Off The Fence: On the Phone with Bono

And dogging on the Duke of Richmond's estate.

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a no-holds-barred newsletter. We’ve got a chin-swipingly juicy edition for you today, so get your napkins ready.

Issue 23 has been spotted in New York City’s West Village, in Key West, on a pillow with Vittles magazine and more. Remember, you can win that sparkling, spenny prize of a bottle of Bollinger Champagne if you send through a top-tier snap of the magazine to us, either tagging us on social media or winging through to editorial@the-fence.com.

Swimming with the sharks

Radio 4’s Emma Barnett has laden the magazine with more praise, hailing ‘our buccaneering spirit’ in her column for the i; Flo Dill has shouted out The Fence on her NTS breakfast show and there have been some lovely words from Andrew Lavers, who has done a long write-up of the magazine, describing it as ‘incredibly varied and often funny’ and ‘kind of like the UK’s answer to the New Yorker? Though maybe it takes itself a little bit less seriously.’ Which really is very nice to hear indeed.

If you haven’t yet signed up, then it’s time to do so, not least because Issue 23 will be sold out very soon, and it really is the best one yet.

The weather is unbearably gloomy today, but the weekend is set to fair, and we have raised the drawbridge once more: in Capital Letter, we reveal the best spot to lounge in the sunshine in London, far away from the maddening crowds. There’s much more to be enjoyed there, too. Do join us there.

Now, to business: we sent intrepid reporter Joe Bishop up to West Sussex on a dogging mission, and told him not to come back until he had a dispatch.

Paw Patrol

Over the weekend, the Telegraph asked a controversial question that was sure to strike at the heart of Brits all over. It wasn’t about the price of a pint or the ethics of using warships on dinghies from Calais, but something much more evocative to us rancorous rosbifs: ‘Are There Too Many Dogs in Britain?’

With the actual number of dogs in Britain floating somewhere between 10 and thirteen million, and the avid trainers and dog lovers canvassed in the article agreeing that the current cohort of custodians is simply not up to the task, the answer does appear to be ‘yes’. We have become a land of turds, often smeared across the pavement, imprinted with the phantom of some poor bugger’s shoe sole, like a seal in wax. Dog 'mummies’ and dog ‘daddies’ haunt our parks, deploying faintly maniacal goo-goo ga-gas at their pets, or swaggering around the streets with a leashless pooch, doomscrolling while their dog sniffs at a delicious child like it’s a pie cooling on a window sill. Between XL Bullies and pub dog supremacists and dedicated Instagram pages, it’s fair to say that the British dog owner has become quite an irritating subculture. There’s a lot of bad behaviour, there’s a lot of weird behaviour.

I have never owned a dog, but I am very much a dog lover. Some people get a flood of oxytocin to the brain when they see a bright-eyed newborn baby – I get that when a loyal dog looks up lovingly at its owner as they skip along through life together. To be a dog hater is, to me, to have a part of your soul missing. But I am keenly aware of the phenomenon of the dog nutter. Those who take it too far, who project their identities and personalities so much onto these innocent creatures that soon the line begins to blur. I wanted to observe the dog nutter in their most natural habitat, so I took myself to Goodwoof, one of the largest dog festivals in the country.

The day begins with the dachshund parade, which is this year’s celebrated breed. Tiny little sausage dogs, some with funny little outfits on, are led around the grounds accompanied by a brass band, like we’re in New Orleans. Goodwoof, which is now in its fourth year, is held on the 11,000-acre grounds of Goodwood. It’s the seat of the Duke of Richmond, himself coiffured like an arrogant terrier, who opened the festival. It’s more well-known for its Festival of Speed, where thousands of guys you wouldn’t leave alone with your teenage daughter look at old supercars. The clientele here is decidedly different, though; families, couples, and perhaps more butch lesbians than I’ve ever seen in one place. It was like a k.d. lang concert, and their patron saint Claire Balding is a regular guest speaker.

Much like any themed show or festival, Goodwoof was replete with vendors flogging their wares. Collars, leads, toys, clothes, sustainable food, drying coats, Italian leather accessories, stem cell joint medicine, photobooths, galleries. Brits spend a staggering £10 billion a year on their dogs, a sum that seems only set to grow.

I wondered what an event like this must be like for the dogs themselves. I’d assumed before arriving that it would be lightly chaotic, the pungent smell of a thousand anuses causing a pheromonal overload in their tiny brains, like a smog of poppers. But they were all incredibly calm. Perhaps it was due to their training; Goodwoof is not an event for amateurs. But maybe it’s because, to a dog, this is just what the world looks like. It would be like me yelping and panting and excitedly slobbering on a busy commuter train at rush hour.

There was certainly a hierarchy at Goodwoof. Displays throughout the day showed off the skills of gun dogs, sheep dogs, show dogs. There were little Cruftsian areas where people could take their dogs around a show dog assault course, in and out of poles, leaping over sticks, ascending and descending ramps. The owners all had that familiar look in their eye, of loving expectation that their dog would suddenly turn out to be an expert showman, because they are perfect in every way. And that familiar look of light disappointment when reality hits, and their companion rolls around on the floor for a bit instead.

Like most gently maligned people on earth, the dog nutters are as varied as they are harmless. I spotted a woman in a full pink outfit, complete with pink dogshit bags and a pink dogshit bag dispenser. At the Taittinger Tent, I was sandwiched between one lady who was a Crufts alumnus and another who had a buggy filled with rabid, brawling pekingese. An extremely old couple shuffled around in the sun, accompanied by their haunted-looking hound, who had a hi-vis ‘NERVOUS DOG’ lead attached to him.

Aside from the races and demonstrations and fun, there was a slightly incongruous woo-woo element to the festival, with tarot readings and crystal healings both having long queues. There was also a dog medium session, which I attended. Inside were two couples; the men stoically holding their feelings in, and the women in floods of tears. One girl was so impossibly distraught that she kept her baseball cap low over her face for the entire session, weeping constantly. The medium asked her how bad her pain was on a scale of one to ten. With a cracked voice, looking straight at the floor, she answered: ‘Ten’.

The medium guided the bereaved through mindfulness exercises, and told them that their departed pets’ energies were in the tent with us. I sensed that it wasn’t quite what they came for. I felt that they wanted, despite themselves and their regular beliefs, to believe that their dog forgave them for putting them down. That through a conduit they could be relieved of the guilt of killing their best friend, a pain that feels terribly unique. One of the men comments that the agony is in not being able to tell them it’s for the best.

‘Be The Person Your Dog Thinks You Are’ yells a woman’s hoodie, just by the DHL Fastest Dog Competition. But I think it’s the opposite. I think we want to be the dog, to be loyal and carefree. As I walk towards the exit, an orchestra plays Debussy’s dreamy Clair de lune. For one day, the dog nutters can live unfettered in their ideal world, lost in the fantasy of Goodwoof, where man’s best friend is king.

Follow Joe Bishop on Instagram – not X, as he’s been shadowbanned and doesn’t know how to get it lifted.

Register Your Interest

Introducing Democracy for Sale – Britain’s roving watchdog with a single-minded brief: show exactly who’s buying influence, and at what price. If you’ve ever glanced at a ministerial register and wondered, ‘Yes, but what does that really cost the rest of us?’ – Democracy for Sale is the publication for you.

Investigations are the whole point of the exercise. Recent scoops include our probe into Peter Mandelson’s transatlantic lobbying empire, the ‘great unspoken’ of Downing Street influence; a series on Peter Thiel’s Palantir and the quiet signing of £400 million in UK government contracts; and follow-the-money deep dives that have already triggered select-committee questions, forced formal apologies from wayward MPs and nudged regulators into reluctant action. When donors, data brokers or dark-money PACs try to hide in the footnotes, we fetch a torch and read the fine print aloud.

All that digging takes time, lawyers and caffeine – mostly funded by more than 27,000 readers who reckon democracy is worth more than a press release. Sign up today with this exclusive link for 25% off your first year and you’ll join the crowd ensuring the next scandal sees daylight. Or, as new subscriber Diana put it, ‘Democracy seems to be in short supply these days… Democracy for Sale offers a way to fight back.’

This is an advert, if you hadn’t noticed. Should you want to advertise in Off The Fence, have a look at our rate card, and our eyeballs could be yours. Not literally.

Heaven Is Lunch at the River Café

Everyone who works in television has a funny story about Alan Yentob. There’s the Bono phone call charade. The Jay-Z green room episode. The time he made a young director rewind his film to the start, after Yentob arrived at the screening almost two hours late.

Impossibly grand behaviour is bearable in a monarch or a pope, less so in a TV producer. Yentob has received largely glowing notices from the right-wing publications that took such pleasure in broadcasting his follies and foibles over the years.

Yentob’s commissioning prowess has been justly lauded. And he should also be celebrated for a lifetime of service to the BBC, a great British institution that still, somehow, competes with the streaming giants. But with Rose Garnett and Piers Wenger at A24, and Charlotte Moore off to Sony Pictures Television, it’s safe to say there’ll never be another Alan Yentob.

Voir Dyer

As the media’s premier sponsor of Bright Young Things, it’s important to us to celebrate when our fledgling contributors do something of note outside of our pages. So it was great to see the little tyro, Geoff Dyer, receive a laudatory review in the Guardian for his recently-released memoir, Homework. Dyer made his TF debut way back in Issue 18, with a gorgeous essay on mortality, ear hair and the oeuvre of Luca Guadagnino.

Yung Geoff was not our only debutant in that issue (sold out on the shop page, sorry); we also welcomed Hibernian whippersnapper, John Banville, into the TF fold, and he has stayed in our coven ever since. We have not one but two new Banville Specials ready to release this year… but only one will be in the pages of a magazine. That’s all we can say for now, but while you await further news, read the reminiscence of his first love, across the Irish Sea in fifties Liverpool, right here.

Stacked to the Rafters

Out to our good friends at Stack Magazines, who were kind enough to list us as one of their ‘Nine magazines to help you cope with the world right now’ – high praise, although we are, of course, The UK’s Only Magazine. Minor quibble aside, we were delighted to see Issue 23 described as ‘well written, often with a sly sense of humour,’ with a mix of features ‘united by the sense of going behind the scenes… drawing the reader into The Fence’s uniquely gossipy and informed existence.’ No lies detected.

We’ll be appearing on stage for Stack on the 17th June, doing our very first reading salon in the basement of The Queen of Hoxton, alongside a few other publications we think very highly of. Tickets are £5, and you ought to come down because it’ll be a lot of fun – be sure to arrive present & correct with your Fence tote (RRP £12) crammed with Fence back-issues (RRP £7.50), all available on our beautiful shop page.

The Man Who Reinvented Posting

There is much to dislike about New York restaurateur Keith McNally’s social media presence, not least the unseemly frequency with which he publishes photos of his youngest daughter and shots of his upmarket Café Rouge-style eateries.

Known in transatlantic foodie circles as a sort-of evil Jeremy King, McNally is famous for taking no prisoners on his Instagram account: witness his legendary tiff with James Corden (fair play), or his encounter with Richard Caring (again, agh, fair play). But this Lion in Winter did take it too far once, deleting one particularly egregious post. Thankfully, one of our readers was on hand to screenshot the effort.

Adult Ballpark

Many have been trying to frame the debates about the festival season of Brockwell Park as ‘complicated’. From where we stand, it couldn’t be simpler. Lambeth Council are selling off usage of an essential public asset to a private company who are commandeering the land for their own profit.

The majority of these festivals are owned by Superstruct, which is majority owned by KKR, the private equity company co-founded by Henry Kravis, of Barbarians at the Gate. The same Henry Kravis whose exorbitant lifestyle was parodied in the film adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities.

It seems this sort of peremptory googling is beyond many of the commentariat. But if you truly think that this mushrooming of festivals is about the south London ‘community’, might we invite you to have a look at this address in Manhattan.

In Case You Missed It

Extremely loud and incredibly scouse: 7000 words on Jamie Carragher, King of the Pundits, from TF’s own Kieran Morris.

Archie Bland with an extraordinarily moving feature on his young son, Max.

Stop what you’re doing right now and read Colm Tóibín on the new Pope.

A hat-trick of great reviews for Shibboleth, the debut novel from soon-to-be-contributor Thomas Peermohamed Lambert.

Another marmalade-dropper from the Gray Lady, uncovering the Russian ‘spy factory’ in Rio de Janeiro.

And Finally

A man moonwalks into a picturesque shot of an overgrown railway arch somewhere in Ireland. He begins to recite. No, this isn’t a snippet from Michael Jackson’s lost mid-nineties – it's the work of Chris Tordoff, performing as hapless drug dealer Francis ‘The Viper’ Higgins. The video is a one-man recital of a legendary altercation between Irish authors Frank McCourt and Gerry Hannan over the former’s damning memoir of Limerick, itself a brilliant watch.

Somehow, Tordoff’s decision to learn the whole thing by heart and perform it is even funnier, and somehow, almost poignant, if it wasn’t so silly. But this is the attitude of the man’s work in general. Playing Higgins in a range of scenarios, Tordoff has created some of the most brilliant and esoteric comedy skits you’ll find anywhere.

If that gave you a taste, here are some of his others: ‘Zurich’, which feels like an old PS2 horror game where a man ominously tries to sell you Zurich life insurance; ‘Fontaine’ where a confused detective makes an impromptu house stop; and the only report on New York Fashion week you could possibly need.

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That’s it for this week. A spicy little outing, no? If you enjoyed it, why not drop a like in the comments, and if you’re feeling even more generous, why not buy a tote bag or a map or a magazine from the shop. In fact, you should definitely do that. Make a purchase and make yourself feel happy. As per a statute still on the books from 1324, every whale, dolphin, porpoise or sturgeon washed ashore in British waters is the monarch’s personal property. Speak soon.

All the best,

TF