Groucho Club
 Groucho Club  (Club, Blackmail operation)   | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Formation | 1985 |
| Headquarters | Soho, London, England |
| Leader | John Lewis |
The Groucho Club is a British private members club formed in 1985 located on Dean Street in London's Soho. Its members are mostly drawn from the publishing, media, entertainment and arts industries.[1]
Secret filming
The Groucho Club has always maintained that it had only two surveillance cameras there, purely for the protection of its clients: but investigator Tyrone Murphy disproved this. The club attempted to intimidate him by suing, but withdrew the case at the last minute[2]
At the Leveson Enquiry, Steve Coogan for example talks about a dinner he had with a journalist. It was intimated to him that a conversation about his kids with the journalist was off the record. Details then appeared in short order in a Sunday Times article….a Murdoch newspaper.
Coogan assumed the hack had betrayed the confidence. But was he recorded by others….and the information passed on?
I have spoken to several celebrities and their agents over the last three years about their tabloid dealings. All but one of them (this group doesn’t include Coogan, by the way) trod warily about blowing the whistle on what they suspected as phone-hacking because they had been threatened with cocaine use exposure. The agent of one of these – a well-known model and TV personality – told me last Tuesday, “[She] was a regular at The Groucho. It had never occurred to me before that there might be visual evidence of substance abuse. But [name] was out of control at the time. She admits that, and she is now clean. But she spent a lot of time ingesting at The Groucho. Almost everyone did. And yes, she was told to cooperate or else her Coke habit would be splashed…but she’s still too scared to say that on the record.”
I can vouch for the level of white powder inhaled at the club over the years. I thought it completely normal in the late 1990s to go to the downstairs loo there and be deafened by the sound of sniffing. Was it a mystery virus, I would often wonder. It may well have been: I couldn’t possibly comment. But the current head of one massive international ad agency yesterday confirmed many similar experiences. "There was," he observed, "a tendency after about nine pm for conversation to be like an Olympic 100 metres final". As a comment threader here noted yesterday, "The Snooker Room was known as the Peruvian procurement office".
