15 AUGUST 1998, Page 25

Sell the club

A CHAP'S club is his own business, but the members of the Royal Automobile Club have got their wheels the wrong way round. They hope to enrich themselves by selling their road-rescue service to an accident- prone American outfit called Cendant. They would be better off selling the club. What a superbly expensive hotel the RAC's London clubhouse (by Mewes and Davis, the Ritz's architects) would make, with its gilded saloons and its oceanic swimming- bath! As for the country clubhouse, this could be Surrey's answer to Gleneagles. The members would keep the road-rescue service and float it. A club is, after all, a mutual society, this is what other mutual societies are doing, and other chaps' clubs would have something to think about.