Who Needs Alli?

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon, and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that never tires of introducing itself. Issue 21 has been printed, boxed, and is currently transiting across the treacherous seas to our clandestine depot near Dover.

We made mention of one contributor – Howth-based book aficionado, John Banville – in last week’s Off The Fence, and can now share not one but two stories from the latest issue. We’ll tell you a little more about them both further on in this week’s missive.

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This week, we have a little bit about Labour, pardon, but stay with us: for dessert we’ve got boozy old Soho, chi-chi fashionistas, links, clips, and a mad old sitcom with a second life in the Eastern Bloc. Everything you’ve come to expect from us. But first, lunch with Lord Alli.

With Friends Like These

Later today, for the first time perhaps ever, the British public will take a good hard look at Sir Keir Starmer, no longer seeing him as a blurry cluster of rounded grey blocks, but as a man wearing very snazzy clobber indeed. The man we have to thank for our new sartorial PM is, as the world now knows, Lord Waheed Alli, the Blair-ennobled media impresario turned professional friend for impoverished ministers everywhere.

Nobody needs telling that donors spend money on influence – but what does Alli actually stand for? Well, if you guessed ‘nothing’ you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but in a rare interview from 2011, over lunch with the FT, you can glean a little snippet of the lavish Lord’s worldview. Bemoaning the bothering of politicians by the press, Alli admits to lobbying Labour to consider a new offence of ‘corporate intimidation’ to put journalists back in their place. ‘When companies or newspapers use their power to intimidate individuals or politicians, it is no more acceptable than when the Mafia does it to a shopkeeper,’ he told the paper. ‘It is blackmail.’

So no chance of getting interview time with Starmer or Reeves, then. However, one key divergence between Starmer and Alli comes on the topic of looters, as Alli spoke – ironically enough – in the wake of the 2011 riots. ‘When you look up and see everybody on the take,’ he said, ‘and you can get a free pair of trainers, tell me what the difference is between a free pair of trainers and a banker’s bonus, or a TV set in a second home that isn’t in your constituency… The difference is, it’s four years in jail for the person with the trainers and nobody else.’ You’d like to think that the Director of Public Prosecutions read this interview, and thought of a better way to get himself some free footwear.

Poppers’ Theory of Falsification

Did you watch Rachel Reeves’ speech yesterday? No? We didn’t either – we already had the finest commentary on the autumn budget locked & loaded in Issue 21. While the nation cheered on our valiant loserboys in the Euros final this summer, we sent the redoubtable Bron Maher to Stark Bollock Naked – a Sunday afternoon bacchanal under the archways of Vauxhall – to ask the naked revellers about our new iron chancellor.

The end result is one of our pieces of the year: a ribald romp through the darkrooms of London, going where no psephologist has gone before, at least during working hours. You can read Bron’s brilliant latest, right here.

But Oh, Don’t You Miss Soho?

It’s Labour v. Labour on the battleground of pedestrianising Soho. In the red corner is Sadiq Khan, who wants to make it so we can access the big IKEA off Oxford Circus without being killed by a double decker bus. In the other red corner, Westminster Council, and Councillor Adam Hug (not a typo), who has sent 10 ‘areas of concern’ to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Mayor of London.

Westminster Council has long been an adversary of Khan – he initially announced the project to pedestrianise Oxford Street all the way back in 2017, but the project, forecast to cost £43 million, fell apart when the then-Conservative led Westminster Council withdrew its support. Now it’s back on, three times the price, and with special powers from Sir Keir to push the project through. It’s the Marble Arch Mound all over again.

Who knows what Central London will look like in the future Khan envisions – presumably all leafy green benches, frolicking TikTokers and All Bar Ones. If you’d like to comfort yourself with the nostalgia of the past and ignore thinking about that all together, then perhaps you’d like to read Charlotte Ivers’ dispatch from Old Soho. Back in Issue 19, the Sunday Times restaurant critic followed in the footsteps of iconic Doctor Who, Tom Baker, who drank, ate and smoked far too much to be drawn into tedious little arguments about Westminster Council. Must be nice! Read it here.

Various Erotic Candelabras and a Well-Preserved Dwarf Skeleton

As a special act of striking generosity, we’ve put our lead piece from the upcoming Issue 21 online a whole week early: a not-at-all contentious and joyously eye-popping primer on the life and times of one Evgeny Lebedev. Party boy. Newsman. Presenter of BBC Radio 2’s Rylan on Saturday.

Written by crack duo Miles Ellingham and Cormac Kehoe, the piece is a quartet of nested dolls, examining the felt-bearded press baron from as many angles as space allows, with bizarre details and eye-catching morsels packing to the rafters of its byzantine dome. It is, in short, an 80-proof shot of pure, unadulterated Fence, and we hope you enjoy it. Cover to come shortly. ваше здоровье!

Church End State

We’ve had the stench of corruption in our nostrils ever since our piece on malfeasance within the Church of England led Issue 19. That investigation told the story of Martin Sargeant, the high-ranking CofE official who embezzled vast sums of money from church coffers and reacted to his ouster by smearing dozens of his colleagues into the bargain.

It was a striking, sobering read and one we’re very proud of, so we’re excited to reveal another boffo piece of investigation in that world will be coming very soon. It’s currently gathering pace but, as always, we’re always on the lookout for extra morsels. Which is where you, our doting and discerning readers come in: if you, or anyone you know, has knowledge of the ins and outs of any rum doings within the Church of England, please contact us at editorial@the-fence.com.

Posh Women? In Fashion?!

Are those th-? The plummy ladies of Vogue House, talking about their Dolce & Gabbana skirts? Yeah, they are. A 1999 video resurfaced over the weekend of the famous fashion writer Plum Sykes talking about her uniform at Vogue, and how the office revolutionised what we would think of as ‘office siren chic’. Most people were focused not on Plum’s outfit (which was really very nice indeed), but instead on her family name and cut-glass accent. Plenty of eagle-eyed and very pleased-with-themselves online investigators pointed out that Sykes’ ancestor was, indeed, Mark Sykes, namesake of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Which led us at Fence Towers to speculate: until this video, did people actually think that the British fashion industry was not made up of fabulously dressed Sloaneys…? Sadly, the gotcha nature of the Plum-posting was inadvertently more revealing about Twitter’s couturial hive mind than anything else. As New Yorker writer Naomi Fry pithily puts it: ‘If you’ve only heard of Plum Sykes now, I don’t know what to tell you.’

As anyone who has ever been to a LFW party can attest to, these publications are basically glossy versions of Hollinghurst novels rather than montages of Anne Hathaway wearing cerulean blue sweaters and funny little Prada hats. Something for which we might be thankful, given that, otherwise, we wouldn’t have anecdotes like Sykes talking about her servants wearing hilarious googly eyes to serve her lunch.

If you’d like some actual juicy gossip from the fashion world, then you are in luck. Back in Issue 15, Clive Martin went undercover in his Dolce & Gabbana skirt to find just that. Read it here.

In Case You Missed It

Róisín Lanigan talks main character syndrome through the lens of Jemima Kirke’s Instagram.

Sean Tatol on the paucity of post-internet art and the gimmicks of future past.

Amelia Tait asks why we’ve stopped even pretending that girls’ looks aren’t everything.

With Mohamed ‘Al’ Fayed making grim headlines a year after his death, you could do worse than reacquainting yourself with Kieran Morris’ stonking obituary of the departed Egyptian plutocrat, from this past July.

New Scientist chimes in with the best news of the day, which is that Octopodes – the real plural, sue us – work with fish to catch prey, and punch those that are not helping.

And Finally…

The Hungarian fascination with Major’s Britain is not limited to the nation’s worship of Roger Scruton. Jimmy Perry and David Croft, creators of Dad’s Army, gave another offering between 1988 and 1993 in the form of their now-barely watched sitcom You Rang M’Lord?. Designed to mock the popular Upstairs Downstairs format – now milked into oblivion by Julian Fellowes and the Downton Abbey Cinematic Universe – the creators latterly felt that the series was a failure. Having made all of the toffs either perverts or arseholes (one character became erotically aroused by the smell of carbolic soap) and all of the servants criminals or arseholes, the show’s failure to make any of the characters even faintly likeable resulted in it being a footnote in British TV history, notable only for having the first regular lesbian character in a UK sitcom.

In Hungary, however, it was a different story. The dubbed version was one of the first new bits of Western TV broadcast after the fall of Communism, and duly acquired a mass following. Pets are still named after the show’s characters, and even Gen Z Hungarians can quote it at length. Today, thousands of people attend You Rang M’Lord? conventions in Budapest, dressing as their favourite characters and swapping catchphrases. In 2018, the show’s 30th anniversary was marked with an enormous convention at the Continental Hotel in Budapest. The guest of honour was Jeffrey Holland, who played the footman James Twelvetrees. Holland arrives in character and gets a rockstar welcome from a huge crowd that reduces him to tears in this both bizarre and strangely touching video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgY8JvSFjM8

In later interviews, Holland was asked if he got tired of people quoting lines from the 1980s at him in Hungarian. ‘Not at all’ he replied, ‘It was like I was Elvis’.

Ah, monsieurs et madames, you must give this reading time back – another table is waiting for this newsletter, but you can have your last drink at the bar. If this beautifully crafted screed has impelled you, in some way, to reach out to us, contact support@the-fence.com for anything we could justifiably support you with. Like, postage issues and stuff, nothing too heavy. Until next week. Issue 21 time. Let’s go.

All the best,

TF