Long life | 29 October 2015

The Metropolitan Club in Washington is so close to the White House that President Obama chose to walk there for lunch on Tuesday through Lafayette Park while his motorcade followed behind. The lunch was described in the media as ‘secret’, and American reporters were frustrated by the refusal of the White House and the club’s staff to divulge anything whatsoever about it. But nothing the President does is really secret, and his visit was certainly not secret to me, since I was staying in the club at the time under a reciprocal arrangement between the Metropolitan and the Garrick in London, of which I’m a member.

As I had been warned in advance, security men visited my bedroom with sniffer dogs to check it for explosives; and when I returned from a morning walk, airport-type security was in place at the front door. I had to empty my pockets and be patted up and down, though the man doing the patting showed good manners bordering on deference, which seemed in keeping with the club’s pride in its ‘tradition of social civility’. Alas, I didn’t see Obama. I had a secret lunch of my own to attend. But when I returned from this, there in the front hall of the Metropolitan Club was George Mitchell, the architect of the Good Friday Agreement, who, it subsequently transpired, had been one of the two hosts at the lunch — the other being Tom Daschle, a fellow Democrat and, like Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader.

If I was a little excited about this near-encounter with the leader of the free world, the club took his visit in its stride. It says on its website that it’s one of the city’s ‘most valued private institutions’, one which, more than 150 years after its founding during the American Civil War, ‘continues to attract distinguished members from around the world’, and has been ‘a destination for many local, national and international leaders, including nearly every US president since Abraham Lincoln’.