Gentlemen’s clubs are cheaper and shabbier in London than in New York but somehow grander. Reciprocal links mean that many British clubmen visit the Union Club, the Knickerbocker, or the Metropolitan. We marvel at their facilities, but we can’t help feeling slightly smug about their flashiness.
London’s clubs are homely and eccentric. There’s the Beefsteak, a single table in a discreet upper room off Leicester Square where it is said that, if you want to join, you have to be a relative of God and a damn close one at that. There’s Boodle’s, the model for James Bond’s Blades Club. There’s Buck’s, popular with Guards officers, where both Bucks Fizz and the sidecar were invented.
There’s the Travellers, a haunt of diplomats and spies where, for a long time, a monsignor who had taken up permanent residence maintained what was, in effect, a private chapel. There’s White’s, where the old aristocracy gathers in understated elegance. There’s the Garrick, where actors, writers, and thespian-inclined lawyers wear a hideous green and pink necktie.
One thing that distinguishes all these clubs from their American counterparts is that they are for men. In most cases, that fact goes below the radar. But not when it comes to the Garrick. Three weeks ago, the left-wing newspaper the Guardian began a campaign against that supposed bastion of the patriarchy, and feminist lawyers have been protesting outside its handsome Covent Garden entrance.
Why pick on the Garrick? Mainly because we live in a superficial age, and several of its members are famous actors: Brian Cox, Damian Lewis, Matthew Macfadyen, Hugh Bonneville, Benedict Cumberbatch, and David Suchet. They alone would make the club newsworthy, even if so many newspaper editors and columnists, including this one, did not also wear that salmon and cucumber tie.
The debate about whether to change the rules has been bubbling away throughout the 20 years I have been a member. Over that time, a dozen other London clubs have admitted women.
I belonged to two of them: the Carlton (frequented by Conservative politicians) and the Oxford and Cambridge. In both cases, I warmly supported the reform, given that women were already, respectively, Tory politicians and Oxbridge graduates. But when it came to the Garrick, which exists for no purpose beyond the pleasure of its members, I felt less strongly. My sense was that women would join in due course and that it would be a pity to push through the change by a tiny majority, so leaving some members feeling bruised.
This shrill campaign has changed my mind. Why should any institution alter its structures at the behest of people who plainly detest it? What happened to saying, “No one has to join, but if you choose to, these are the rules”?
Freedom of association used to be the defining feature of an open society. Yet it, too, must apparently give way before the imperatives of identity politics. Incredibly, four senior judges and the head of the civil service have quit since the Guardian began its campaign. Even more incredibly — indeed, shamefully — so has the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Richard Moore.
What do you suppose the Russian FSB will have made of his resignation? This is the man who is the real-life M from the Bond movies. He is supposed to be ready to withstand torture and sleep deprivation rather than give up information on his agents. Yet he crumbled at a hostile headline.
What is it that he and the others had been pressured into leaving? Some weird cult or subversive cabal? Hardly. Simply a place where people gather over good wine and talk mainly about the theater.
Are same-sex gatherings now considered beyond the pale? Not exactly. People seem fine with ladies getting together, whether through book clubs or through the Women’s Institute — a wonderful organization that counts around 200,000 members in Britain. Indeed, when it comes to sports teams, people of both sexes are strongly in favor of preserving same-sex spaces.
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But the unwritten rule is that white men are different. That protest on the steps of the club was addressed by a Labour MP called Apsana Begum, who told the other women that it was “a no-brainer that it’s unjust and prejudicial” to have men-only clubs. Yet she is evidently happy with her local mosque having separate spaces for male and female worshippers.
What her mosque does is, of course, none of my bloody business. Since I have no intention of joining it, I wouldn’t presume to tell it what to do. Is that really such a difficult idea?
