People often imagine that each of London's private members' clubs are bursting with vast libraries. Not true.

Many have closed down - as underused as public libraries - or been converted into conferencing rooms. Many never had a library. This🧵looks at those which survive... More typical (if there even is a library) is something like the "Library Bar" of Soho House's 76 Dean Street. Note the complete absence of any books.

Generally speaking, fewer than half of the historic clubs of London still maintain a working library, & none of the modern ones.

THREAD: The lost clubhouses of London.

We often don't realise just how many private members' clubs London has - I count 130+ today, and 600+ historic ones.

And we walk past ex-clubhouses all the time, i.e. the🇨🇦High Commission on Trafalgar Square was the Union Club (1824-1924). The purpose of this🧵is to offer a walk past some of the surviving ex-clubhouses, still hidden in plain sight - 'Clubland' helped mould the London we know today.

Since the topic of women in clubs has been in the news, I'll start with the heart of 'Ladies' Clubland': Dover Street

I get a lot of questions on the portrayal of private members' clubs in Yes, Minister.

I'll try to answer them in this thread.

We see at least 9 club rooms in Yes, Minister & Yes, Prime Minister; though they could be portraying as few as 3 clubs. Read on for more details... Which clubs are they meant to be?

The books are much clearer on this than the TV series. Sir Humphrey & Sir Arnold are both members of the Athenaeum. That’s explicitly stated in their diaries, whenever they meet at “The Club”.

Permanent Secretaries have long been found there.

On #JamesBondDay, the 60th anniversary of Dr No, I'll be starting another of my "Clubs in film" threads, looking at how clubs have been an essential part of the James Bond films.

Lest you think this is tangential, Dr No literally starts with 3 assassins turning up at a club... But before I get too deep into the James Bond movies, it's worth recognising how clubs were an essential backdrop to the Bond books.

M's club, Blade's, recurs in several books (esp. Moonraker), and is clearly based on Fleming's club, Boodle's. (Seen here in the 50s comic strip.)

This is peak Johnson.

The PM is set to be “cleared” over “allegations of soliciting a donation from Brownlow”. But that wasn’t the accusation. It was that he’d lied over knowing where the £ was coming from, & lied over the existence of WhatsApp messages.

ft.com/content/d47eaa… Instead, the exclusive FT report from @SebastianEPayne suggests the only way Johnson could be “cleared” by his adviser was by framing the report around something he’d never been accused of doing in the first place!

The appointment & remit of Lord Geidt as Johnson's Independent Advisor on Ministers Standards. THREAD...

The process of recruiting Geidt was all quite informal. No advert for the post.

As FoI to @cabinetofficeuk shows, he had an informal meeting with the Cabinet Sec on 29 March Remarkably, no minutes or notes were kept of that meeting. Not even any briefing notes.

That meeting on 29 March came 10 days after my @openDemocracy report, which revealed there were no signs of any steps taken to recruit an Adviser since vacancy in Nov
opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

My grandmother died in France in January. She wasn’t v mobile in her last few years, so I always went to her at least every couple of years. I’d last seen her in 2018 & was due to go in 2020. Covid hit, with travel restrictions. Downing Street laughed.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquelin… I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, either: UK wouldn’t let me leave, and Switzerland wouldn’t let me in (she was on the Swiss-French border). Parish was so overwhelmed with deaths, they didn’t have the capacity to do something over Zoom (had to bring a priest out of retirement).

Political parties hate to admit it, but they're usually reliant on a few major donors - who are not necessarily consistently loyal supporters over the years.

A look at living Tory Treasurers gives a sense of this. 5 of the 14 in the Lords no longer sit as Tories...
[THREAD] Parties are subject to what fundraisers call "the 90-10 rule" - 90% of your donations will come from 10% of your donors (and vice-versa). That's why it's instructive to look at the tiny pool of major donors that keep parties going, i.e. the Leader's Group. opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

The very definition of “unclubbable”.

https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1398624251045945346

The word “club” in the sense of a gathering (rather than a blunt instrument) has its etymological root in the word “clubbable”, which in turn had its root in the mid-17th century word “unclubbable”.

To be unclubbable was to duck your round of drinks.

When middle-aged men in politics are having a mid-life crisis, they like to launch their own political party....
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla… Past examples include David Owen...

What NOT to do in a global pandemic:

Visiting the optician, and then a cafe, when you're awaiting covid-19 test results, and have been advised to self-isolate at home.

THREAD... I was in a favourite cafe of mine this afternoon, and popped upstairs - there was only one other person there, a middle-aged woman, so I went and sat in the opposite corner of the room from her.

After half an hour, she rings a number, on speakerphone. It's a testing helpline...

1. One of the reasons for the current crisis is that in Feb 2017, MPs voted by 498 to 114 to trigger Art. 50. That included Corbyn issuing a 3-line whip for Lab MPs to vote for it, with only 47 of the 232 Labour MPs defying the whip to vote against, while 167 voted to trigger it. 2. Article 50 - a clause whose own author admits that the timeframe was so narrow, it was never really intended to be used - defaults to a "No Deal" crash-out.

Can we please stop repeating the lie that it's a "convention" for defecting MPs to trigger a by-election?

Since WW2, 69 MPs have switched from 1 party to another (not including party mergers, withdrawals of the whip, & sitting as an Independent).

Only 4 triggered by-elections. (Dick Taverne in 1972, Bruce Douglas-Mann in 1982, and both Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless in 2014.)