Just inside the grand entrance to the Carlton Club, the private members’ venue in central London where the Conservative MP Christopher Pincher is alleged to have groped two men, is an area known as Cads’ Corner. The club, which is closely tied to the Conservative party, boasts about this “inviting corner” that features a small cluster of chairs underneath a grand staircase – but its website is somewhat coy about how Cads’ Corner gained its name. As Dr Seth Thévoz, a historian of London’s private members’ clubs, explained: “It’s the spot where male members could stand to stare up the skirts of female guests walking up and down the stairs.” The latest allegations against Pincher have focused attention on what goes on behind the doors of the Carlton Club, where about 1,500 people pledging allegiance to Conservative values pay more than £1,700 a year for membership. A regular venue for Tory fundraising dinners, the club’s political committee continues to donate tens of thousands of pounds a year to Conservative politicians and it was at the centre of speculation when rebel MPs supposedly used its rooms to plot against Boris Johnson in January. Thévoz, whose latest book is Behind Closed Doors: the Secret Life of London’s Private Members’ Clubs, said the club’s repeated boasts about its close links to the Tory party could be a curse. He said: “It tends to attract people on the make and people who want to be seen at the heart of things. If you actually are at the heart of things you don’t want to get within a million miles of the place.” As a result, the attendance on a typical weeknight was often “estate agents, property dealers, Tory councillors, maybe one or two MPs” who would be “Conservative-minded people but not necessarily rabidly so” – with the focus on socialising as much as politics. “There’s a fair bit of young fogeyism going on, with young male twentysomethings straight out of university who are planning a career in Tory politics and want to tick that establishment box,” added Thévoz. The club – founded in 1832 to provide a venue for Tories – occupies a sturdy Georgian building in the St James’s area of London, close to the Ritz hotel and surrounded by other private members’ clubs, wine merchants, and cigar shops. The interior is styled as a Regency country house with paintings of former Conservatives on the walls and it is a venue where discretion is valued – and where the media attention that Pincher has attracted will not be welcome. Instead, the surprise for many who have attended events at the Carlton is that someone broke the omertà around events within its walls and reported Pincher’s alleged behaviour to his bosses – rather than simply covering up what was alleged to have taken place. Within the club an alternative reality can take hold. People who have recently been describe seeing the Conservative MP Mark Francois holding forth as club members queued up to applaud him on the success of Brexit. Despite finally agreeing to let women join as members in 2008, following years of rejections, the membership remains overwhelmingly male, with ties still required. One visitor recounted a lunch there: “An elderly man started choking on his food and they carried him out still sat on his chair, in what looked a very well-drilled operation.”
Pincher could lose the party whip after the MP – a close ally of Boris Johnson – resigned from the government for the second time in five years over allegations of inappropriate behaviour. The MP – who writes a drinks column for the Critic magazine – has said he “drank far too much” and “embarrassed myself and other people” at the club, although allegations about Pincher’s behaviour have been circulating in Westminster for some time. Whether the particular venue of the latest alleged incident is notable remains unclear and the club did not respond to a request for comment on whether Pincher would face any punishment. However, the Tory MP may wish he had heeded the advice attributed to the Duke of Wellington, one of the club’s founder members: “Never write a letter to your mistress and never join the Carlton Club.”