The old boys club Benign curiosity or sexist bastion of power?

Around the turn of this century, a change to Garrick Club rules finally granted female guests permission to walk up and down the vast, oil paintinglined staircase that leads up from the grand entrance hall to the bars and libraries on the first floor.

- Amelia Gentleman

However, most women invited to the club will still find they are immediately ushered on arrival by the hall porter towards a side door and a smaller, narrower staircase to hang up their coats upstairs.

The Equality Act 2010 meant the club could no longer prohibit women from sitting at its main 30-seat central table, but it remains extremely rare for a female guest to be invited to eat there. Most of the time they will be seated at a table on the edge of the dining room and handed a menu that gives no indication of prices; club rules state guests (and therefore women) are not "permitted to pay for anything whatsoever". After lunch, some members will retreat to sit in leather armchairs beneath the main staircase, an area that remains strictly out of bounds for women.

Attempts to modernise the Garrick are fiercely resisted by many in the club. Members have repeatedly voted down motions proposing women should be allowed to join, the last time in 2015. But the club's position on women does not seem to have made it any less attractive to a string of the most senior figures in the government, Whitehall, the arts and the law.

Simon Case, the head of the civil service, joined the Garrick in 2019, the same year that Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, became a member. Richard Moore, the head of MI6, joined in 2016.

The Garrick is often viewed as a harmless, benign curiosity, a final, lonely slice of an England that forgot to modernise, its never-ending squabbles over female members offering an amusing peepshow into Britain's declining patriarchal elite. But the Guardian has been publishing articles about the battle to admit women to the Garrick since at least 1966.