The Garrick Club is no match for Joanna Lumley
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I have never understood the appeal of private members' clubs. In my rare visits to Pall Mall's oak-panelled bastions of privilege the guests have usually been as stale as the cakes on the pudding tray. That the wealthy are willing to pay a thousand pounds a year for access to a stuffy bar and a restaurant that provides a reminder of how England was once a culinary wasteland seems a strange throwback to the era of empire.
On the anachronistic scale, though, it is their Covent Garden cousin, the Garrick, with its men-only membership policy, that reigns supreme (though women have limited access as guests). Now, however, this 180-year-old rule is being challenged. Hugh Bonneville, the Downton Abbey star, has proposed that Joanna Lumley be allowed to join.
I suspect that the actress receives more exciting offers than an invitation to the Garrick. But if she does want in, she is the one to win this for women. Lumley is, after all, a 65-year-old superhero. She helped win justice for the Gurkhas.
She kicked butt as Purdey in The New Avengers while managing to pull off a pudding-bowl haircut. She can even make insurance sound sexy. And though there are many far more important feminist fights, it would be a baby-step forward for equality.
In its constitution, the Garrick Club states its selection policy as: "It would be better that 10 unobjectionable men ... be excluded than one terrible bore ... be admitted." Which perhaps suggests that every woman is automatically deemed dull. Or maybe ladies are barred because the membership still believe that we can't hack the verbal sparring (19 years ago, Peregrine Worsthorne said there would be "tears before tea-time" if women were allowed in). If either is true, the Garrick hasn't noticed that around half the greatest wits of our day - as twitter gives daily testament to - lack a Y-chromosome.
Defenders of the Garrick usually point to the existence of women-only gyms. But there's a significant difference between wanting to get sweaty in a single-sex environment and half the population - however talented they may be - being barred from an influential networking club.
The Garrick's policy is symptomatic of something wider too. Any woman who scoffs at the idea that females should stick together in the workplace or declares herself "allergic to the idea of sisterhood" should watch her male colleagues closely. For in offices across the country, you will see bromances of a Ben Affleck-Matt Damon level and there's enough buddy-buddying and back-slapping to put women at a disadvantage. The Garrick is just an out-of-office version of this.
The club is presumably proud that it is described as being "frequented by the great and the good in the worlds of art, law and literature" but it surely will not keep this reputation unless it stops blackballing women. In 2011 it should be embarrassing to be a member of a club that discriminates according to sex. It's a bit like bankers taking clients to strip clubs: their female colleagues can theoretically accompany them but they will probably be made to feel like second-class citizens.
The Garrick would be wise to let women in, or it risks seeing the retaliatory rise of the Lumley Club. For in a reversal of Groucho Marx's bon mot, who would want to join any club that would not have Joanna Lumley as a member?