High Court battle over Covid row at Mayfair club

YOU could be forgiven for thinking that Downing Street was alone in suffering the legal aftershocks of parties — or ‘ business meetings’ — held during the dispiriting months of repeated lockdowns.

But now the £1,235-a-year Lansdowne Club in Mayfair has been rocked by a High Court action brought by a member who was expelled after allegedly breaching Covid guidelines.

In an incendiary claim against the Lansdowne, which boasts its own swimming pool and occasionally holds fencing competitions in its ballroom, Gina Mok, 44, alleges that she has been the victim of statements which are both ‘untrue’ and ‘made maliciously’, and which imply that she had been ‘convicted of a criminal offence’.

In court documents, Mok, a selfstyled ‘private investor’, explains that, until her expulsion last December, she was a member not just of the club but also of the council that oversees how the Lansdowne is run.

But last autumn, after travelling to Bulgaria, she attended a meeting of the club’s council.

Afterwards, Mok had dinner, sitting next to a fellow council member, Phoebe Topping — Head of International Certification at the Department of Health, responsible for drafting and implementing government policy on ‘vaccine certification for travel’.

Mok, who was unvaccinated, alleges that Topping accused her of ‘breaking the law because new Covid rules’ — of which she was unaware — ‘required unvaccinated individuals to quarantine after returning from abroad’.

Barely a month later, her membership of the Lansdowne was cancelled. The club has submitted a defence in response to Mok’s High Court claim for £ 50,000 in damages for ‘loss of privacy, injury to feelings and person, distress and damage to [her] reputation’.

A club spokesman says it would ‘not be appropriate to comment in detail, other than to say we were extremely surprised, given the factual background, that these claims have been brought in the first place’.