“It was a useless life” says Taki Theodoracopulous, the Greek shipping heir and last of the playboys. “But a very, very pleasant one.” For the Clermont Club — perhaps the grandest, oofiest gambling den in the history of London — this is high praise indeed. The uselessness is built in, of course. A high-end casino exists solely to move money from rich, tipsy people with inheritances to richer, more sober people with CCTV cameras and panic rooms and sympathetic smiles. It is a place of distraction and oblivion, where the game is all, and the money is simply a side-effect, a symptom, a McGuffin. There is no wider societal good; no great point or modern-day ‘purpose’. No economic trickle-down, particularly — just the constant dribble of someone else’s Krug. Useful? Who wants useful? That’s what members of the public are for. We’re just here to have a lovely time. Uselessness is the last great indulgence: lower the blinds, dear boy, the sun’s coming up.

As for pleasantness — in the case of the Clermont, 

is an understatement. This is pampering, engulfing, comforting, swaddling. It is silk sheets and warm milk: some bosomy, lovely nanny of the soul. Completed in 1740, 44 Berkeley Square was the final palladian townhouse ever designed by William Kent, the great Mayfair architect. A little over two centuries later, it was bought by John “Aspers” Aspinall to house a planned gambling establishment and monument to some forgotten England. (The laws on gambling in the UK had just changed, in part due to the wranglings of Aspinall himself: charged with gaming offences in the 1950s, he wriggled off the hook so successfully that the wider legislation was altered, meaning the Clermont and its ilk could bat happily on.) Aspers threw open doors in 1962 — and the first thing to strike you was the decor. Arranged around a central, sweeping double staircase, the interiors of the Clermont Club were high pomp and utter luxury: an inviting English country house, elevated by Louis XIV furniture and filigreed carpets. Osborne & Little took care of the design, of course, curving gold-leafed wallpaper around Romanesque pillars and busts from antiquity. But the finest exhibits were always the members themselves: a self-selecting cast of constant fixtures and florid old boys; captains of industry and creaking aristos; young bucks and friendly rakes.

The Clermont Club exterior, 44 Berkeley Square, 1970s


“The feeling that one had,” says Manoli Olympitis, the former merchant banker and onetime Mayfair gambling legend, “was that you were walking into your own drawing room, and you were seeing your pals — secure in the fact that they would never let anyone in you didn’t like.” Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan — more, much more, of whom later — was said by Aspinall to be “good furniture”: well-bred Old Etonian bait that conjured the correct ambience and encouraged the right breed of sap. He was what was known as a ‘Blue’: a house player, gambling with the Clermont’s own money in order to keep more liquid individuals at the Chemin de Fer tables (‘chemmy’ to you.) “You only had Old Etonians as Blues,” remembers Taki. “Charles Benson [the louche, jet-setting racing reporter] was a Blue, too — and another who I won’t mention because he’s currently in the House of Lords. But they played correctly. There was no cheating or anything.”

tonight?” he laughs. “That meant dinner with a Blue.” (“The food was terrific, with the best wines,” he adds later. “All free. You never paid for anything — until you went upstairs.”) Lord Derby and Lord Devonshire sat at the top of the aristocratic pile — the final stand of genuine gentry wealth — alongside a new breed of businessmen, like Jimmy Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland, corporate raiders James Hanson and Gordon White, and rakish regulars like Lazards heir Dan Meinertzhagen and Michael Hicks Beach. Mark Birley, Mayfair’s panjandrum of taste, was a fixture, too — his nightclub Annabel’s, which slithered into the basement below the Clermont at 44 Berkeley Square, was due to be connected directly to the gambling den. But at the last minute, Birley baulked at being so closely connected to a casino, and bricked up the stairway. It didn’t matter — the membrane was porous, the atmosphere interchangeable. Annabel’s was the Clermont with a dance floor and discreet corners; the Clermont was Annabel’s with ruinous debt. (“Although Aspers didn’t want too many women around,” recalls Taki. “He said it distracted us from the gambling.”) Algy Cluff — the indomitable entrepreneur and oil man — recalls a story about Geoffrey Keating MC, the former Lieutenant Colonel and war photographer. Keating, “who was absolutely plastered, of course” said to the Clermont doorman: “get me a taxi to Annabel’s.” The doorman replied: “You’re standing on top of it, sir.” But Keating was adamant. “Get me a taxi to Annabel’s at once!” So the doorman fetched him a cab, sent it on a lap around Berkeley Square — and welcomed Keating, 60 seconds later, in the exact same spot. “A fantastic man,” laughs Cluff.

“Aspers almost ruined me twice. I had to sell my house on Cathcart Road..."

The day started in the dining room at 12.30 sharp — at which point decent champagne and a good lunch would blow out the cobwebs from the night before and begin to get the senses tingling again. Afternoons were for backgammon downstairs. “It had just become fashionable in England, and there were a lot of people like Philip Martin around, who was a professional backgammon player,” remembers Olympitis. “People went to the Clermont to play professionally — but in a nice way, in a rather elegant sort of way.” (A 1974 

story covers an international backgammon tournament held on a transatlantic cruise, featuring the best of the Clermont set against their American equivalents. Charles Benson eventually wins, despite drinking vintage champagne throughout and leaving “the Tourist-Class disco at 5 a.m” the night before, “at the gentle urging of Lady Curzon.”) As the afternoon rolled into the evening, it was back to the dining room for a spot to eat and more very good wine. And then, after a light cognac-ing, the members headed to the casino floor, where the fun really began. I ask Taki how long he would spend at the Clermont on an average day. “Why must you ask me such lower middle class questions?” he laughs.

The general consensus, in most obituaries of John Aspinall, is that the arch host bled the aristocracy of the last of its cash — a charming pied-piper who knew how to push the right buttons and never met a millionaire he couldn’t milk. The aristocracy, it should be said, seemed largely happy to be bled — though there are certainly some punchy war stories. Charles Benson, it seems, was the luckiest unlucky man of all time. “He gambled every day of his life, and was perennially dead broke,” wrote Taki in Benson’s obituary in 2002. “But he lived better than anyone I have ever known.” Olympitis remembers how, whenever Australian tycoon Kerry Packer won big at black jack, Benson could be found hovering encouragingly in his corner. “He’d hand £10,000 to Benson at the end of the evening, or to anyone who was a bit unlucky. A gambler’s gambler.”

John Aspinall, the Clermont Club founder


“Aspers almost ruined me twice,” Taki says. “Only because I wouldn’t go to my father. I had to sell my house on Cathcart Road. He never put pressure on me and he knew I could pay because he knew one day I would inherit — but I didn’t like to have debts.” Jimmy Goldsmith, long before he was Sir James, went down £500,000 in one torrid night at the Clermont — some six or seven million today. But Aspinall saw something in him, apparently, and knew he’d make a fortune one day. So he extended Goldsmith a long line of credit until he could pay it back. Algy Cluff, meanwhile, declined to gamble entirely: “when you spend all day betting on the oil market, it’s probably the last thing you want to do.”

One particularly colourful tale centres on Bill Shand-Kydd, the daredevil sportsman, entrepreneur and racehorse breeder. Taki recalls the time Shand-Kydd returned home to his wife one night at three in the morning from the Clermont, blurry-eyed, permeated with cigar smoke, suspiciously perfumed. His wife promptly reads him the riot act, of course — only softening her approach after he mentions he’s just won £200,000. “Did you get a cheque?” she asks. “Not yet,” he says. “Well go back there and get a bloody cheque!” So he goes back to the Club — and returns two hours later, sweatier still. “I got the cheque. Cashed it. Lost that. And lost £200,000 more,” he says. “And then she really started to hit him” laughs Taki.

“Charles Benson gambled every day of his life, and was perennially dead broke..."

Shand-Kydd played a key part in Clermont’s most infamous episode, too. On the night of November 7th 1974, Lord Lucan disappeared off the face of the earth after his nanny, Sandra Rivett, was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia townhouse. Ensnared in a noxious custody battle with his wife, Lucan had become increasingly erratic, had been drinking even more heavily than usual, and on the night of the incident failed to turn up to a table he’d booked at the Clermont with a group of friends, Charles Benson among them. The next morning, Lucan’s borrowed Ford Corsair was found parked at Newhaven, a piece of lead piping wrapped in tape in the boot. Somewhere between the two incidents, Lucan sent two letters to Shand-Kydd, a cousin. In the first, Lucan claimed that he had been walking past his old house in Belgravia when, glancing through the window, he saw his wife struggling with an unidentified man and rushed to help her. But he slipped in a pool of blood before he could get down to the basement, and the assailant escaped — at which point, Lucan’s estranged wife accused him hysterically of hiring someone to kill her.“I will lie doggo for a while,” Lucan wrote to his cousin. “But I am only concerned about the children. If you can manage it I would like them to live with you.” The second letter asked Shand-Kydd to help him flog some of the family silver, apparently to pay off gambling debts and his groaning overdraft fees. An old brigadier, hearing the tale shortly afterwards in the dining room at White’s, simply said: “a bad day for Eton.”

Bill Shand Kydd, the dardevil sportsman and entrepreneur, was a key member of the Clermont Set


The next day, John Aspinall invited a set of Lucan’s friends to his house in Lyall Street for lunch, including Benson, Shand-Kydd, painter Dominick Elwes, and several others. It seems most likely they were simply meeting to discuss what they ought to do if Lucan resurfaced, and how they might convince him to face the music. But the clandestine nature of the lunch — and the fact that none of its members would confirm or deny that they were present — encouraged rabid conspiracy theories about a cover-up and the Clermont’s shadowy influence. Aspinall — who famously said that Lucan was “his sixth or seventh best friend” — seemed to rather enjoy the infamy, goading the police and the press with off-hand barbs. “If she’d been my wife, I’d have bashed her to death five years before and so would you,” he said. “You know how the English are,” explains Taki. “Everything has to be a joke. And making you feel awkward is how the upper classes try to control those beneath him.”

“But the idea that the Clermont set were hiding him was bullshit,” he continues. “They’d have told him to go hand himself in. Lucky died that night. He drowned. He had already gone down with a boat twice. He knew exactly how you scuttled a boat and scuttled a body.” (Taki once claimed to Patrick Marnham, who wrote a 1987 book on the case, that Lucan owned a powerboat and had performed practice runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. There is something horribly specific about that eight stone.) The next summer, a scandalous dissection of the Lucan saga appeared in the 

. Clermont fixture Dominick Elwes had been paid £200 to paint a cartoonish portrait of his fellow club members to accompany the piece, in perhaps the world’s most genteel leak ever. He also apparently flogged private photographs to the paper — an unthinkable betrayal that placed him, in the words of Patrick Marnham, “on the other side of the green-baize door.” Blackballed from Annabel’s and shunned upstairs at the Clermont, Elwes nose-dived into a nervous breakdown, and in September of that year took his own life. “Dominick Elwes was a fantasist and a sick boy who killed himself because he was banned from Annabel’s,” says Taki. “Can you imagine? He was a wreck anyway, always borrowing money, and always crying in public. I liked Dominick. I lent him money just before he died. But he was pathetic. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.” In Elwes’ suicide note, he wrote: “I curse Mark and Jimmy from the grave. I hope they are happy now.”

"Dominick Elwes was a fantasist, who killed himself because he was banned from Annabel’s..."

In the wake of the Lucan saga and the Lyall street lunch, a new opinion began to form of the club: that they were becoming not just a clandestine in-group, but also some sort of right-wing, buccaneering alternative court; a brooding think-tank in black tie. Colonel Bill Stirling, the founder of the SAS and a World War Two hero, cooked up an organisation called Great Britain 75, populated mainly by former army officers and Mayfair clubmen, and backed by the fortunes of Tiny Rowland and his ilk. It lay poised to take the reins of power should the current Labour government plunge the country into anarchy, amid the discontent of the three day week, and the rubbish bags that were quite literally piling up in Berkeley Square. “They all talked like that,” remembers Taki. “They were saying: ‘come on, we’ve got to do something.’ But you know, we’d drink! Drink at lunch, go upstairs to the bar and start drinking again. Of course you’re going to get people who are very patriotic and old fashioned to say silly things. It was like people sitting in White’s during the Second World War and talking about how to sort things out.” Nigel Dempster, the 

 gossip columnist and club regular, began to see the Clermont members not simply as jolly fodder for his pieces — but as a symptom of something altogether more sinister. “They have become an embattled race,” he said. “The curtain, they know, is half-way down on them — but they don’t know when the final drop is coming so they’ve occupied the high ground. They think the scum are baying for their blood so they form clubs to keep the scum out, secure in the knowledge that they can behave boisterously and badly.”

Dominick Elwes, whose indiscretion saw him shunned from the Clermont and blackballed at Annabel&#8217;s


“They have become an embattled race. The curtain, they know, is half-way down on them.."

The rot was beginning to set in. Soon, vague rumours began to swirl that the Clermont wasn’t exactly playing things straight. In 2009, a Channel 4 documentary claimed that Aspinall had worked with East End gangsters in the seventies to engineer a unique press which would subtly put a bend in certain cards. A planted player, sitting at the chemmy tables, might then be able to guess at their value and win back money for the house. Several of Aspinall’s friends rubbished the claims at the time. Olympitis tells me: “If you had thought that was going on, you wouldn’t have played. If I thought that was true, I wouldn’t have given a character reference to John when he got his last casino licence. I always thought John was very straight, an incredibly loyal friend. You didn’t need to be in any way bent if you owned a casino — the odds took care of that for you.” Cluff adds: “It doesn’t ring true to me. Aspers played things straight.”

In 1970, as the old money stream began to dry up, Aspinall decided to sell the club to Victor Lownes, the American businessman who’d brought Playboy to London. “Aspinall had cleaned the aristocracy out,” Lownes said in a 1999 profile in 

 “We soon finished them off, but the business was all coming from Arabs. We made them feel very welcome, and we were delighted to have them, whoever they were.” But by the mid-seventies the tone had changed, and the party, for the original Clermont Set, was dwindling. There was a brasher, splashier atmosphere, with more celebrities, more bunnies, more Americans, more foreign money. (“It was still fun, of course.” Taki clarifies. “I got to bed every single girl Lownes put out front. All you had to do was be nice and not be a pig and they’d go home to sleep with you.”) From here, the Clermont shuttlecocked between various anonymous, corporate owners — The Trident corporation bought it in 1981, before flogging it to Rank Leisure plc. in 1990. Rank then sold it for £31m in 2006 to Malaysian tycoon Quek Leng Chan and his company GuocoLeisure, who ran it for a while — and even spun a hotel brand out of it — before cutting their losses in 2018. It has lain dormant ever since.

Lord &#8220;Lucky&#8221; Lucan, the protagonist in the Clermont&#8217;s most infamous episode


The club itself may well have faded, but its unique cocktail of hard and soft power lingers to this day, largely via the descendants of its original members. The Clermont 2.0, as it were, chiefly inhabits 5 Hertford Street, Mayfair’s 

 a place with a familiar air of chummy curation and country house maximalism. Hertford Street is owned and overseen by Robin Birley, son of Annabel’s founder Mark, who donated to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign fund. Ben Goldsmith, Robin’s half brother and the son of Sir James Goldsmith, was a founder member of the club and is a noted Tory donor, too. Ben’s brother Zac, the former Conservative MP for Richmond, is a regular, too, and is particularly chummy with Boris Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds (Boris made him a life peer when he lost his seat last year.) When Carrie was looking to refurbish the flat above Downing Street in early 2021 — in what soon spiralled into ‘Wallpaper-gate’ — the 

 suggested that Zac was involved in conversations on how to foot the bill, while the planned interiors, overseen by society designer Lulu Lytle, were said to mimic the comfy atmosphere of Hertford Street itself. Meanwhile, in March, Carrie signed on to a new job as head of communications at the Aspinall Foundation — the wildlife and conservation charity run by Damian Aspinall, and set up, post-Clermont, by old Aspers himself. Ben Goldsmith and Robin Birley are both on the Foundation’s board of trustees, overseeing its governance. The Clermont is dead; long live the Clermont.

"Suddenly, she started screaming and pointing — and there’s an 800 pound tiger behind me..."

At some point later this year, if press releases are to be believed, a new casino will open its doors down at 44 Berkeley Square. It will go by the title of The Clermont Club, but will likely embody the original haunt in name only. The website copy boasts “a modern-day reimagining of hospitality and taste” and “an intriguing twist on the traditional,” which will be “seamless and discreet. Indulgent beyond compare.” It is accompanied by stock images of stubbled gamblers laughing near roulette tables with flutes of champagne. Elsewhere, there are artificial 3D renders of the interiors in hues of yellow and grey, and some generic dice on green baize. I ask Manoli Olympitis whether he’ll pop his head in when it opens. “No,” he says simply, with a chuckle. “I don’t gamble anymore. And I know I’ll just be disappointed. Some things are best left in the past.” Taki is more forthright. “You can’t go to the Clermont without Aspers!” he howls. “It’s like fucking a hooker that looks like Ava Gardner instead of the real thing!”

“I remember once I was gambling, and I was sitting with Tina Onassis, before she became Lady Blandford,” he continues. “Suddenly, she started screaming and pointing. So I spin in my chair — and there’s a fucking 800 pound tiger behind me, roaming around the casino floor! The tail stroked Tina’s arm, but nobody moved — everyone just continued gambling, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Aspers had just let the tiger out for fun. I thought that was just wonderful,” he laughs.

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