Farewell to clubland: the England of rakes is gone

In an open letter to the Secretary of Brooks's Club, Andrei Navrozov explains why he chose to be expelled: its surrender to the new smoking rules, he says, symbolises a much greater decline Palermo In the disheartening post a friend has brought to the tranquillity of Sicily from the wilds of London I see that my name has been placed on the Front Morning Room mantelpiece, in accordance with Rule 15 of our Club, as my annual subscription has not been settled. Yet paying it would mean remaining in the Club.

When I first asked to become a member of Brooks's, I did so at the insistence of my wife, who had given me to understand that joining an historic St James's club and obtaining British citizenship were the displays of enterprise and fidelity she would require of a slothful and errant husband. My wife, whom I would leave for a woman whose romanticism hinged upon a less onerous requisite, that of money, was an American heiress; in her dreamy eyes, a gentlemen's club, circumfused with loyalty to the sovereign, was a beautiful gated garden wherein, vicariously through marriage, she could find refuge from the levelling effects of democracy; or at least of that peculiar form of democracy against which Mill had cautioned in the essay 'On Liberty' and with which the United States had been plying electorates since the last world war.

I realise that illusions of your own, Mr Secretary, might make you abhor the idea of a putative gentleman, even of the dubious kind said to begin at Calais, who would join a club such as ours at the behest of a woman. Thus to learn flying a Montgolfier because one likes the scenery may be offensive to committed balloonists. I do not wish to displease you by my suppositions; my conflict is with myself my dissatisfaction lies with the errors peculiar to a runaway life, my anxiety hints at the vastness of experience necessary to liberate oneself from easily acquired conceptions. It should not trouble you that I, a relative stranger, should now be addressing you as a lifelong acquaintance, or at least as a chance companion in the railway carriage of a private eclaircissement.

Do you remember how, a few weeks after I had been elected, you took me round the Club? It went without saying, you muttered as we entered that antediluvian lift, that women were not allowed in the bedroom, to which I, in the confusion of a novice, responded: And men?' Certainly not, you said, and despite my embarrassment I thought I saw a blush, possibly of indignation, blooming upon a cheek. It was the kind of story my wife liked to hear, of course, just the sort of intractably English episode that acquires transcendent significance as an American heiress views it through roseate spectacles. Conversely, my present confession of cherchez la femme is bound to disgust you with some commensurate force, though I assure you that neither the woman who was my wife, nor any other presence likely to defile the sacred purlieus, was ever to trespass on that bedroom's threshold.

Yet the laws of the Club are perforce a reflection of the wider world beyond its doors, as doubtless are its liberties. This is confirmed in a letter to members from our chairman, an encyclical which may be entitled Concerning the Installation of a New Lift and the Eschaton of Smoking. The first decretal is speculative, the very possibility of an installation having been only recently reviewed by the Fabric and Fine Arts Committee with the result that there is now 'a spectrum of opinions among the Managers which ranges from an enthusiastic support for a change to a feeling that the whole issue should be hit into the long grass'. The second, however, concerns an event that has obviously intruded on the life of the flock with a wolverine energy characteristic of pagan irruptions.

The British Hospitality Association,' this begins ominously. It would have aggrieved my wife no end to learn that 'we and other clubs' belong to something that sounds like it holds conventions in Rockford, Illinois, complete with valet parking, name badges, and women in trouser suits of Elvis lime. And yet this Ding an Sich, whose immanence the chairman's bull does not pause to question with even a portion of the rhetorical panache he reserves for his own Fabric Committee, has been instrumental in deciding that 'we shall be allowed to designate bedrooms as smoking bedrooms where the occupant, but no one else, may smoke'. In other words, if in violation of the existing ordinance, I were to lure a young lady whose acquaintance I had made on impulse in the vicinity of King's Cross into a bedroom with the hollow promise of a quick snort, I would have to further deny her the meagre compensation of a Marlboro Light in my company.

Don't feign shock, Mr Secretary. You know better than I that our Club, like every one of the historic clubs of St James's, began as a casino. We have not balked at decorating our walls with gaming chips of the period, impotent as tribal arrowheads though these are behind the glass of the display cases. Whoring and drinking were the bywords of the day, and by God, the 18th century knew more of bywords than it did of bylaws, or Bye-Laws as our chairman would spell it, cloaking himself in the ambience of an autarchic England. No point hitting the issue into the long grass, Mr Secretary. The Club's founders were rakes, and rakes its members continued to be as long as England was England. My wife, whose Connecticut schooling was never to overpower her paradoxical mind, wanted her husband to join such a club because she believed he belonged there.

'It is likely,' the bull goes on, that 'the roof' is `the only practical option' for smokers. 'What we do not yet know is whether the bill will contain clauses limiting the freedom to smoke within a defined distance of a building subject to the smoking ban. In some states in Australia no smoking is permitted within 25 feet of a building covered by the legislation. Any limit of this sort would probably catch smoking on the roof.' Members may yet dream of donning winter greatcoats to smoke among the chimneypots like naughty schoolboys, but adult reality puts paid to the childish dream. Moreover, there will be 'a direct telephone line from which anyone may make a call to complain to the bureaucracy charged with enforcement of the legislation if smoking takes place'. As with the Disability Discrimination Act in the past, 'an activist bureaucracy supported by informers' is afoot.

Whereupon the defender of our sovereignty, who has hurled the ugly word bureaucracy at the encroaching leveller, has this to say by way of peroration: 'We shall have a final dinner to honour tobacco before its use in the Club slips into oblivion. Snuff will be available in the bar on a trial basis.'

People who dwell in glass clubhouses should not throw stones, Mr Secretary. It is our chairman who is the bureaucrat, as well as a hypocrite and a coward. That he is a bureaucrat is evident from his prose. He is a coward because, though nothing is at risk beyond upstanding citizenship, he fears spies. He is a hypocrite because he hates the barbarians yet would not call an extraordinary committee meeting, much less move a finger, to oppose them. Why has he not severed the Club's links with the British Hospitality Association, with the Australian Red Cross, with the Boy Scouts of America? Why has he temporised while this legislation was being introduced, without taking legal advice or sending a strong letter to the Times? Why has he not chained himself to railings in Parliament, or gone in the nude to a Covent Garden premiere of Turandot as a token sign of individual resilience?

Mr Secretary, let us shed some bachelor tears over the emerging truth that no man's an island; nor is a social group or a political class; and that the very island upon whose newly mown pitches we are crying a river is an island no longer. It scarcely made a difference to our Club's founders that the richest places on earth were three times richer than the poorest, including Pakistan. Today, it ought to make a difference to a Briton that the world's poorest places are 77 times poorer than the richest, while Pakistan has successfully tested nuclear missiles capable of striking London as well as Brooks's. Do not mistake this, I pray, for the kind of Jacobin sentiment you might expect to find on British Hospitality Association-headed paper. If anything, mine is rather a plea for Britain not to dismantle its independent nuclear deterrent in the dawning era of borderless diversity.

Yet Trident's survival is hardly more credible than that of the Club. It is with a whimper rather than a bang that the world ends, to borrow the idiom of yet another American seduced by the promise of England's past. The dominant cultural ideology, now being pumped into what once went by the name of Westminster democracy as though to enlarge its precious liver, is diversity, which means no less than the systemic emaciation of every distinction, every eminence and every sensibility that the cunning breeder regards as inutile. Trident is not among the desirable attributes, any more than Davidoff or Fonseca. To be sure, our members may still have their Shooting Days and Grouse Dinners, their Wine Lottery and Burns Suppers, their Trips to Bordeaux and Oporto. Yet what this moulage by subscription brings to mind is my Soviet childhood, when my homeland was, in theory, as rich in experiences as Russia under the Romanovs, while in practice the only experiences to fall to the common share were the half-litre of vodka at 2 rubles 87 kopecks and gelid slabs of a hooves-and-innards pudding at 36 kopecks the kilo.

America's and, ineluctably, Britain's future is like a botanical paradise, recalling the gated garden where my wife once hoped to find vicarious refuge, where the Quercus suber, the Cypems papyrus and the Melaleuca timifolia have been razed to the ground to make room for coleseed rape under a directive promoting agricultural diversity. The gatekeeper mutters something about bureaucracy and what a pity it is to see the place go, but hands over the keys to the fellow in the bulldozer like the good citizen of the European Union that he is.

I, too, had hoped to find refuge, Mr Secretary, first as a political refugee from the Soviet Union in the United States, and then as a cultural refugee from the United States in the United Kingdom. My son was born in London. He is fluent in three languages, plays The Well-Tempered Clavier and prefers Scotch to vodka. Yet the psychiatrist of an expensive school in New York has diagnosed him with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and attempted to put him on Ritalin, which only my threat of a lawsuit prevented. You see, Mr Secretary, unlike our chairman I defend my own. Unlike the last of the Romanovs, I do not abdicate. Unlike our sovereign, I refuse to mourn publicly for the Princess of Wales.

Ritalin's 'chemical properties', according to the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 'are virtually indistinguishable from the street drugs,' while the underlying reasons for its use in America are children's evident rather than politically fictitious 'diversity'. I, too, have been oppositionally defiant since childhood, and now I must ask whether the very existence of our Club is not a manifestation of the selfsame disorder, one that the progressive society of today proposes to treat with intravenous methylphenidates? Like the hero of Chekhov's Ward Number 6, our chairman is rendered impotent by the tiniest sign of aggression within that smaller sphere of action in which an individual worthy of the name must show his mettle. He's passing the buck, Mr Secretary, while your club, your class and your very nation are being diversified into oblivion.

I should not be writing this letter of resignation, in lieu of a subscription cheque, if only for a moment I could believe that I, and my son after me, would yet find in Brooks's even a residual trace of the particularity now ebbing in the life of Europe. As it is, why pay to sustain yet another agent of global diversity? My son and I can go to Disneyland instead, and join a replica of the Club there, complete with somnolent grandees, surly porters and a library of bindings by the yard. Who knows, there may even be snuff in the bar.

Andrei Navrozov is the Louche Life correspondent of Aspinall's Magazine.