Last week more than 300 of Britain’s wealthiest men gathered for a event at the Dorchester hotel in London at which £2 million was raised for charity and dozens of women were groped, fondled and propositioned after being warned that the men might be “annoying”. Last night the charity that organised the dinner was shut down. No other course of action would have been acceptable for an organisation that made elaborate plans for an event at which the sexual harassment of young women chosen for their looks appears to have been not merely tolerated but expected.
Sexual harassment is illegal in the workplace, and these women were working. The men were not, which leaves the question of whether crimes were committed at the Dorchester open to legal debate. What is not open to debate is that a culture of sleaze survives in the City of London and beyond among powerful people who should know better, and probably do.
That such an event was explicitly for men only was, in 2018, anachronistic enough. That it was promoted as “the most un-PC event of the year” should have been a warning to new names on the guest list — including the new minister for families and children, Nadhim Zahawi — but was clearly part of the attraction for habitués.
Many who attended will be indignant, at least in private, at the rapid collapse of an institution that raised many millions for good causes over more than three decades. The real cause of indignation is that so many apparently sophisticated men do not seem to have understood that no good cause justifies sexually aggressive or intimidating behaviour. It demeans the aggressor as much as it demeans and appals the victim.
Since the exposure of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual harasser, thousands of women have overcome fears of predatory men, and of ridicule, to demand a new sort of sexual equality. This is an equality that goes beyond anti-discrimination laws and seeks to change norms and behaviour where laws are virtually impossible to enforce — in bedrooms, for example, and behind private security guards in five-star hotel ballrooms. It is possible that some who were at the Presidents Club dinner, and who pressed themselves against unwilling “hostesses” at the after-party, might now change their behaviour. If so, some good will have come of it.
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The debate prompted by the Weinstein affair has not been all in one direction. Women as well as men have worried openly that a new puritanism might spell the end of workplace flirtation, old-fashioned courtship and impetuous romance. That would be sad, and Catherine Deneuve has every right to say so. Indeed, there is no harm in going further and restating the case for unbridled lust between consenting adults. But readers of the original exposé of the Presidents Club event in the Financial Times and of subsequent reports should be under no illusion. What has emerged does not fall into any of the categories that Ms Deneuve defends. The tone of the evening was set by the inclusion of a cosmetic surgery procedure in the charity auction to “add spice to your wife”. Many hostesses spoke of hands up skirts. At least one man was seen to expose himself and security was reportedly posted at the women’s lavatories to keep the hired help mingling.
Caroline Dandridge, of the agency that employed the women, said that she was “astonished” at how they claimed to have been treated. Yet she had reportedly told them: “You just have to put up with the annoying men.” In a civilised society, annoying men learn to control themselves. There have been suggestions that Great Ormond Street Hospital keep its donation so as not to penalise its patients. A better idea would be for the City to organise another dinner hosted and attended by men and women and which raised twice as much.