The peak of London’s Groucho Club was probably in the Julie Burchill era, before she went hell-for-leather anti-woke, when she used to do nice things, such as giving £20 notes to homeless people. I suppose this was the late 80s, early 90s, when those were the people we lionised, the ones who were kind to people on the streets, not the Bullingdon Club tradition of burning £50 notes in front of them. Then something changed, the kind became unkind, and the already unkind became heroes, and here we are; and the Groucho, meanwhile, has changed hands, bought by the international gallerists behind Hauser & Wirth.
The original consortium was a group of publishers and agents, including Carmen Callil, Ed Victor, Liz Calder and Michael Sissons. I know nothing about their finances, but I’m guessing that all those people had already made a packet. We’re not talking about a metropolitan un-elite, put it that way. They benefited hugely from the advertising boom of the era, but they weren’t interested in a place without characters, and that meant – from hearsay mainly; I was more of a Trisha’s person myself – that the staff were as important as the punters. There was no culture of servility. Bernie Katz, front of house, was higher in the hierarchy than anyone, and his moral judgment – that, for example, it was more important for him to get someone in a wheelchair (OK, it was Jeffrey Bernard) home safely than it was to remain in situ – set the mood.
The club took corporate money in the mid-2010s, the atmosphere changed, Katz resigned and later died: the ghost of its heyday is pretty distant. But the ambitions of the new owners, to recreate that early spirit by getting more young people in, misses the point. For a club to be cool, even if it’s expensive, it has to be able to make money without worshipping it. This is something that high net worth individuals find it notoriously hard to figure out.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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