Behind closed doors

Private members’ clubs have aways provided perfect ground for plotting. They positively encourage it. “Whenever three Englishmen are together, two of them shall form a club, for the purpose of keeping out the third”, goes an old joke. Most of the attention tends to go on the whole process of exclusivity, and excluding that third person. But the behaviour and mannerisms inside the club are no less interesting – especially the politics which crop up.

Part of this is down to surroundings. Clubs come in all shapes and sizes. They can be palatial, intimidating edifices on Pall Mall which fuel delusions of grandeur, or they can be small, grubby back rooms over a shop – or some combination of the two. But when people speak in a club, whether in the dining room, or the bar, or the terrace, or the garden, there is a sense of intimacy. That intimacy breeds a sense of conspiracy, for friends, lovers, family and colleagues alike, beckoning them in. The simple act of walking through a guarded door which doesn’t advertise itself lends a sort of blessing to the proceedings behind it. Little wonder that gregarious club members such as Ian Fleming have often been the most proactive fantasists, daydreaming the most elaborate scenarios.

Then there is the company. Most clubs like to cultivate the notion that all of their members are extraordinary individuals, and that to be even admitted to their portals is a vote of confidence in the special guest. The reality is that most club members are as ordinary and as everyday as you and me; yet just a smattering of bigwigs gives a club a sense of occasion, whether it’s the local working men’s club murmuring: “He’s something big in the local Rotarians”, or a Mayfair establishment whispering: “He used to bury bodies – literally – for Tiny Rowland.” The club is like a theatre – it is there to set the scene, complete with bit-part players to give it atmosphere.

It helps that most clubs are themed, whether around the arts, or shared educational or military background, or even politics. The union of like-minded people makes it more likely that members will agree, or at least share a basic viewpoint, even if it carries the danger of an “echo chamber”.

All this was found in the very earliest origins of clubs, in the 17th and 18th centuries: the back rooms of pubs and taverns and coffee houses, usually known as “The Snug”, in which regulars would gather for greater privacy (especially as the fashionable practice of gambling was then also illegal). And as clubs have taken off over the past 250 years, they have frequently indulged in a sort of “arms race” among rivals, to offer the most luxurious facilities.

As clubs grew bigger, so the subject of conversation expanded. Gossip, tittle-tattle, shoes, the relative merits of George Lazenby or Roger Moore as James Bond actors, these might all be passing snatches of club-land conversation today; frivolous exchanges are nothing new in these establishments. A 1785 wager in the Brooks’s betting book recorded: “Lord Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld. Derby, to receive 500 guineas whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a balloon one thousand yards from the earth.” Sadly, the book does not record whether the wager was fulfilled. Yet the increasing grandiosity of clubs has encouraged more statesmanlike topics of conversation, putting the world to rights over a pint or five.

Nowhere has this been truer than politics. The Great Reform Act of 1832 saw the country polarised around major questions of reform, and London’s newest and most fashionable clubs of the 1830s followed suit: the Carlton Club was set up for the Tories, the Reform Club for the Whigs. Both were haunted by shadowy solicitor-manager figures, fancying themselves as political puppet-masters, doling out secret donations, putting up parliamentary candidates, printing anonymous leaflets to be sent to the provinces. Writers from Dickens to Trollope immortalised these “Tadpole and Taper” figures of Clubland, although the truth was rather more mundane. The sums they raised were relatively small, and limited in reach.

Where they did intervene, it was not always successful: men who “came down from the Carlton” with a pocketful of gold coins to distribute in bribes were often arrested within minutes, for a curious lack of subtlety. The very fact that they intervened spoke more to the streak of Clubland egotism and fantasy after a few ports, than to any real skill in the manipulation of elections.

More successful in their political aims were the local working men’s clubs: these promoted policies embraced by lower-waged people in local communities. For them, we have to thank the slightly improbable figure of the Reverend Henry Solly. He wanted to bring a slice of Pall Mall to the people, and in 1858 set up the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union. Solly was an idealist and social reformer. He hoped that the fellowship of clubs would go hand-in-hand with self-improvement, as members combined sociability with self-improvement, sipping tea and attending lectures, followed by reading philosophy.

Of course, politics in this country usually involves a measure of democracy, and Solly was astonished to find that when asked, his new members didn’t actually want their clubs to be puritanical, alcohol-free zones. He was appalled that working-class members took to booze with the same alacrity as the middle and upper classes, and their clubs became synonymous with cheap beer. Yet alcohol proved to be a keen lubricant to working-class politics, and despite their Victorian image, the working men’s clubs prospered for much of the twentieth century, not peaking until the 1970s, when they numbered 4,000 across the UK.

A curious mishmash between the “elite” clubs of London (which numbered 400 at their Edwardian peak), and the working men’s clubs, was the provincial political club. Major cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester each boasted vast, late-Victorian Conservative and Liberal clubs (or “Constitutional” and “Reform” clubs) in the vernacular. These were hugely important centres of power in their heyday. The 20th century was less kind to the grandest clubs. They were in turn demutualised, bankrupted, bombed, asset-stripped, sold off, or simply closed in ignominy after successive scandals. The political clubs suffered particularly badly, as relics of an earlier age where politics was carried out by a small cadre of people. Universal suffrage since 1928 has stood ill at ease with private club membership. The surviving examples became outliers.

Yet politics has never stopped being a key ingredient of clubs. Just as surviving clubs were outliers, so the politics found within them became more of an insurgency – less attached to established parties and causes, and more drawn to the fanciful and the marginal. By the 1970s, this had evolved into retired Colonels in clubs harrumphing that prime minister Harold Wilson must be a secret communist agent, and murmuring approvingly at post-prandial propositions of a coup d’état, over the port and cigars. They were UKIP, before Alan Sked invented the concept.

Indeed, renegade politics, of left and right alike, have thrived in clubs in recent years, and UKIP was their poster child. The nascent anti-European movement was born in Mayfair clubs in the 1970s, as industrialists such as Sir James Goldsmith and Mark Birley proselytised about a buccaneering, low-regulation, small-state Britain leaving the European community and going it alone; and this movement bubbled over in the suburban golf clubs that were UKIP country by the 1990s and 2000s. By the 2010s, Birley’s son Robin was running clubs such as Oswald’s and 5 Hertford Street, so favoured by Vote Leave alumni that the latter is known as “the Brexit sex dungeon”. Nigel Farage himself has long adored clubs as quintessentially British, although he recently resigned from his beloved East India Club, after 72 per cent of members last year voted to admit women.

Yet to see all clubs as “Brexit central” is to do a disservice to the wide cross-section of political views they contain. Like any theatre, they are a stage. As a setting, they are filled with drama, and they lend a sense of importance to the most flippant conversation. In their glittering, conspiratorial back rooms, anything seems possible after a few drinks, and even the most marginalised voices feel ever more confident to come to the fore and speak up, for everyone to hear.

Seth Thévoz is a historian and journalist. His latest book “Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs” is available from Robinson/Little, Brown