The Garrick Club part II: when luvvies attack

This should ideally be read in the context of my earlier post about the club and its travails. There have been a couple of developments.

1. A judge was removed from a case on the basis of his membership. The defendant, a man accused of violence and coercive behaviour against the mother of his child is also a member, and the mother has protested outside the club in the past. If the accused were shown to be a friend of the judge in question, that would certainly be problematic and presumably he would have recused himself. But if the judge cannot be trusted to be impartial on the basis that he belongs to a club which chooses not to admit female members, that is very worrying and suggests that he is not fit to do his job at all.
   
   
2. A letter addressed to club chairman Christopher Kirker, presumably deliberately leaked to The Guardian, signed by Stephen Fry (whose hand-wringing over the matter I deplore in the earlier post), Sting, Mark Knopfler and various other showbiz types threatens resignation of all the signatories should the vote on the issue not go the way they want next week.
   As Amelia Gentleman writes in her article, this does not seem to be a matter of principle: “Their concerns appear to have been primarily triggered by the bad publicity that the club’s men-only membership has provoked in the past few weeks, rather than the discriminatory nature of the membership rules.” Quite. Their membership apparently makes them uncomfortable when dealing with female colleagues including “backstage and front of house theatre staff”. Oh dear. How awful for them. Why, then, did they join the club and why have they not raised their voices in protest before?
   The letter continues: “Those who oppose this measure because it will ‘change the club’ will find the club changed beyond recognition to the lasting detriment of its artistic standing. Our motto is ‘All the world’s a stage’ but the stage at the Garrick will be empty. We fervently urge you not to let this happen.” Named after the actor David Garrick these resignations would no doubt be a blow to the club but I do not see how what they are doing differs from a sort of blackmail.

To take a reactionary, reductio ad absurdum viewpoint for a moment, would this give me the right to object to being judged by a member of the Women’s Institute or any of the various women-only clubs and should the celebrity status of the signatories give them the right to try to influence the democratic vote in this way, ostentatiously scoring virtue points while they are at it?

I have already said that I think that Mr Kirker has handled the situation unwisely, intemperately and ineptly, whilst acknowledging that that may be unfair in that we do not know the full story. I resigned my membership towards the end of last year for entirely different reasons; this behaviour almost tempts me to put myself forward again although the cursory manner in which my resignation was acknowledged did not much endear me. I rather hope that the letter will have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended, that members will vote not to change the status quo on the grounds that they object to being dictated to by an elite clique of luvvies. To repeat, Stephen Fry has done enough harm to the club already by making membership seem something of which to be ashamed and about which to be clandestine and furtive.