Off The Fence: The British Are Coming, Dude

And we unmask Dr Evil

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a saucy little number of a newsletter. Lots going on in the world right now, isn’t there? We’ve got our usual buffet of tips and tricks for your delectation.

Issue 22 continues to be seen in all the finest places: resplendent at WH Smith St Pancras; in Mogadishu; smothered by some small dogs and on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

Remember: the winningest snap of Issue 22 will win a bottle of Bollinger Champagne. Either send through a photo to editorial@the-fence.com or tag us on one of our social media channels.

You can buy one from our independent stockists here, at WH Smiths, Waterstones, or you can click on this photo of Issue 21 and Issue 22 outside The Windmill.

Now, as ‘democracy dies in darkness’ and everything gets steadily more expensive, we’re continuing to sling a premium offering starting at an almost insultingly low sum of £24.99 for 12 months. Do subscribe to The Fence if you haven’t done so already.

Now today, we’ve got some bits about Austin Powers and mobile libraries, but let’s talk, if we must, about yesterday’s proceedings in Washington.

51^st State

Amid the clamour and hubbub of a dismal day in Washington, many have been focusing on the spectacle of obsequious tech barons lining up to kiss Trump’s ring, the stamped display of executive orders and pardons that prefigured the day’s retinue of speeches and tirades, and the fact that the celebrations included the richest man on Earth giving what the world’s press are doing their very best to avoid calling a Nazi salute.

But what of the plucky Brits who were also in attendance? Never the type to miss a clicking lens, the most radiant stars of the UK’s rightosphere were there to show their support.

Nigel Farage was sure to take pictures from the subsequent parade within the Capitol One Arena, but was not among the guests for the inauguration proper, a fact his fellow travellers at GB News couldn’t help ribbing him on, which he was absolutely fine with, and didn’t mind, and actually, if anything, is still laughing about even now.

Seated near the front of said inauguration was Boris Johnson, so moved by the occasion that he was seen resting his eyes during key moments of the spectacle.

Away from the main event, the unembarrassable wing of the Tory party had further representation, with Suella Braverman and Liz Truss both milling around the Potomac. Sentient divorce order Lawrence Fox joined former gaming journalist, Calvin Robinson, to watch the swearing-in ceremony with Kid Rock, on what appeared to be a couch from a porn set.

Many of the above were later seen all together at the pithily named Stars & Stripes & The Union Jack after-party, laid on by Arron Banks and a host of other sponsors whose names crowded the entrance like the line-up to the worst Home Counties garden festival your uncle has ever asked you to DJ.

Graphic design is my passion

Spare a thought, however, for Banks himself. Having funded the party to the tune of a reported £150,000, his hopes that it would ensconce him within the glowing firmament of Britain’s new elite were dashed when he was denied a visa to enter the country.

A salutary lesson, perhaps, that when it comes to toughening America’s border security, you should be careful what you wish for.

You’re Making a Show of Yourself

What’s going on at the National Portrait Gallery? A photographer by the name of Zoë Law has scored an exhibition at one of Britain’s cultural lodestars. The show, imaginatively titled ‘Legends’, is a collection of celebrity portraits.

But as this video makes clear below, no one in the highly insular world of photography had ever heard of Law before this pronouncedly grand début:

Curious, we searched for some of Law’s earlier work, and one of the first hits is this: an article detailing her tenure as chairwoman of the Conservative Black and White Ball. Her husband, Andrew, is a hedgefunder described by the FT as an ‘unassuming master of the universe’.

So how did Law find her way on to the radar of one of Britain’s most vaunted cultural institutions? Well, Chairman of the Board at the National Portrait Gallery is Carphone Warehouse tycoon and Tory superdonor, David Ross, known for giving Boris Johnson a much-needed Mustique holiday just before COVID. We wonder what the grand man of the TLS – Sir Peter Stothard – makes of it all in his role as ‘chair of the ethics committee’ at the NPG.

Never Before Has a Boy Wanted More

Have you noticed that the theatre in London seems like it’s got good again? For five years there really wasn’t much happening (unless you were a drama critic or a jobbing actor) but now there are a lot of shows that you might, just might, want to shell out £100 for. There’s the universally acclaimed Matthew Bourne spin of Bart’s Oliver!, playing just round the corner from us. There’s dynamic political theatre over at the terribly named @sohoplace, with the Stephen Daldry-directed Kyoto winning rave reviews. There’s the jukebox musical parody that is Titanique, which tells Jack and Rose’s love story from Celine Dion’s perspective, and is supposed to be extremely funny.

What are all these producers thinking? Dynamic drama for the paying public as opposed to reheated adaptations for an audience of scowling pensioners? No one on the editorial team has seen any of these plays – but we are tempted to do so, which is a start.

Greetins Vrum Zummerset

Does London have excellent restaurants? Yes, it does, much more so than it did even a decade ago, but at the moment it feels like nearly every new opening is the same: chi-chi bistro classics, baller French wine, with a pasty English chef, fresh from trying to detox in the Auvergne, overseeing everything with a tyrant’s hand. And the bill? £150 a head for your troubles, tasting or à la carte. It’s all a bit unimaginative, to say the least: once you’ve seen one Planque (or Cadet, Cornus or Fantômas), you’ve seen them all.

But if you want to go somewhere with real gastronomic vision, you can do little better than high-tailing it down to pretty Bruton in south Somerset, where Merlin Labron-Johnson is doing all manner of things with vegetables at the peerless Osip.

Labron-Johnson won a Michelin star at Portland at the age of 24, before decamping to the West Country. A decade on, and in the peak of his powers, he’s launched a second version of Osip in a revamped coaching inn, leaning on the auberge model that you find dotted throughout the French countryside. The tasting menu – 11 ever-changing courses of faultlessness – is an improbable £125, and would comfortably command double in the capital. All the produce is cultivated and chosen by the kitchen staff from two of the restaurant’s farms in the surrounding area, but the total mastery of technique on display is what makes it sing.

Fresh and Verdant

It’s got one star at the moment, but it will have two, very soon; beyond that is anyone’s guess. After your meal, go into town and try to spot a roaming George Osborne, or if you’re not minded to earn yourself a Public Order charge, you can drive to Maiden Bradley, and enjoy a pint of cider for £3.50 at the time-warp Seymour Arms, surely one of the best pubs in Britain.

Sip by Sip

It may well be Dry January for some of you, but our pints reportage is ceaseless. In a piece that would lure even the most staunch and sober back to their local watering holes, Henry Wismayer writes about the one at the end of his road, which happens to be that holiest of holy grails, a truly great shit pub. These are easily identifiable once you know how to look for them; perennially on the verge of closure, aesthetics from the last century, on the outskirts of acceptability, area-wise (in this case deepest south London). Head into a paradise of Lost Albion here, and then please do send us your suggestions for other great shit pubs of London and beyond. Until February 1st.

Popping the Bubble

You may have noticed that The Fence, being based in London, publishes a lot of articles about London. But we're not as Soho-obsessed as they're making out! We love publishing features from outside of Zones 1 to 8, and over the years many of our favourite stories have come from anywhere but London. We've written about foiled terrorist plots in Liverpool and sipped pints in the farthest corners of Cornwall; we’ve sipped tea with priests in Maynooth and ventured deep into the heart of Thatcher country.

And now we want more. If you have a story from anywhere except London – we cannot emphasise this enough, not in London – then please do get in touch and tell us all the gory details at editorial@the-fence.com. We’re also looking for an experienced investigative journalist based in the East Midlands. If this sounds like you, then do drop us a line via the same channels.

Soho’s Greatest Pisshead

The real news of yesterday was in fact not the inauguration but the 91st birthday of the honourable Tom Baker, arguably the greatest Doctor Who, and less arguably the greatest Soho drinker. In 1978 a newspaper profile chronicled one of Baker’s typical liver-destroying jaunts around central London.

Then, 45 years later, Sunday Times restaurant critic Charlotte Ivers retraced Baker’s steps for The Fence. An intrepid Soho explorer, Ivers posed an essential question: can you truly enjoy a smörgåsbord of pints in a more sanitised era of boba tea shops, 10.30pm pub closing times and thousands of Yank tourists? Read the piece here to discover her answer. Or at least read it as a belated happy birthday gesture to Mr Baker.

He Invented the Question Mark

Did you know that Dr Evil, famed villain of the Austin Powers cinematic universe, is actually based on Lorne Michaels, famed villain of the SNL cinematic universe? Perhaps you did. But did you know how evil Lorne Michaels truly is? Perhaps you did not.

A new, fascinating and intricately detailed profile with the man himself in the New Yorker just dropped, which goes deeper into the SNL world than the kind-of-bad new film could ever dream of going. A journey through five decades of a man who ruled with absolute power, and inspired a million parodies in his wake. But Dr Evil is the best one, in our humble opinion. Here it is for you all to enjoy.

In Case You Missed It

Charlotte Higgins on the ghosts haunting the British Museum.

Fuchsia Dunlop with a fascinating tour of the western food of Shanghai.

Zoë Hu on the truth and fiction of the male loneliness epidemic.

Jacob Furedi travels to Keighley, to meet the victims of grooming gangs.

Garbage Day’s Adam Baumas on what – and how little – the TikTok ban really means.

Ashwin Rodrigues on the Arsenal fans reckoning with the fact the word ‘Gooner’ is now (even more) associated with chronic masturbation.

And Finally

‘In any town in Britain, the public library is an easy building to find’

So speaks Sally Jenkins in this public information film from 1960. Made by the pleasingly named Basic Films, I Am A Mobile Librarian tracks the titular bibliophilic vehicle run by Jenkins and her driver Thomas, as it rambles around rural Hertfordshire in gloriously filmed black and white footage. Their operation was an impressive one, encompassing a labyrinthine sorting system for their 2,000 customers, a van carrying 2,500 books in and of itself, with around 10,000 books in circulation at any one time. They even offered a transnational exchange scheme wherein books could be procured and loaned from international libraries at no extra cost.

Presented with Jenkins’ unfussy élan, and improbably posh diction – the kind you simply don’t hear anywhere these days outside of parodies of this exact type of film - it’s a charming insight into the cultural prominence libraries enjoyed 65 years ago. As Britain reels from the closure of one in five of its libraries in the past 15 years, it’s also a somewhat bittersweet look at a time that seems long gone. One sadly, perhaps, for the history books.

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That’s that for the Tuesletter, we hope you enjoyed it – savoured it, even – and do treat yourselves to something from our shop if you enjoyed it, there are some beautiful maps, top-drawer magazines and other assorted treats for you to peruse online. The internet really does excel with regards to retail pleasure. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, please email support@the-fence.com and we’ll get back to you. Have a lovely rest of the week.

All the best,

TF