Off The Fence: Oh My God, The Daily Mail!

And we've got a dispatch from Cannes

Apr 06, 2024

Dear Readers,

No, your eyes do not deceive you, it is Saturday, and it is an extra edition of Off The Fence, everyone’s favourite weekly newsletter.

On Tuesday we brought you news of our biggest story of the year so far, a scandalous investigation into corruption within the Church of England, but now we’re back with more gossip nuggets from across the web, a lovely dispatch about a dolphin from Jade Angeles Fitton, and the original story on London’s answer to Dimes Square, which is inexplicably close to birthday boy Nigel Farage’s watering hole of choice.

Issue 19 looms ever closer, so we are once again urging you to make sure your address is correct if you’re already a subscriber. You can even enjoy a ‘sneak peek’ at the pages within on our Instagram stories here.

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This newsletter, however – inexplicably – is free. So without further ado, let’s get into it, and we’re kicking off with a dispatch by Stephen Delahunty, who went to this year’s MIPIM, a property conference held in Cannes. But behind the glamour…

Riviera Style

I caught my first sight of MIPIM 2024, the international property sector’s annual piss-up, after I stepped into a small square with a fountain opposite the mediaeval city’s marina.

A sea of navy gilets and quarter zip jumpers was already creating a cup final-like atmosphere. A French protester shouted his disapproval into a loudspeaker. He was calling for affordable and environmentally friendly housing for all, higher taxes on real estate and profits, and less speculative tourism developments – but he was barely audible over the din.

As a reporter focused on housing, I’d landed in the French Riviera under the guise of finding out what the world’s investors thought of the UK property sector. However, I was tired and facing eviction from my London home. My patience for hearing about new build-to-rent skyscrapers in zone one was already thin.

MIPIM has become synonymous over the years with profligate spending by cash-strapped councils. But many local authorities and housing associations stayed away this year, the days of spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a tent by the beach with free booze on tap appearing to be on hold.

Despite being around half its normal size with 21,000 attendees, there were still crowds of bankers, developers, council officers and civil servants dancing to tech-house remixes of Toto’s Africa in the bars and cafes for miles around.

On my first day, caffeine-fuelled and unaccustomed to the March sun, I spent most of the morning pacing the vast 18,700 square metre site trying not to feel self-conscious about my sweat patches, before heading for lunch on a 68-foot yacht with an affordable housing developer from the north-east of England.

My Geordie host greeted me barefoot, wearing denim Hugo Boss jeans and a Bluetooth headset. I removed my shoes and joined him on the top deck alongside an architect, a lobbyist and a senior government town planner, where we filled up on cheese, olives, deli meats and several glasses of rosé, I stepped back onshore and into Saudi Arabia’s tent to grab a coffee, but stayed for a tuna burger and a VR experience of ‘The Mukaab’, a skyscraper large enough to hold 20 Empire State Buildings.

After whistle-stop tours of the London marquee, plus Paris, Liverpool and Manchester, I settled on Belfast, as it was the only tent with Guinness on tap. I sat down outside next to a burly, thickly accented city native and struck up a conversation about why it's difficult to insure buildings with fire safety defects.

We quickly got talking about the Orange Order. The Liverpool wing used to walk past my nan’s house in their masonic garbs when I was a kid. After a few pints we both agreed they had some ‘mad craic’.

With the sun setting for the evening, I moved on to what was meant to be an invite-only dinner for journalists. The bash at La Pizza Cresci seemed over-subscribed. I sat at an empty table and began helping myself to wine and salad. Minutes later, three bankers took up the remaining seats.

After some pleasantries, the banker on my left asked ‘have you come to write an exposé about MIPIM lads and prostitutes?’

We went our separate ways not long after. On the way home, I stopped at an Irish bar that was playing System of a Down to many worse-for-wear revellers, one of which was being helped to his feet by staff after he had collapsed into a table of empty glasses.

The free coach my hotel provided dropped me outside the marina on Wednesday morning. I was on my way to breakfast with a law firm on the beach about 20 minutes outside of the main site.

My breakfast was notable only for the garish blue-yellow waistcoats the venue’s staff were wearing, and the chance it gave me to sit on my own and listen to the waves crash against the shore. Though, as I left, the momentary peace was broken by a MIPIM attendee shouting for help after getting trapped inside a toilet.

Another 20 minutes up the road, was a tennis tournament hosted by a membership club for small developers. One member told me the group had been ‘like therapy’ as they struggled to get planning permission in London. I downed a glass of champagne and stubbed a cigarette out on a tennis ball in an ashtray and moved on.

I spent the rest of the day in the Palais de Festival listening to talks at the UK Cities and Partners (UKCP) stage. During a panel discussion, one well-known brownfield development boss bemoaned how the government had created chaos for buy-to-let investors.

This was in part because house builders are still waiting for clarity on the government’s technical detail for introducing second staircases into new and existing high-rise blocks.

He said: ‘We’ve been waiting since 2017 for this government to sort out the policies it wants, and bring them in quickly to provide us with certainty. So there is a capital side issue, but regulation, planning and the economic situation are all playing their part.’

He failed to mention the major event that triggered this government’s drive towards improving building safety: the Grenfell fire.

The UKCP area ended with a brief talk by housing minister Lee Rowley. Beyond declaring the UK being ‘the best place to do business’ there was little of substance. I’d wanted to ask what his government’s election offer was to private renters like myself, who were being evicted from their home using a Section 21 ‘no-fault’ eviction notice. The Tories pledged to abolish it in their 2019 manifesto.

But there was no Q&A and he left while I was chatting to a female prop-tech boss about the ‘pervy’ experience she had just come from. A lot of these housing industry events can get like that,’ she added.

Thursday was a low key affair. I slept late and found a cafe in the old town overlooking the marina to take stock.

Reflecting on this year’s event, one MIPIM veteran lamented the halcyon days of pundit Gary Neville dropping in by helicopter, of the days when council leaders didn’t fear being snapped by long-lens tabloid photographers as they guzzled champagne on yachts.

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ I suggested.

‘But capital is global and the UK needs to offer the best returns to compete with the rest of the world,’ he said. In the evening I headed to my final party, which was no more than six people drinking in a kitchen showroom.

The kitchen island doubled as a bar, and I sat next to a guy from St Helens who looked like the MP Lee Anderson. True to his doppelganger, he began complaining about illegal immigrants being given council homes.

I left with a tall black guy in a pin-stripe suit from Waltham Forest who was clearly trying to chirpse a glamorous blonde property developer from Los Angeles. They were going for dinner, but I wasn’t invited.

You can follow Stephen on Twitter here.

The Voyage of the Damned

Jade Angeles Fitton is one of our star contributors, and has written for us since December 2020, when she debuted with a funny piece about getting married during COVID, and there’s a particularly handy Goodfellas reference within.

For her honeymoon, she went to Cuba, and had a terrible trip to see some dolphins, which really makes for a diverting piece of reading this Saturday morning. Please enjoy it.

The Opus Dei of British Intellectual Life

An article about a private library in the heart of St James’s? Where membership costs five hundred and sixty five pounds sterling a year? Groundbreaking stuff. Last month we sent Gus Carter deep into the backstacks to report on the incestuous, shelf-sniffing literary scene that is The London Library, the city’s supposed answer to New York’s Dimes Square scene.

Hot on the heels of that reportage by two full weeks came the Daily Mail, who posit that the very same library is some sort of Soho House alternative for people who still use their university email addresses. The first line of the Mail’s piece, which we are reproducing verbatim here, reads: ‘Private member's clubs are all the rage these days, with youngsters flocking to exclusive London clubs to party, relax, and work out behind closed doors and away from the masses.’

Nigel’s Special Day

We would never have guessed that Nigel Farage was an Aries, but he celebrated his 60th birthday party last night at Boisdale (where else) in Canary Wharf. The Standard’s diary reporter Claudia Cockerell gatecrashed the bash, which included a quickly melting ice luge of the man himself, ‘innumerable conga lines’ and a video message from Donald Trump, who described him as a ‘prophetic leader’.

In Case You Missed It

A case for abolishing the media party. Not ours, obviously. But all the other ones.

Yuval Abraham of 972Mag lands the extraordinary, chilling scoop on the IDF targeting system marking tens of thousands of Gazans for death via AI.

Alex Blasdel tells us there’s something weird going on between death and the brain.

The NYT’s Brett Martin meets the stranger who wrote a song about him, and about 23,999 others.

What Lamorna Ash talks about when she talks about netball.

And Finally

This has been doing the rounds again, and if you haven’t experienced it, then now is the time. Truly one of the greatest archive discoveries of all time, in which a choir of French schoolchildren dressed as mini Serge Gainsbourgs pay tribute in song to a weeping Serge Gainsbourg. Surreal? No. It’s one of the most life-affirming clips out there.

That’s it for this week, and we’ll be back next Tuesday with another packed-out edition, as we do love to spoil you so. Enjoy the weekend.

All the best,