The Garrick Club 

I DON’T want to show off but Harrington has never stepped foot inside the Garrick club in Covent Garden. It sounds like a ghastly place.

I was once acquainted with a very seasoned newspaper editor who would say all the right caring things about inequality in this country, but then always name drop who he had seen reading the Telegraph in an armchair on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s funny what the feeling of exclusivity can do to people.

Anyhow, you’ll have seen the club has been forced to consider whether its saggy-old-men-only rules still make sense after the Guardian published a leaked membership list and suggested that this is where the elite hold power and opportunities denied to the rest of us are handed out on a handshake and a glass of expensive wine, and with certainly no female influence.

The newspaper’s campaign has led to six women being put forward as the first possible candidates to sign up if the Garrick changes course, including the omnipundit Baroness Ayesha Hazarika and Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News.

Well done them, but Harrington would’ve preferred honorary membership for Amani and Amira, the sisters from Enfield on Gogglebox. Someone like that.

They would certainly liven it all up, because while it is all fair enough for the Guardian’s campaign to highlight the downright weirdness of the old puffins in the Garrick still being scared of women, other divides will always exist.

If men and women of a certain existing wealth and standing get to sip a Macallan together in there at last, then great, it’s a step forward to a more modern world – but it won’t stop it being a rarified place where those already in top spots hatch schemes and make killer contacts.

Whatever your gender, you’ll always need to be able to afford the membership fee and some smart shoes.