The Financial Times is not usually noted for its investigative journalism, but its exposure this week, of a men-only, black-tie dinner at the Dorchester, one of London’s poshest hotels, shows the real attitude of so many top executives and businesses towards women.
The secretive annual event, the Presidents Club Charity Dinner, was billed as a “charity” event, but as the Financial Times journalists showed, it was little more than a grope-fest.
It showed why so many of the bosses of British companies are organically incapable of ever delivering on equal pay and opportunities for women.
The 360 paying guests were from business and finance, including FTSE-listed companies, as well as politics. They were ‘hosted’ by 130 specially-hired women for the evening, two of whom, unbeknown to the organisers, were Financial Times journalists.
For the guests, there were opportunities to bid in a “charity” auction for a top marque Range Rover, as well as for such items as dinner with Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson and afternoon tea with the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney (although the Bank later denied any knowledge of this prize).
What the Financial Times expose showed was that the hostesses, all selected for being “tall, thin and pretty”, were obliged to wear “skimpy black outfits with matching underwear and high heels”, and were told to keep the businessmen, lords, politicians and property magnates, etc, happy and supplied with drinks.
At the main event and even more so at an after-party many of hostesses were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned.
In fact, the entire event turned into a grope-fest. As well as being groped, many of the hostesses were subjected to suggestive and lewd comments and were frequently asked by guests to accompany them to bedrooms in the Dorchester. Hostesses reported to the Financial Times journalists about “men repeatedly putting hands up their skirts; one said an attendee had exposed his penis to her during the evening”.
One well known society figure, according to the journalists, told a hostess, “You look far too sober,” and filling her glass with champagne and grabbing her waist, told her “I want you to down that glass, rip off your knickers and dance on that table.”
Many of these women were students and others doing odd bits of part-time work, to makes ends meet. For the six hours, including the ‘after dinner party’, they were paid the magnificent sum of £150 plus the taxi fare home, probably less than most of the guests would have earned in half an hour. Minders were placed outside the ladies’ toilets, to time how long the women were in there. If any hostesses were deemed to have been in the loo too long, they were called out and led back to the event.
Lists of guests at this do included financiers and hedge-fund managers and others of the same ilk. The Financial Times reported that the seating plan included, for example, the head of Barclays investment bank’s Middle East business. From the world of politics on the list was Nadhim Zahawi, newly appointed under-secretary of state for children and families. No doubt we can expect this politician to be making speeches about ‘family values’ in the near future.
As soon the Financial Times expose was published, there were the predictable cries of outrage, of course, as if the organisers didn’t expect such scandalous goings on. Yet from the opening of the charity auction, when the announcer welcomed everyone “to the most un-PC event of the year,” there was no mistaking the character of the event.
This whole episode stinks of the most sickening hypocrisy. When they are sober again, no doubt the guests will be basking in self-righteousness at having earned money for charities, such as those for “disadvantaged children”. It was claimed that over £2m was going to be raised by the event. What the Financial Times didn’t point out was that, in all likelihood, it would have cost that to put the event on.
More to the point, were it not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of those present support and are engaged in industrial-scale tax-dodging, many charities would not need to be so desperately seeking funds. It is their government, their tax-dodging and their control of the levers of the economy that is multiplying daily the numbers of children living in poverty and squalor.
This whole sordid event shows why these people, the bosses of so many British companies, are incapable of delivering on anything remotely like equality for women in pay, opportunities or conditions of work. This drunken bacchanal, where the loutish ‘captains of British industry’ are groping and braying at scantily clad women, is a fitting metaphor for their appalling stewardship of the British economy as a whole. We can all go to hell in a hand-cart, they think, so long as they’re making their money. The sooner there is a Labour government, committed to socialist policies, like taking over the commanding heights of the economy and putting these Masters of the Universe out of their jobs, the better it will be for all of us.
January 24, 2018
