May rebukes her families minister for debauched City dinner
The most shocking thing about groping allegations at a prestigious dinner is that we’re surprised, says Polly Vernon
THERESA MAY’S families and children minister was last night ordered to explain his attendance at a men-only fundraising event at which female “hostesses” were allegedly groped and propositioned.
Nadhim Zahawi was summoned to Downing Street to explain to the Chief Whip his version of events surrounding the Presidents Club gala.
The Prime Minister was said to have been “appalled” after reading reports of the event where 130 “tall, thin and pretty” women played host to some of the UK’S richest businessmen. A Downing Street source said: “This shows there is a long way to go to ensure all women are treated properly as equals.”
Reports stated that at the dinner some women were groped and plied with alcohol. The Presidents Club’s charity was shut down in the wake of the reports, some of which suggested that sex workers were also at the event.
Amid suggestions that the dinner had highlighted sexism in the City, the Government yesterday said that any business that had representatives at the event had until the end of the week to publish its gender pay gap data.
Mrs May initially expressed confidence in Mr Zahawi after he said he had left the event when dozens of women in short black dresses were led into the hall, which according to reports was at 8pm. However, friends of Mr Zahawi said he had told them he left at 9.35pm.
Last night Mr Zahawi confirmed that he left at 9.35pm. He said: “I have been consistent. I told No 10 and friends that I arrived at 8pm and left at 9.35pm as I felt uncomfortable. I did not see any of the horrific events reported… I am shocked by them and condemn them unequivocally.” Mr Zawahi had earlier posted on Twitter: “I will never attend a men-only function ever.”
There are questions over whether Mr Zahawi had breached the new ministerial code for “inappropriate or discriminating behaviour”. He has not been referred for investigation.
Maria Miller, a Tory MP and chairman of the women and equalities select committee, said that Mr Zahawi had made an “error of judgement”, adding: “Should any minister go to an event that is men-only? No they shouldn’t.”
David Meller, a trustee of the Presidents Club, yesterday quit his role as a non-executive board member at the Department for Education.
The event was held at the Dorchester Hotel on Thursday. Two undercover reporters posing as hostesses claimed women were repeatedly propositioned by guests. One reporter said she was groped “several times”.
Great Ormond Street said it would hand back the £530,000 given to it by the club between 2009 and 2016. The Eveline London Children’s Hospital and London’s Royal Academy of Music also said they would return donations.
The main event at the fundraiser was an auction with the chance to bid for tea with Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, or lunch with Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson and Mr Carney, who were not at the event, said they had not authorised the auction prizes. David Walliams also withdrew an auction prize of naming a character in one of his books. His spokesman said he would donate his fee to a good cause.
IT BEGAN at around 8pm with a parade of 130 scantily clad young women, described by the charity event’s organisers as the “hostesses” for the evening.
As 360 guests from business, politics and finance – all men – drank glasses of champagne, the young women were told to form two lines in order of height, with the tallest first, before parading across the stage of the ballroom of The Dorchester hotel in London to the sound of the all-girl band Little Mix’s Power.
It was soon to become clear that the choice of music was apt.
Making their way to their allocated tables, paid for by top finance and property companies, the women were no doubt mindful of the instructions issued by Artista, the agency that hired them: keep the guests happy and fetch them drinks when they run dry.
But what happened shocked both some of the guests present and those hired to work as their hostesses at the fundraising dinner organised by the Presidents Club.
According to an account by two undercover reporters from the Financial
Times present at Thursday night’s event, it quickly turned into an excuse for some of the men to grab, paw, grope and molest the hostesses.
Madison Marriage, one of the FT reporters, told BBC Newsnight: “I was groped several times and I know that there are numerous other hostesses who said the same thing had happened to them. It’s hands up skirts, hands on bums but also hands on hips, hands on stomachs, arms going around your waist unexpectedly. The worst I was told by one of the hostesses was a man taking his penis out during the course of the dinner. The other one was another man telling a hostess to down her glass of champagne, rip off her knickers and dance on the table. I can’t believe it still goes on in 2018. It’s quite shocking.” A waitress who worked at the event told ITV News she was asked to wear a revealing black outfit, and said it was as if they were there for men to “gawp at, touch. To be laughed at”. She also alleged some “sex workers” turned up to the after party in red dresses. “They came in and were immediately kissing people. I don’t know many hostess jobs that pay you to do that! They were quite happy to have… you know I saw a few men with their hands up their skirts.”
As the wine and champagne flowed between courses of smoked salmon with keta caviar and 34-day-aged black Angus beef fillet, a troupe of burlesque dancers dressed as Coldstream Guards, but with star-shaped stickers covering the nipples, entertained the guests.
In what the Archbishop of Canterbury later described as a shameful example of men exercising power over women and doing so “brutally, selfishly, cruelly”, one unnamed guest reportedly invited a hostess upstairs to his room. It appears that the Presidents Club may have anticipated the behaviour of some of the guests. A glossy brochure handed to all guests felt the need to include a warning to guests not to sexually harass any of the staff. Artista had instructed the hostesses to wear black underwear and “sexy” black shoes.
They were encouraged to drink alcohol and urged by staff from the agency to interact with the guests. It was even claimed that hostesses who spent too long in the lavatory, apparently upset at the behaviour of guests, were called out and led back to the ballroom. Caroline Dandridge, founder of Artista, said: “There is a code of conduct that we follow, I am not aware of any reports of sexual harassment and with the calibre of guest, I would be astonished.”
David Walliams, the comic, acted as host for much of the evening, but later said: “I left immediately after I had finished my job at 11.30pm. I did not witness any of the kind of behaviour that allegedly occurred and am appalled by the reports.”
By 2am – when the proceedings finally wound up – what one hostess hoped at the start of the evening might be “a bit of fun” had become an exercise in escaping grasping hands, slathering tongues and leering faces.
One hostess, 19, told a colleague how a man in his 70s had asked her whether she was a prostitute. “I’ve never done this before and I’m never doing it again,” she said. “It’s f------ scary.”
Little wonder that Jonny Gould, a former television baseball presenter and host of the charity auction that followed the dinner, took to the stage and gleefully bellowed into his microphone: “Welcome to the most un-pc event of the year.”
News that some of the women hired to serve at the Presidents Club’s all-male charity fundraiser last Thursday said that they were groped, propositioned and groped again by guests, comes as no surprise to anyone who’s ever worked in a bar.
Everyone else seems stunned by reports of “hands up skirts, hands on bums…”; horrified that waitresses were asked to wear “matching black underwear” and sexy shoes, to “rip off your knickers and dance on the table!”.
How could any of these high-powered and high-profile businessmen act in this way, asked a lot of people who, presumably, have never “waited-on”. On Newsnight, Nicola Horlick found claims of such impropriety “unbelievable”. Great Ormond Street Hospital – a recipient of funds raised by the organisation – said it was so “shocked to hear of behaviour reported”, it would no longer accept charitable gifts from the Presidents Club, which yesterday announced it had shut down.
MP Nadhim Zahawi popped along to the dinner, but found it all so “bizarre” and “uncomfortable” that he made an excuse and left early. Those of us who have worked in the hospitality biz, on the other hand; those of us who’ve toiled at the coal face of bars, clubs and restaurants; who’ve mixed drinks and carried steaks and brought bills… We heard about the night, and responded not by clutching our pearls and decrying what the Women’s Equality Party’s Sophie Walker called this “grotesque circus of sleazy rich men…”, but rather by saying: “Yeah. Sounds about right.” The only thing surprising to us, is that everyone else seems so surprised.
Take it from a woman who spent what I refer to as my prime sexually harassable years –
21 to 23 – working six nights a week in a cocktail bar in
Covent Garden; from a woman who served pre-mixed Long Island iced tea to MPS and soap stars, footballers and City boys. Men are preposterous when they’re drunk. Preposterous.
So what exactly was so surprising about the alleged groping and propositioning that took place at this dinner? Was it that the alleged gropers and propositioners were so grand? So very powerful? Do we honestly expect better of older, richer men? Or do we just enjoy being extra-appalled when they’re exposed as behaving as badly as we’d always suspected they would anyway?
Is it that it happened now, in the direct aftermath of the Golden Globes blackout, while #Timesup and #Metoo are both still trending?
Did we think we were over this kind of thing? That we had moved on, to better, braver, lechery-free times, during which an explicitly “all-male” dinner will unfurl in a moderate, mild-mannered, testosterone-lite fashion?
Or was it perhaps that it happened in the name of children’s charity? That its righteous end goal contrasted so starkly with its raucous, rabid reality?
I don’t know. I do know, that a drunk man is rarely a “woke” man – that is a right-on man with a social conscience – especially when said drunk man is surrounded by other equally drunk men.
“Woke” was certainly not how I’d characterise my old cocktail bar clientele. The word didn’t even exist then, in the early Nineties; we talked rather about being “politically correct” and, goodness, my punters were not that, either. They were grabbers and lechers, propositioners and pawers. No, they were not “woke” – they were a joke.
But I wouldn’t call them Weinstein-grade sexual predators. I’d say their behaviour aligns pretty well with the claims made about the Presidents Club diners. Deeply uncool. Deeply irritating. Silly. Pathetic. Enabled by booze, by one another, and by delusions about the limit on their sexual allure. (I truly believe some of men’s iffiest behaviour is a consequence not of them consciously abusing their power, but of them wildly overestimating how good-looking they are. They don’t think that beautiful young woman over there will be menaced into sleeping with them by the tacit threat of what they’ll do to her, if she doesn’t. They honest-to-goodness think she’ll fancy them, in all their paunchy, balding, middle-aged glory!)
But was my professional experience of drunk men damaging? Was it a violent aggression? A dangerous, distressing, esteem eliminating assault on my person? Oh, was it hell! I milked those muppets for tips and rejected their advances with a level of cruelty from which I’d imagine a few of them have yet to recover.
Apart from that one footballer – I went out on a date with him.
I left the cocktail business 22 years ago for journalism (which has its own issues around drinking and lechery, let’s be honest). So perhaps the surprise of last week’s allegations about the Presidents Club dinner’s antics is that nothing has changed in two decades.
It does seem at odds with the current mood. Social media is
rammed with men declaring themselves appalled by the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein, by Donald Trump’s “pussy-grabbing”, by what Scarlett Johansson claims James Franco did, which is why she wants him to return her #Timesup pin (Franco has not yet responded, but sources claim he is “stunned”); by some of the Presidents Club men themselves.
Why, these vocal, noble men of the internet (one of whom seems to have forgotten approaching me at an awards event and asking me if I was “wearing knickers under that dress” – but that’s another article) can’t so much as rewatch Friends without noticing its blatantly sexist undercurrents, so “a-woken” are they!
They talk about how they are thinking long and hard about their past behaviour, too – not that they were ever lecherous or Weinstein-y, you understand, heavens no! They just find themselves newly, uncomfortably mindful that they may have looked the other way while friends or colleagues were conducting themselves in a less appropriate fashion. Officially, none of these “enlightened” men we follow on Twitter or Facebook would ever, ever behave as the Presidents Club diners are alleged to have behaved! It is perhaps the disconnect between some of those men and their regular, righteous protestations, and the bawdiness of the Dorchester diners, which proved shocking to so many.
At the same time: have the people so publicly affronted by what went down at this dinner been out lately? You don’t have to be at a men-only do at the Dorch to see waitresses being propositioned, touched, bothered. You just have to look up from your dinner and see what’s happening to the girl charged with refilling the olive bowl on table two, replenishing the drinks on table 17, getting the bill for the guys who’ve been loitering round the bar all night. She wasn’t surprised by the stories that leaked from that dinner, either.