Luminaries of the men-only Garrick Club draw attention to London’s elite private cliques

“Try the trifle,” said my exceedingly gracious host. “This place is famous for it.”

We were having lunch in the Coffee Room, the palatial old diningroom in the Reform Club on Pall Mall. The lavish building in the style of an Italian palazzo is home to one of the best known of London’s private members clubs, most of which are located near the West End.

There is a particularly prestigious cluster of clubhouses around the St James’s Street and Pall Mall zone, west of Trafalgar Square and south of Piccadilly. The Reform Club, the adjacent Athenaeum and the Travellers Club all share a Pall Mall garden.

The Reform Club was founded in 1836, originally as a base for Radicals and Whigs. It later became a headquarters for the Liberal Party. These days it is politically neutral, although many of its members might consider themselves classic liberals. To this day, its roughly 2,500 members pay homage to the principles of the 1832 Great Reform Act.

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The Reform Club will always be associated with the Jules Verne novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. In the book, the explorer Phileas Fogg begins and ends his expedition around the globe from the clubhouse on Pall Mall. Michael Palin tried to emulate it when filming his documentary travel series in 1989, but was denied entry upon his return to the Reform Club as he was not wearing a tie.

Private members clubs are, to an outsider, an intriguing part of London’s power scene. Yet their importance in the city’s establishment ecosystem is not often remarked upon by people entrenched here. The clubs’ prevalence is rarely publicly trumpeted, yet their influence is quietly omnipresent.

Politicians, lawyers, business people, celebrities and even the odd journalist throng their hallowed halls. The clubs form an elite crust on society. Meanwhile, this sodding hack was only in the Coffee Room this week as the guest of a kindly, esteemed member. It was simply a handy place to meet.

Some view London’s private members clubs as anachronistic throwbacks to a bygone age, when elite men (most were originally men’s clubs) gathered to gossip and secretly pull the strings of society below. Think golf clubs without the golf, where you just decamp to the clubhouse without the torture of enduring 18 holes of failure.

Others see the clubs as private networks to nurture intellectual pursuits and as bastions of free association. They mostly have loose affiliations. The Groucho Club, with its diningroom paintings of breasts and backsides, is an arts and media club. The Carlton Club in St James’s is a notorious Tory plotting house.

Their various rules can be difficult to figure out for naive guests. Most have fairly strict dress codes. Yet early in my sojourn to London, I arranged to meet an Irish businesswoman at a Soho House club in Mayfair, where I was asked to remove my tie at the door.

Many of the oldest clubs founded early in the 19th and 18th centuries remain men-only clubs to this day, and therein lies the root of a mini scandal that has piqued interest in Britain over the last week.

Somebody leaked to the Guardian newspaper the list of members of the men-only Garrick Club, which has lots of lawyers and people in the arts. It included Simon Case who, as cabinet secretary, is Britain’s top civil servant. Not a good look for him to join a club with sexist membership rules.

After initially defending his membership on the basis that he wanted to end the ban from the inside, Case resigned from Garrick last week amid the furore. Dozens of judges were also on the men-only membership list. Three high court judges resigned from the Garrick this week. Britain’s lady chief justice (her official title), Sue Carr, wrote to all judges in recent days to warn that she was “alive to the issue”. That sounded more like a metaphorical “you’re dead if this causes trouble”.

Other members of the men-only Garrick are said to include former Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson, Succession actor Brian Cox, Tory politicians Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove and Kwasi Kwarteng, and the main man himself, King Charles. Past members included Charles Dickens.

There are just a handful of women-only clubs in London, such as the Allbright in Mayfair.

The Reform Club has admitted women as members since 1981. Betty Boothroyd, the former House of Commons speaker who died last year, was among them. Past members included the Catholic emancipator Daniel O’Connell and Barry Edward O’Meara, the Dubliner who was Napoleon’s doctor.

The Coffee Room’s trifle, meanwhile, was reliably old school but utterly delicious. Here’s hoping they never reform the recipe for that particular delight.