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GARRICK CLUB TO VOTE ON WOMEN MEMBERS

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The Garrick Club in London is considering new legal advice that its rules already permit the admission of women as members. The club’s chairman, Christopher Kirker, has expressed concern about the club’s current situation after a week of unpleasant publicity. The club’s committee will be considering the new advice with its solicitors and will contact members again on 4 April. Kirker urged members not to make any public comment on the situation and expressed a wish for people considering their future in the club to wait for the outcome of the meeting before resigning.

Despite the chair’s plea for discretion, there were no shortage of club members who were happy to share their views on this latest twist in an eventful week within the club’s heavy grey stone building in central London. A member of the clergy who joined the club around the turn of the century said that things had reached a turning point in attitudes towards women within the club. He said that many people here still believe it’s a man’s world, that men can still call the shots. However, the resistance is crumbling.

The publication of a list of over 60 influential people with high-profile jobs named in the club’s list of members triggered embarrassment among some and irritation among others. Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, defended the Garrick, of which he was once a member and where his father, Stanley, remains a member. Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, said: “I just wish people would all be left alone. If a lot of men want to get together and have a club – it’s up to them.”

Andrea Leadsom, a health minister, had a more acute understanding of why the publication of the list had prompted so much anger. She thought it was “extraordinary” that the cabinet secretary had “only just discovered” the club excluded women. Some members were flattered by the wide curiosity shown by the media in the club’s affairs, while others were angry with the coverage of the club’s resistance to female members, displaying limited awareness of the fury felt by women in the civil service that prompted the resignations of Case and Moore.

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