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.
People had heard, possibly, that the Garrick is where ex-member Boris Johnson reportedly joked (as a guest) about a new wife and “buyer’s remorse”. But not that, along with his father, Stanley Johnson, members include Crispin Odey, Kwasi Kwarteng, Jonathan Sumption, Oliver Dowden, Paul Dacre, Simon Case and Michael Gove. Basically, the kind of big names you’d join a club to avoid. Among the more treasurable objections to the Guardian report, an anonymous member explained in the Mail why “the offencerati” would dislike the Garrick: “simply jealousy”.
It would be difficult, admittedly, for most civilians to access, within a comparably upmarket venue, a well-known wife beater, a disgraced chancellor, the judge who told a woman her stage-four cancer made her life “less valuable”, a number of unapologetic Brexiters, a hedge fund manager currently addressing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, and a civil servant who may have known that a designated chairman of the BBC had helped fix a loan for his patron. The membership also features, in line with tradition, eminent actors, writers and musicians: do they offset potential proximity to Jacob Rees-Mogg? Wouldn’t you, if placed between him and, say, Odey, under conditions of compulsory chaffing, wonder if – even if you joined only in order to reform the place from within – this was too high a price to pay? Is it ever OK for a covert feminist to join the Taliban? A fine subject for the BBC’s Moral Maze, if it were not presented by proud Garrick member Michael Buerk.
Until last week, both Sir Richard Moore, head of MI6, and Simon Case, cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, could not resist combining leadership on diversity with attendance at, essentially, a women-excluding privilege bank (or as protesting lawyers have put it in a letter to the Guardian, “a symbol of entrenched anti-woman tradition”). Even David Cameron, when he was reinventing himself as modern, withdrew from White’s, another all-male club.
That neither Moore nor Case, one actually a spy, appeared to have ever anticipated being hoist by their club memberships may or may not be an insight into the Garrick’s rigorous selection process; it should certainly encourage women who worry that leadership of these key bodies is reserved for exceptional talent. Moore took a day to realise that he’d just trashed his own, assiduously cultivated record in diversity signalling, one featuring statements such as, “What I do want is for my service to better represent the country we serve”. Technically, I guess, “my service” does not mean “me”.
The beauty of Case’s resignation was not so much in its contradictions, his inclusiveness having been less zealously displayed, but in his demonstration under liaison committee questioning – with some insulting bollocks about changing the Garrick from within – of exactly what that club gains by mirroring structures from which women have been systematically excluded. Or would this absurd 45-year-old male, most celebrated for never resigning, have been considered an ornament to what the club likes to describe as an invigorating, “lively atmosphere”, if he had not endeared himself to Tory prime ministers and the royal family? Apologies, naturally, if at his forthcoming appearance at the Covid inquiry we discover that Case has worked doggedly to undermine No 10’s sexism from within, even when he was ostensibly collaborating with Dominic Cummings and Johnson in the “that cunt” era.
That the case for a mixed Garrick Club risks being – in fact, inevitably is, by Boris Johnson, in his effort for the status quo – represented as threatening the existence of non-comparable women’s spaces, is one reason its critics may be more likely, these days, to propose that compromised professionals leave the club, as opposed to women be admitted. But even if arguing for female membership were not depicted, as it routinely is, as inconsistent with wanting single-sex toilets, as if these were also historic sites for accessing power, featuring the king, a library and occasional glimpses of Brian Cox, the membership details and their fallout now expose the Garrick, in its unreconstructed form, as a potentially career-blighting embarrassment.
Overrun with gargoyles and lawyers, the club sounds stuck, in the same way as, decades ago, were declining but misogynistic male colleges, with the additional difficulty that, for nervous members, the reputational risk of membership may now be too high. They can, of course, hope to conceal the affiliation – another leak is improbable. But what if Simon Case and Richard Moore, the undercover feminists, were telling the truth? Either way, other diversity-minded members in public life might want to rustle up, before the next election, a more plausible explanation.
Or it could just be worth admitting that, at this point, the Garrick Club needs women more than they need it.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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