A hotel on the Strand is a potent symbol in the great money-Monopoly game

‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days
when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who nicknamed it the Dealmakers’ Arms, was often at the
captains’ tables.

The City clientele drifted away after Gordon Ramsay took over in 2003 and abolished the jacket-and-tie rule; but perhaps they’ll drift back now that their old haunt has reopened along with
the rest of the great late-Victorian hotel after a three-year, £220-million facelift that was only meant to have taken 18 months and cost £120 million.

I’m not pandering to the PR people in the hope of a freebie (Oh go on then) when I say that the Savoy has always been more than just a hotel. Its ownership and finances represent
Britain’s longest-running corporate costume drama, a Downton Abbey that has notched up more episodes than Coronation Street and provided cameo roles for every big City actor since the second
world war. Thanks to an impregnable share structure devised by Cazenove, the founding D’Oyly Carte family and the hotel’s long-serving chairman Sir Hugh Wontner rebuffed a queue of
takeover predators, of whom the first, in the 1950s, was the property tycoon Harold Samuel and the last and most persistent was the Italian-born hotelier and caterer Lord Forte. ‘I’ve
known little Forte since he ran his milk bar,’ the ineffable Wontner liked to remark.