Poor Little Rich Club

[Updates, two so far, at end of post]

Ian Hislop couldn’t understand why Private Eye’s readers would be interested in a column that related the goings-on among the Royals, the high society set, and the rest of the Hooray Henries and Henriettas. So he had no compunction in killing off the Grovel column and dispensing with author Nigel Dempster. But the Sloane lovers at the Evening Standard are rather less puritanical.

Some of the clientele you may have missed

Hence the tearful headline “Public enemies: why Prince Harry and Pippa Middleton’s favourite nightclub has closed”. So the sister of the second in line to the throne, and her brother in law, are going to have to find somewhere else to show orf, waste money and get ratarsed? High tirrible! High ipslutely ghastly!! One might hev to mix with the unwashed!!! High tirribly and atterly valgah!!!!

So what is this nightclub, and what does it matter in the scheme of things? Well, it was called Public, the supposed in-joke being that those who went there had been to public schools. Of course, that wouldn’t be just any public school: one wouldn’t want to encourage the minor publics, one knows, with their provincial accents and ghastly lack of breeding. One would be expected to know one’s place.

A K Yah indeed. Public was run by Guy Pelly (who he? Don’t know, don’t care, and won’t be wasting calories doing so much as a Google search to find out). Pelly claims to have spent lots of money on legal fees and council costs. He wants everyone to know he paid his taxes. And he employed people. So Public was like any other business, then.

Except that there is an assisted housing project across the road, and clearly there had been complaints about the clientele’s behaviour towards its tenants. Pelly, showing his sensitive side, then complained about being “labelled non-PC”, which is probably almost as bad in Yah-Speak as “non-U”. But he garnered no friends by calling one of those tenants a “dwarf”.

The upshot has been that Public had a 0030 hours curfew slapped on it, which Pelly and his unfeasibly overmonied punters found so jolly insulting that one hes hed to clase one’s clab. High ipslutely ghastly all those Royals, City types, Society hoorays and hangers-on must have felt at the news that their loutish behaviour towards the less well off might be subject to nasty proletarian things like laws.

What does the Standard think is the point of giving space to these goings-on? Do they think that all those Tube and bus travellers who are struggling to find the cost of fares hiked once again by their hero Bozza secretly dream of the day when they can rub shoulders with apprentice lush Harry and social climbing party planner Pippa? Most of them would run a long way in the opposite direction at the prospect.

Me, I’d want the bottle of whisky and revolver first. I couldn’t care less about Public.

[UPDATE1 18 May 1500 hours: just to add to the original post, the Mail's serially inaccurate Royal hack Richard Kay has also reported the closure of this outlet for conspicuous consumption, telling that Guy Pelly is reportedly "in pieces at the moment" and "so upset that he is not even answering any phone calls from friends". Readers are also reminded that Pelly went to Stowe (which is a proper public school, of course).

But it is what Kay does not tell that is most revealing. Although residents' complaints about anti-social behaviour get a mention, the Mail's man would rather dwell on the numbers allegedly losing their jobs than remind his readers that those complaints included abuse of the disabled. It's interesting to see what gets filtered out when the A K Yah crowd gets reported]

[UPDATE2 21 May 1110 hours: even the Telegraph's Cristina Odone has not been impressed with goings-on at Public, but then, she does live in the area affected by the Hooray Henries and other A K Yah merchants and their anti-social behaviour.

As she says, all the talk by Guy Pelly about his audience including minor Royalty and the Middleton offspring failed to trump the rule that the law applies even to those who on this occasion thought themselves above it. And the abuse of a disabled person dependent on a mobility scooter has been confirmed]