It was hands on bottoms, hands on hips – and hands creeping up skirts . . .
Inside the £2,000-a-head City charity bash the age of political correctness forgot
‘This is what your wife could look like’
Marmite job. Some girls love it and for other girls it’s the worst job of their life and they will never do it again,’ Caroline Dandridge, the founder of Artista, is said to have told one hostess.
‘You just have to put up with the annoying men, and if you can do that it’s fine.’
It appears that the sexualisation of the Presidents Club event was used as a fundraising tool.
hostesses were introduced to guests by being paraded across a stage to the song Power by the girl band Little Mix. As they walked to tables, pictures of sick children were flashed up on video screens. At dinner, a troupe of burlesque dancers performed while dressed as Coldstream Guards, wearing star- shaped stickers to hide their nipples.
Lots sold during the fundraising auction included a night at Soho’s Windmill Club – a lap- dancing venue whose licence was revoked recently after dancers were caught flouting no-touching rules, and a course of plastic surgery that was promised to ‘add spice to your wife’. The auctioneer was filmed drumming up bids by announcing: ‘This is what your Missus could look like! Who’ll give me £10,000?’ Perhaps understandably, a number of guests who attended the event rushed to disassociate themselves yesterday from any allegations of impropriety.
Mr Walliams, who had compered the event for the third year running, declared himself ‘absolutely appalled’ and said he left early and did not witness any wrongdoing.
Tory junior minister Nadhim Zahawi claimed to have been unaware of the nature of the bash when he accepted the invitation (although the BBC has reported that it was his second time there, having also attended before he became an MP).
others caught in the fallout, having been in the room, include ocado founder Tim Steiner, clothing tycoon Sir Philip Green and Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones. his former colleague on the show Theo Paphitis also featured on the guest list, although it’s unclear whether they actually attended.
There is no suggestion, though, that any of them were involved in any inappropriate behaviour. With Great ormond Street hospital having pledged to give back money raised by the Presidents Club, there are also awkward questions to be asked of the scores of other charities to have received funds.
They range from Prince Charles’s Prince’s Trust to such blue- chip outfits as the Tate Gallery, Cancer Research UK, the British olympic Association, the NSPCC, the Lord’s Taverners, and the scandalhit and defunct Kids Company.
In defence of those involved, it should, of course, be pointed out that the main aim of the Presidents Club is to raise money for good causes. Last Thursday’s event generated £2million.
one well-known attendee, who spoke to the Mail on condition of anonymity, claimed he saw ‘nothing worse than what would happen in any nightclub in London any night of the week,’ and said it was ‘tragic’ that ‘political correctness means money will no longer go to dying children’.
But they can’t say they weren’t warned. As long ago as 2004, when the then London mayor Ken Livingstone was the guest of honour, newspaper diary items remarked on the ‘large numbers of very pretty women in attendance’.
Four years later, when the guest list was said to have included Formula 1 tycoons Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore (who was once chairman of Queens Park Rangers), property developers Nick Candy, David Reuben and Gerald Ronson, and comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, a report drew attention to the large number of hostesses paid £ 120 for ‘ fetching drinks’ and ‘socialising with’ the glitzy guests.
‘It was quite a racy event... but the beauty parade seemed to be something of a hit,’ The Daily Telegraph noted. ‘The boys tucked into the girls.’
But now it has ended in tears.