Garrick members rebel over men-only rule

MEMBERS of the men-only Garrick Club have rebelled by nominating seven prominent women including Dame Mary Beard and Amber Rudd as members.

In a move designed to force through female membership, the names are being put forward to the Garrick’s candidates committee. It will then have to decide whether to accept the women.

The alternative is a threat of legal action if they are declined, although that has been played down in some quarters.

Dame Mary, a television presenter and professor of classics at Cambridge University, said she was delighted to have been proposed for membership.

“The Garrick is a great club and I have enjoyed being a guest there, and I would very much like to be a member,” she said. “I am being put forward, although I shan’t be suing them if I don’t get it.”

Asked if she was intrigued at the prospect of making history rather than researching it, she said her biggest concern was paying the fees should her application be successful. “What I am worried about is whether I can afford it, but we will cross that bridge later. I might have to crowdfund my membership,” said Dame Mary.

Emily Maitlis, the broadcaster, posted a list of women on X, formerly Twitter, she said were being proposed, adding that she had seen their names in a “for- mal letter”.

She said the other women on the list were: Amber Rudd, the former home secretary; Baroness Hazarika, the journalist and political adviser; news presenter Cathy Newman; the actress Juliet Stevenson; Margaret Casely-hayford, a former City lawyer and chairman of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre; and the former Court of Appeal judge Dame Elizabeth Gloster.

Maitlis said that the women had been nominated by members of the club including the actor Stephen Fry, a number of senior KCS, and the journalists Sir Simon Jenkins and Simon Heffer.

Dame Mary confirmed that she had been nominated by Prof Heffer and Sir Simon.

‘What I am worried about is whether I can afford it. I might have to crowdfund my membership’

Abunch of lily-livered chaps have resigned their membership of the Garrick Club because The says it’s not fair or something. If we banned everything The Guardian

says is not fair, all we would be left with is hypocritical Left-wing newspaper columnists who secretly send their children to “bastions of male elitism”, and cheese. Have they announced cheese is elitist yet? It is a bit white.

Simon Case, the head of the Civil Service, Richard Moore, the MI6 chief, and at least four judges have resigned their Garrick memberships because a handful of humourless harridans are incensed that men should join a club that has blocked the admission of women as members. Case and Moore’s capitulations are “likely to put pressure on other high-profile members of the club to rethink their membership”, says The Guardian, licking its lips like the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs”.

May I refer those gentlemen who are still holding firm within the Garrick’s portals to the advice of PG Wodehouse. “It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

Why on earth has this eccentric, charming place (I had lunch there long ago with the critic and broadcaster Clive James) become the latest designated victim of cancel culture? Far from clamouring for admission, most of my sex are delighted not to have to eat school dinner cuisine from circa 1958 or study luncheon menus that start with chump chops and rapidly descend to intestines and other ordeals.

I don’t think fashion entrepreneur Emily Bendell, who first organised a petition in 2020 calling for the club to change its “deeply troubling” rule, would find much to like at the Garrick if she got her way. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Ms Bendell seeks not to join but to destroy. The club would be turned into a clone of Soho House. Before you knew it, retired judges and crumbly Coriolanuses (chock-full of actors, darling!) who are currently left in peace for companionable, post-prandial farts in the drawing room, would be invited to take part in Bikram yoga classes.

Much has been made by campaigners of the networking that goes on in men’s clubs. Does no one think that, if men really wanted to discriminate against women, they aren’t quite clever enough to form an exclusionary huddle in Costa if girlies were admitted to the Garrick?

Look, I consider myself to be a feminist, which means I want equal opportunities for my sex. I don’t want all the things men enjoy confiscated by spiteful females who have no interest in those things, save to get one over on the old oppressor. Why shouldn’t men have their own spaces? I love women-only gatherings and places, and sometimes meet a friend at the University Women’s Club in London. The space was founded in 1883 when there was nowhere for women to socialise outside their home without their husbands.

Millions of British women adore their girls’ book groups. And where does this campaign leave the Women’s Institute – a hateful misandrist group that should be forced to admit men? Or a quarter of a million women members who count on the support and shared interests they find there?

Men and women are different. A controversial position these days, of course, but, sorry, there it is. If Himself comes home after lunch with a friend, I always ask what they talked about. “How are their kids doing? Where is X at uni? Did you find out if Y is getting divorced?” He looks bemused. None of those things came up, he says. At a ladies’ lunch, by contrast, each participant will be expected to download every detail of her situation for mutual analysis.

If men cannot afford the Garrick, they play golf together or form a cycling posse. Or they buy a shed where they can do man things, or at least plan to do man things, in peace. A working man’s shed is his Garrick.

As a child in south Wales, I was once taken by my coal-miner grandfather to his working men’s club. I remember being very small amid a forest of trousered legs and the smell of fags and beer and damp felt hats just in from the rain. The men were in their element. Did the wives mind that they were down the club? I bet they were thrilled to get them out of the house. Can I suggest that those campaigning to gain entry to the Garrick Club should direct their energies towards the infinitely more urgent cause of fighting to keep women’s spaces safe for women?

Bit by bit, we are turning into a nation of killjoys. Every eccentricity must be ironed out, every institution must embrace a deadly homogeneity in the name of “equity, diversity and inclusion”, every club must disown its gloriously indefensible traditions, every delicious difference between the sexes must be denied. Members of the Garrick, I beg you: do not surrender to the unsmiling commissars of the cultural revolution. They seek the elimination of you and your kind. Keep serving your awful offal. Keep the ladies out and the Archibalds in. If women want their own spaces, men have the right to keep theirs.