Tim Walker

Mandrake

Clubbing Together

When the country was in the grip of Brexit fever, and Theresa May was frantically trying to sever all ties with the European Union as soon as possible, Baroness Brenda Hale, then President of the UK Supreme Court, hardly endeared herself to the then Prime Minister when she and her fellow justices decreed that formal withdrawal from the EU would first require parliamentary approval.

But fevers break, and Mandrake is touched to learn that May and Hale have not merely mended fences, but struck up a close friendship within the civilised enclaves of The Athenaeum Club in London’s Pall Mall. They are both members of the cerebral institution – sometimes called “the club of the mind” – and it was May’s husband, Sir Philip, its chairman, who brought them together.

“Philip sees it as his mission to reconcile diverse points of view and nurture civilised conversations so it would have been personally embarrassing for him to have his own wife not on speaking terms with another member,” whispers my man in the well-upholstered sofa. “I’ve often seen Theresa and Brenda together and, by the look of it, having a high old time.”

Hale has in recent years noted that, while the deal May negotiated with the EU was “not perfect”, the alternative subsequently cobbled together by Boris Johnson when he became PM was even worse. She was dismayed by his Government’s threats to break the agreements it had formally made, believing it undermined both the domestic rule of law and the rules-based international legal order.