for legal support.
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Smoked Salman
Last week, we launched one of the funniest and smartest literary pieces we have ever run: Asad Raza’s essay on how to make money from postcolonial trauma-fic. We were blown away by the sharpness of Asad’s mockery & mimicry from the very first draft he filed – it’s not often that a first-time contributor goes straight into our features section, but this piece very much forced our hand. If you haven’t read it already, you can find it right here. Oh, and while you’re here, you should watch this clip from where Uncle Salman plays ping-pong live on air while being interviewed by Jason Manford.
Under Cover of Darkness
We’re no strangers to bemoaning the loss of Old Soho. But something has shifted recently. While pubs are still reliably and annoyingly bound to Sam Smith’s yoke, and members clubs as cringe as they’ve ever been, it’s the restaurants that are stepping up around here for that crucial 11-1 evening slot that has all but disappeared from London nightlife.
Speedboat Bar, down the road from our office, was the first place to nail it – strong drinks, beer towers and fried food until the early hours – but we no longer have to traipse five minutes into Chinatown for our late-night drinks. Our neighbours around the corner at Paradise are now slinging cocktails until the break of dawn, and we are willing recipients of said slings. If you’re marooned on Berwick Street, four Taddy’s deep and on the cusp of transcendence, you could do little better than a nightcap at Paradise.
Services To Journalism
There were cheers among the FBPE ‘sensible’ majority as two knights of the written word, Sir Anthony Seldon and Sir Max Hastings, tore into Boris Johnson in a pair of tub-thumping op-eds that were shared online with glee.
If Sir Max feels that Boris Johnson is the ‘most selfish human being’ he has ever met, why did he employ Johnson at the Daily Telegraph – for years – after the then young hack had been sacked for making up quotes by a rival newspaper? Sir Anthony writes of Johnson’s ‘inner emptiness’ last week but in 2019 was describing him as an ‘intellectual’, a ‘radical thinker’ and a ‘big man who doesn’t bear grudges.’ Can anyone give us a clue as to why Sir Anthony changed his mind?
In All Naturality
It’s always worth celebrating when one of our contributors has a book out. But this week, we’re particularly lucky, as two of our favourite writers – Richard Smyth and Jade Angeles Fitton – both have beautiful books about the natural world, and our relationship with it, on the shelves at all good bookshops.
Richard’s latest, The Jay, The Beech And The Limpetshell (Icon; £16.99) is a touching ode to childhood: his own, his children’s, and any child that finds themselves hopelessly curious about the world around them. Written with his typical deftness and humour, we found ourselves oddly moved about the world Richard writes about – a world we’re all immersed in, often too much so to notice the everyday wonders we breeze past every day. It made us want to take a day off and go to the Natural History Museum, and we’re sure it’ll do the same for you.
Jade’s book, Hermit (Hutchinson Heinemann; £18.99), is a memoir of a different kind. Breaking away from her abusive ex-boyfriend, Jade recalibrates her life, and her world, around her newly-found solitude on the Devon salt marshes. She writes beautifully and tenderly about the pains, virtues and possibilities of hermitude, adapting to her new circumstances, and allowing the natural world to aid in her recovery. Hermit is a stunning piece of work, every bit as good as we’ve come to expect from Jade’s features with us, and we’d encourage you to buy your copy as soon as possible.
In Case You Missed It
The Verge’s Jon Porter has the best explainer on one of the most unprecedented acts in digital history, namely that Reddit’s entire userbase has gone on strike.
Staying with strikes, it’s hard to keep up with all of the actions going on in the American media space, so kudos to those within Business Insider’s union, who’ve launched their own platform called Business Outsider.
Tristan Cross took the trolls’ bait and learned to code – ‘and now what?’
How the Barclay Brothers lost their media empire might sound boring to some of you, but there is a story in here about Margaret Thatcher and the Ritz that most of you will savour.
Vulture’s Josef Adalian and Lane Brown have the media-on-media story of the week, with their searing takedown of the Ponzi-shaped mess that is the TV streaming eco-system.
If you only read one piece this week about a semen release and testicle vibration seminar, then make it this one by Samantha Cole.
And Finally
If you were to pick the two passions that truly unite our editorial team, they would be fine wine, and the films of ponytailed Russophile action hulk, Steven Seagal. Never once had we seen those strands combined until we came across Empire’s Nick de Semlyen talking about The Celebrity Guide to Wine, a 1990 straight-to-video documentary that really does what it says on the tin: Whoopi Goldberg, Herbie Hancock, Dudley Moore and others talking about their own deep relationship with oenology.
Seagal’s star turn is pure magic. Remaining seated for the entirety of his time on screen – much like he does in some of his latest offerings where he is too immobile to do karate – the man himself ogles his then-wife Kelly LeBrock as she clumsily uncorks a stubborn bottle between her legs, then pours him a glass for him to muse over. The whole thing is shot like an Australian soap and the two minutes it lasts for crawl by like the passage of time itself is unspooling in front of you. You really ought to watch it right away:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E1NFckaDqU
Phew! Mop the sweat from your brow, we’re all done today. A gentle note once again that if you ever, ever, have any sort of question for any member of the editorial team at any hour, day or night, for any reason, big or small, at any length, again big or small, then reply to the email you’re reading this on and we will answer you! (If you’re just reading this on Substack, then the same applies to you: just email editorial@the-fence.com).
Until next time, we must bid you adieu. Drink plenty of water, and join us here again next Tuesday.
All the best,
TF