Off The Fence: Falconry with Steven Gerrard
And we meet the man who invented jogging.
Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence. We’ve got further updates on the Rory Campbell story today, so you might say this is a scandalous newsletter, but we think it’s a pretty straight-down-the-line mail-out. An honest endeavour.
Issue 22 has been spotted around the planet in dizzying array of locales: in the bedroom of Simón Bolívar; at Joshua Tree National Park; sizing up the delicacies in Torino; gazing out over an Australian beach; at the Senegalese capital; being lovely held by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Cartagena; in Yelapa, Mexico; alongside a Radiohead album; in a Californian town where the mayor is a golden retriever (true story) and this really wonderful snap of the magazine with some zebras.
The competition for the Bollinger is now very competitive, and we do welcome photos from less glamorous environs; it can be taken down a piss-strewn alley in Edmonton if you wish.
The magazine is also sold out at a number of stores – all copies are sold out at Good News on Berwick Street, but there should be some left at Foyles on Tottenham Court Road or Piccadilly Waterstones if you’re in central London.
The magazine is going to be sold out soon. For those of you hunting copies of Issue 20 or Issue 13, there are some available from Pics and Ink here, and you can also fill your boots on eBay.
You can pick up a copy of Issue 22 at this lovely photo below.
Or you can buy a subscription, as many of you do every day, which really is very nice to observe.
Let’s get it going.
Campbell’s Scoop
Last week, we reported on Rory Campbell, the spivvy son of spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, who has lost £5 million that a betting syndicate entrusted him with. Campbell is unable to provide any receipts or evidence as to what has happened to the money, and his father drafted in his old friend, Charlie Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, to act as an intermediary. At the time of writing, some of the investors plan to report Rory Campbell to the Serious Fraud Office.
We spoke to one of the investors in the syndicate this week, who has lost ‘between £150k-200k’ and has spent a year trying to get his money back. The syndicate comprised around 50 individuals, mainly people in the gambling industry ‘who are comfortable with a high level of risk’, but also some ‘friends of friends’ who have lost a considerable portion of their wealth.
Many in the syndicate considered Rory ‘a real friend’ and ‘went on holiday with him regularly’. According to our source, Rory is ‘very personable and charming, obsessed with politics and football.’ They would meet for ‘five-pint lunches’ two or three times a year.
But now, Rory has vanished. He doesn’t return calls or communications, and members of the syndicate believe he is hiding in Portugal. What has happened to the money? There are a number of rumours floating around, but nothing substantive.
That Charlie Falconer inserted himself into the situation was, in our source’s view, ‘deeply stupid’. Even as attention flows to Tulip Siddiq’s property portfolio, there’s another north London scandal that might taint the Starmer administration.
To Be Dammam, You Gotta Beat Dammam
With the Liverpool legend on the cusp of a sacking from Al-Ettifaq, now feels as good a time as any for a short retrospective on Steven Gerrard’s Saudi sojourn.
It all began in the summer of 2023, as the warm thrums of Salmanic petro-cash reached the shores of European football, in what looked to be a total upending of the global football order. When Al-Ettifaq president and Liverpool diehard, Samer Al-Misehal, first offered Gerrard the job in the eastern city of Dammam at the end of June, he demurred. ‘I was invited over there to look at a potential offer,’ he told Channel 4, ‘which I did. I have been analysing that over the last couple of days. But, as we stand right now, I won't be taking that offer up.’ One week later, after presumably having a freight lorry’s worth of bank notes dropped off at his mansion in Formby, Whiston’s second most famous son had a change of heart.
‘Marhaba,’ says the besuited former Liverpool and England captain, holding a front-facing camera above his head, ‘Ana Steven Gerrard. Ana Al-Ettifaqi. See you soon.’ With that, Gerrard introduced himself to the Saudi fans, not as the new manager but as Al-Ettifaq itself, owing to his novice grasp of the Arabic language. But soon after arrival, Gerrard settled into his own little cell of Scouseness on the shores of the Gulf.
He was able to tempt over the man who replaced him as Liverpool captain, Jordan Henderson, in a move that incinerated a bank of goodwill for the player who had led Gerrard’s club to greater glories than his own. Henderson, head spinning with the prospect of multi-millions, moved his entire family from their home in Sunderland to Dammam, where he promised that they would be able to entertain themselves in the famously abstinent nation by driving over the gargantuan, humpback King Fahd Causeway to Bahrain whenever they wanted a drink.
Henderson left Dammam after six months – reportedly a ‘football decision’, but really because of a full-scale family revolt. But due to the strange deferred payment set-up he’d agreed to in signing, he didn’t earn a penny from Al-Ettifaq, leaving for Ajax a diminished, humiliated figure. Gerrard responded to the instability by agreeing a contract extension, again presumably for a chunk of the money that Hendo left on the table.
In the neighbouring city of Khobar was another long-time friend of Gerrard’s, Robbie Fowler, who was now managing Al-Qadsiah in the Saudi second division. Fowler, too, left eastern Saudi in October 2023 despite managing his side to an unbeaten start in the league, leaving Stevie marooned in Dammam.
His side finished sixth in last year’s Saudi Pro League, but with Al-Ettifaq languishing in the relegation zone, a P45 seems imminent, and while he may never get another top-level coaching job for the rest of his days, he can be confident of having finally secured generational wealth for his clan, something that must’ve been unnerving him toward the final years of his £150,000 a week contract at Liverpool. But he needn’t have bothered, as it seems that his daughter, Lilly-Ella, is expecting her first child with partner Lee Byrne, scion of Kinahan cartel associate, Liam Byrne. If Carlsberg made grandads…
She Made the Universe
A few cold Mondays ago over a lunchtime pint, two of our editors decided it would be quite funny to get on a train and high-tail it down to Lincolnshire, to the town where a certain little madam (as she loved to be known) called Margaret Thatcher was born.
Two short hours on the LNER later, Kieran Morris and Fergus Butler-Gallie arrived in Grantham, saw Thatcher’s childhood bed, gatecrashed a boys’ school prizegiving rehearsal and bothered as many locals as they could find about the shadow of the Iron Lady. You can read the fruits of their gumshoe reportage right here.
All Above Board
Vampiric fraudster, Edward Davenport, has been in and out of the headlines since the mid-1980s, when he started the Gatecrasher balls for wealthy young lotharios in the Home Counties. They were, it must be said, a great success, but then there was the first run-in with HMRC. There have been many more since.
According to the 58-year-old’s Instagram account, his Portland Place mansion has been the site of a record-breaking attempt by a young Briton called Bonnie Blue, who claims to have slept with 1,057 men in 12 hours.
Davenport previously owned another mansion across Portland Place, which he scored from the Sierra Leone government at a knockdown sum. Major Hollywood films like The King’s Speech were shot there. There were also a number of upmarket ‘swingers parties’ there, before Davenport had to flog it to fulfil compensation and confiscation orders, having masterminded a £4 million fraud. At this trial, ‘Fast Eddie’ found a Fleet Street ally in the form of Eleanor Mills, lately of the Sunday Times. Mills provided a character reference for the fraudster, and wrote a column that details her 40th birthday party at the ‘ultimate party palace’ in Portland Place. We’re sure a wonderful time was had by all.
Van Dammaging The Brand?
We’re not really sure what’s going on with this post advertising JCVD’s Old Oak whiskey, which makes a few dazzling turns within its breezy character limit; enjoining Muslims to drink alcohol, threatening employees with termination for failing to promote his products, and a forest of hashtags that gets more bewildering by the line.
They say all publicity is good publicity, and by ‘they’ we mean the tiny, drunken demon who sits on the shoulder of martial artist, master distiller and actor Jean-Claude Van Damme.
That said, if Monsieur VD – one of our first subscribers and financial backers – would like to send us a bottle, we’re at 2 Archer Street, Soho, W1D 7AP.
PTA Should Only Stand for Paul Thomas Anderson
Parents: surely you’ve been itching to talk about the strange WhatsApp groups you’ve fallen into since you first welcomed life into the world, as your inbox bloats with dings and pings from all the kinds of adults you’ve studiously tried to avoid.
Well, now’s your chance, as we’re casting our net out far and wide for stories of the worst and weirdest parental WhatsApps and residential groupchats; from happy-clappy nursery bants to wildcat strikes against nefarious ice cream peddlers.
Click on the above – or indeed here on Bsky – and rummage around the replies and quotes to find more than one hundred barnstorming entries tallied so far. Join their number by sending your own best grievances, gripes, and horror stories to editorial@the-fence.com - the pettier the better!
In Case You Missed It
Lila Shapiro’s Vulture piece on the allegations against Neil Gaiman is every bit as sobering, and damning, as you’ve heard.
When did Tokyo stop being the city of the future?
WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg on the teenager who called armed cops on hundreds of fake school shootings across America.
Assigned Media’s Billie Sweeney on trans voices being frozen out of the New York Times.
TF features editor Séamas O’Reilly on why AI is a shit thing that everyone should hate.
And Finally
In 1971, BBC Nationwide’s Bob Wellings took to Hyde Park to interview the Rt Hon Ernest Marples, former Postmaster General in the Macmillan government. The subject of their discussion was not the affairs of state or a light progress through the great man’s storied career, but on his passion for a newfangled exercise routine which he sought to introduce to a curious public.
The resulting segment, ‘What on Earth is JOGGING?’ is a beautiful time capsule from a simpler age.
Dressed in nondescript – but classily collared – athleisure, he extols the virtues of the ‘latest American import’ and conducts a brief demonstration of the mid-tempo ambulation he’s there to evangelise.
Of particular note to history is his insistence that he doesn’t run to Parliament in his ‘lounge suit’ because ‘people look at me like I’m running away from the police’. For someone whose ‘Controversies’ section on Wikipedia lists ‘Conflict of interest’, ‘use of prostitutes’, and ‘flight to Monaco’, and concludes with an exhaustive itinerary through his manifold late-in-life legal issues, we can only presume this was a judiciously chosen line. Proof, were it needed, that you can’t run forever.
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That’s it for this week, another stellar outing, on that we can all agree. Magazines are available to buy here, should you so desire. We’ll be back next Tuesday, and please email support@the-fence.com with any technical queries. Thank the Lord the cold weather has ended. Thank you, Lord.
All the best,
TF
The O'Reilly article on our AI future is scarily prescient. Couldn't agree more with the thoughts conveyed.