How are they taking it at the Garrick? Does tradition still mute responses to revelations about its membership by my Guardian colleague Amelia Gentleman, which led to the departure from the club of the heads of MI6 and the civil service, followed by demands for scores of lawyers, judges and cultural names to do the same?
While a haughty resistance to reform is practically written into the club’s constitution, this may be the first time the Garrick has been confirmed as, above all, ridiculous. Until last week, it could hope, benefiting from a general ignorance, to be taken by outsiders at its own estimation, as a gracious and discriminating space, strictly inaccessible to the sort of bores welcome at inferior clubs. The membership publicity has changed all that. It is one thing for the Garrick’s traditionalists (whenever convenience requires denial of its unique status) to assert, however risibly, the harmlessness of their single-sex association – another for it to appear, courtesy of the Guardian story, as substantially a guild, with a generous contingent of, to borrow from Boris Johnson, tossers. Some nights, it must make the average local sound like the Algonquin.
