Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter for sore eyes.
This week, Issue 27 was seen enjoying several much-needed holidays: first on a beach in Vietnam and then on a beach in Malaga. It then made its return from abroad, popped by Selfridges, pleased the fishes, flew to Vienna and, finally, rode the subway up to Harlem.
It’s fantastic to see. Our inbox remains open to the finest photographs available via editorial@the-fence.com or social media, and, as ever, there may well be a bottle of something excellent in it for you.. You can find your show copy of choice in the nation’s favoured and most civilised institutions – WHSmith and Waitrose, among them – as well as in slightly more subterranean corners. All places of purchase are eligible. However, the best place of purchase is, of course, in the form of a print and digital subscription, which you can do thanks to the large, orange button just this way south. This is a particularly opportune time to take the plunge, as we are currently stringing together the new issue and tightening it into shape. Let’s get it going. Let’s do it. Subscribe today and make us all very happy.
We’ve also enjoyed the fanfare over the announcement of the return of the Carbuncle Cup this week. Submissions on Twitter have been especially eye-popping. Don’t miss out on the chance for some good old-fashioned audience participation. Why choose one, when you could do it all? Sometimes, more is more. In the meantime, enjoy Phin Harper’s video showcasing the many terrible buildings this great city has to offer, and all done in an enviable moquette skirt.
Capital Letter had an enjoyably bitchy outing last Thursday, where we crowned Otto’s as the most vulgar restaurant in London. There’s lots of good stuff there for you all to get stuck into. Sign up here.
Let’s get it going, it’s a bumper edition this week.
Let’s Get Together and Feel Alright
London’s double demonstration bonanza was many things: a logistical nightmare for the Met, an ‘interesting’ flashpoint for political commentators to ‘analyse’. But best of all, it was host to some of the most hilarious nonsense we’ve seen in a good while, mostly thanks to the fact that, whatever qualities you may want to invest him with, Stephen Yaxley Lennon is not a good music booker.
There was this horrendous performance for one. But the act that caught our eye was one Rikki Doolan, a pastor/musician, whose hits include You Are God Alone and Unchained (Na, Na, Na). He took to the stage in a fetching faux-paint splotched Union Jacket and delivered some of the words waves of audible sound to ever reverberate through the universe’s many atoms. His rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone was so bad, it led to ‘Tommy Robinson’ cutting the mics early and shuffling them along – something of a theme for the afternoon, as Robinson cut off some speakers who threatened to breach hate speech laws which, just recently, have expanded to implicate event organisers as well as speakers.
Doolan is, in many ways, unremarkable for this ilk of far-right semi-celebrity. He has a small YouTube channel he fills with divisive clickbait, a website that doesn’t work and a weekly livestream. His Companies House record is a little more interesting though, as the staunch opponent of migration and globalism was a former co-director of Farming Zimbabwe LTD, a mixed farming firm registered in the UK whose dormant accounts in 2022 showed a total asset value of £1.
It capped off a rather strange showing at the stop the boats big top, which included this on-the-fly manifesto delivered by a refreshed looking Yaxley-Lennon. But it is a serious difficulty for right-wing organisers who want live musical acts at their events. Many famous musicians don’t want to get involved in politics for fear it will damage sales, and those that do tend to sit to the left. The Republican National Convention was thus graced with this awful performance from Kid Rock and Reform UK’s party conference had, Dame Andrea Jenkyns doing whatever the hell this was.
To be sure, there is more than enough potential for the intermingling of cringe music and politics across the isles – Z. Polanski and Hannah Spencer proved that recently in Trafalgar Square – but by God, this really took the biscuit.
The Dean Street Comedown
One of the most enjoyable pieces we’ve published for some time is now available on the website. Fonie Mitsopoulou spoke to a number of former staffers and lifelong members of The Groucho Club, perhaps London’s most controversial club, and unearthed previously unreported details about the Soho late-night standby. It’s an absolute crackerjack of a piece, dripping with gossip and anecdote. Read it here.
Tell Me About It
It’s tough work out there in the political hack trenches right now, fielding 50 WhatsApps a day from peers, friends, and family asking one thing: what is Wes Streeting really like?
One insider writes, ‘the thing about Wes is that all he has ever wanted is to be PM, which means he’s pretty boring gossip-wise… which is a red flag in of itself.’
Rodney’s in Trouble
If you want to know what the people of London, England, are really thinking about the current government, might we suggest visiting an orgy? Bron Maher went to a sex club in Issue 21 to get the people’s thoughts on party politics. At Stark Bollock Naked, Bron spoke to a selection of men, including Connor, who wanted ‘greater investment in the NHS and social care – and he was not alone.’ Later, when Connor was unsteady on his feet, Bron ‘accompanied him to the bathroom and then back outside, strolling naked arm-in-arm like a Victorian couple promenading in Regent’s Park.’
Now We Sip Champagne When We’re Thirsty
Somewhat unbelievably, our ‘personals’ section in Issue 28 is now full to bursting, and we are already anticipating our invitation to the very first TF reader wedding. But if you would like to appear in the next issue, we have space in Fencepost, and this time out, we’re asking: what was your most memorable birthday? It could be for entirely pleasant reasons, or it could be a less fortunate memory. Either way, do let us know on social media or at editorial@the-fence.com.
Alphabet Bar on Beak
While it has many other deficiencies, creating little oral histories is one of the few unalloyed benefits that social media has brought us. One particularly enjoyable account is ‘90s London’, which we have been fans of for years, and is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Here, there’s a celebration of a pub called The George, which was on D’Arblay Street and pumped house music all night long, and a prompt to readers as to which other boozers in the capital stretched the legality of their license. It all makes for rich reading in the comments, and demonstrates that the saturation point for 90s nostalgia is, for now, some way off yet.
His Majesty’s Pleasure
King Charles III made a splash this week in the House of Lords, even if it was one slightly dampened by the spectre of other dramas unfurling. Nonetheless, he looked quite dashing, which is always a good thing in the face of dissent and disaster. In Issue 16, Jimmy McIntosh explored His Majesty’s adventures in urban planning at Poundbury, the settlement that marked ‘a return to tradition, a reaction against estate modernism, the wet dream of a thousand Quinlan Terry fanboys and internet edgelords.’ The pubs turned out to be less than ideal, but nonetheless worth a write-up. ‘On entry, it seemed we’d found the answers we were looking for. Look, there’s an avuncular landlord wearing a Union Jack bowler hat!’
Illicit Access
The time is now if you live in London and enjoy snooping through other people’s letters. There’s Lucian Freud’s note to Caroline Blackwood currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, which declares ‘I miss you so much I have quite forgotten what you look like’ while simultaneously presenting her the bill from a shared lunch. Then there’s John Keats’ letters to his fiancée Fanny Brawne, which are now on the market. Or, there’s John Cairncross’s letters to Gloria Barraclough at the National Archives, which show a secretive side to the fifth man that perhaps we already were aware of. Of course, the problem with letters is that more often than not, they make for rather dull reading. Michelle Taylor realised this when leafing T.S. Eliot’s offerings in Issue 13. Yet, ‘even in reading Eliot’s most workmanlike letters, we get something like a secondhand thrill of the archive, a little trace of the pleasure in illicit access.’ She trawled through the archive in search of something special, and against the odds, she managed it.
In Case You Missed It
A mechanised flock of flamingos.
The sculptor Michael Dean’s Palaeolithic bread.
That the cold weather this week was decreed by German saints.
James Butler on the national revulsion for Labour this week.
Wonderfully strange names stumbled upon in a forgotten cemetery in Appalachia, including Goth, Meta, Bonnie Bell and Tilf.
We’ve found the best new game going: LinkedIn or Interpol?
All cooking shows are over. All we will ever need now is the scransitvan.
Advice on how not to check if your lighter is working.
And Finally
He was the grandson of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and descendant of former US President William Howard Taft, but in 2009, Kendall Myers – and his wife – were arrested on charges of state espionage.
When he died this week of complications related to prostate cancer at the age of 88, he had already served fifteen years of his life sentence. He provided classified information to the Cuban government over the course of nearly three decades, not only in the form of stolen memos or documents, but also in the systematic memorisation of vast amounts of data, which was eventually recounted to the Cuban government via a short wave radio – and even personally to Fidel Castro in 1995 in a four-hour meeting at Castro’s house. Eventually caught by an undercover US agent working to narrow down the leaking information, Myers apparently asked how things were at home, and if the agent would send the couple’s love to his intelligence officer in Cuba. By that point, Myers had already retired, and in the final meeting with the US agent, Myers said: ‘We really have missed you. You, speaking collectively, have been a really important part of our lives, and we have felt incomplete.’
His wife, Gwyndoline Myers, worked as a bank clerk, and helped prepare the stolen information for meetings with intelligence agents across Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Trinidad and Tobago. Gwyndoline got out of prison in 2015 for her collusion in her husband’s crimes. They had met at university – a period during which Myers took a four-year break to work as a Czech translator in West Germany – before they moved to South Dakota. There, they seemed to enjoy a softly counter-cultural life, growing a small patch of marijuana and taking an interest in the growing possibilities of solar panels. In photos together, they look totally at ease. They show a slim man with a white moustache in various polo shirts; she has fine hair and an elegant face. In later courtroom sketches, they look older, but generally similar.
There are other curious threads to the story, including that the Myers were apparently not only motivated by a devotion to the Cuban communist party, but also a disillusionment with the treatment of the UK by the US in Bush’s America, as described in comments made during a press conference to The Times, who described him as ‘a senior State Department analyst’ with a ‘specialty in UK politics.’ The same piece quotes the convicted criminal and former Labour MP Denis MacShane referring to Myers as ‘little rat’. An accusation always doubles as a confession.
All these years later, the couple’s dispassionate commitment to contravening the security of their native country still bewilders, and is nonetheless almost viscerally State Departmentcompelling. There is very little by way of explanation of the precise details of what was leaked and the effect it had available online, but ten years ago, a state department counterintelligence officer called Robert Booth wrote a book detailing his work uncovering US espionage, including on the Myers case. You can hear him talk about the couple here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_Xvh8vo6hI
Good golly Miss Molly, that was a fun time. Remember that all technical questions are to be directed to support@the-fence.com and everything else to the editorial address. Do buy a subscription if you like what we’re doing here. The London Tube is so old that early passengers were able to take the train to watch public hangings. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF