Trouble at club | 5 May 2007

New York

It’s been a hellish week for Pug’s Club. A week in which I was unable to lend my good offices against the violent outbreak of disapprobation and impropriety. What has been until today a relatively smooth path to the great and most exclusive club in the world was threatened by a member or members unknown, although there are only seven of us. Let me begin at the start: Pug’s was founded by Leopold Bismarck, Nick Scott and myself last summer. The club was named after the main character in Herman Wouk’s book The Winds of War, who was played by Robert Mitchum in the eight-hour-long mini-series. Pug Henry is a United States naval commander who is a friend of Franklin Roosevelt, known to Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, liked by Winston Churchill, and trusted by Joseph Stalin. He is sent on all sorts of diplomatic missions around the world, hobnobs with high Nazis, is toasted by Stalin in a great banquet in the Kremlin, flies over Berlin during an air raid, and takes command of a destroyer in the Pacific, winning the war single-handed.