The Pembroke sits among embassies and mansions in Belgravia. Yet its director, Will Woodhams, like his counterpart in Fulham, says he is targeting a local crowd. As some of the international wealth that sustained Mayfair’s clubs has ebbed, newer clubs are courting Londoners who stayed put. Many will use the Pembroke as a workspace: Mr Woodhams jokes he will bring a mini martini to members who close their laptops by 4pm. A third model is the scalable club brand. Several London-born concepts are expanding abroad, not least to New York. One, 67 Pall Mall, a wine-focused club founded in St James’s in 2015, now has three foreign locations and plans for more. Such clubs are not rooted in a single neighbourhood but offer a familiar experience replicated across cities. The template is Soho House, which has around 50 sites worldwide but also saw its 200,000-plus members dismayed by overcrowding and rising fees. Its recent move back into private ownership, after a spell as a public company, was widely read as a reminder of how hard it is to scale exclusivity. Mr Thévoz says the success of traditional London clubs relied on the ability of members to mix easily with one another. Shared tables and common rooms encouraged “clubbability”. Whereas older clubs filtered by class or profession, newer ones aim for a broader mix. Those hungrier for subscriptions may be less selective still: if you can pay, you’re in. One commentator warns of “ersatz clubs”: places that look like clubs but operate as hospitality businesses. Members, less interested in community, behave more like customers—readier to complain when dissatisfied. Clubs remain a precarious business. Mr Thévoz estimates that around 90% fail, often within three years. High up-front capital costs can leave operators burdened with debt that modest annual revenues struggle to service. London’s older clubs have advantages here. Many own their buildings. They have also adapted quietly, relaxing dress codes, improving facilities and, in some cases, admitting women. London has reinvented its clubs before. The coffee houses of the 17th century gave way to the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall; the smoky dining rooms of the post-war era yielded to the creative hangouts of Soho. Today’s boom may have a mix of models, but all borrow the language of community. The history of clubland suggests it is the hardest thing to build.■
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Sir Keir’s bucket list The prime minister’s final few weeks sum him up July 16th 2026 To see how someone lived, examine how they died. The final few weeks of Sir Keir Starmer’s strange political life say much about the man. Outstanding affairs have been put in order. Sir Keir hammered out an increase in defence spending of £15bn ($20bn) over four years. The bulk of it was paid for with cuts to capital-spending budgets. Roads will go unbuilt. Energy projects will be canned. You could call it a “sticking-plaster” approach to public investment. Bad for business investment. Bad for living standards. Bad for growth. And, in the end, bad for the public finances as well. Those words may sound familiar. They are Sir Keir’s, when attacking the Conservatives in 2023 for doing what he has now done: raiding capital budgets to pay for spending elsewhere.
Others will have to deal with the inheritance. Even with the capital cuts, Sir Keir leaves behind about £5bn in unfunded spending for whoever is lucky enough to be Andy Burnham’s chancellor. When making way for someone in their own party, a prime minister should act as a sin-eater, choking down the consequences of the errors made in government, allowing their successor the benefit of purity. When it comes to defence spending, Sir Keir is less sin- eating than sin-chewing-and-spitting-into-a-napkin. There was a final trip to Paris. Where else? Sir Keir was hosted by Emmanuel Macron at a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” of Ukraine allies. The French president led plaudits and awarded him the Légion d’honneur as a sign of the improved relations between both countries. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, foreign policy is the last refuge of an unsuccessful prime minister. Sir Keir, more than any recent occupant, loved it, attracting plaudits for deft diplomacy even when pilloried at home. Beneath the diplomatic pomp, personal relationships matter less than many assume. Where Britain was useful, it was welcomed. The coalition of the willing would have been far less potent without Britain, which is still one of only two serious hard powers in western Europe. Where Britain was weak, it was bullied. Under Sir Keir, Britain struggled to win concessions from the eu—often because of the man handing over the Légion d’honneur to a beaming prime minister. Back in London, Sir Keir gathered the people he always spoke for: victims. He saw politics through their eyes. On a warm afternoon on July 14th, he welcomed a collection of them to the Downing Street garden: one mother whose son was killed by a ninja sword, and another whose child perished in the Manchester Arena attacks in 2017. Also in attendance were parents of those killed in the Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 Liverpool Football Club fans died due to police incompetence before being slandered by a malevolent state. Thanks to Sir Keir’s government, each now has a law named after their tragedies. For a man with few guiding principles, victims provided a moral map. The job of the Labour Party was “to look directly into the eyes of their suffering”, said Sir Keir. It is a humane response. But governing is not a humane job. Was banning ninja swords, already illegal to carry in public, a
good use of legislative time? Is it proportionate to require a church hall to have an anti-terror plan? Will the “duty of candour” that the Hillsborough law introduces lead to openness, or to public servants becoming strategically uninformed about brewing trouble? A government must be clear-eyed, and grief makes people blind. Cabinet ministers gathered for the final time on July 15th to send off a prime minister regarded by all but a few of them with contempt. They gave him a carriage clock—the symbol of an unthinking retirement gift. Still, it was a serene end. Good prime ministers tend to enjoy messy departures, argued Andrew Adonis, a former Labour minister, in a note to his then soon-to-be- departing boss, Sir Tony Blair. By contrast, Sir Keir has enjoyed a form of political euthanasia, put out of his misery by people he once considered friends. It is a dignity he did not extend to the public after he failed to pass a euthanasia bill, although it was one of the few things in which he sincerely believed. Since Sir Keir’s fate has been settled officially for nearly a month (and unofficially for far longer), the prime minister has had time to offer interviews about his legacy. What policy does he want to be remembered for? Why, scrapping the two-child limit on benefits, of course, which lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. It is the sort of thing Labour should do. Unmentioned was the fact Sir Keir fought such a move for almost two years, even sacking seven mps for calling for it. It could have been announced on day one. Instead, it happened on day 509. Sir Keir would have spent his final few moments in power 5,500km away in New Jersey, had Argentina not ended England’s hopes in the World Cup. By a remarkable coincidence, the football-mad prime minister had picked the day after the final as the earliest possible moment for the handover. Sir Keir began his reign in a furore about free football tickets he enjoyed while leader of the opposition. Why change the habit? England in a World Cup final would have been more justifiable than Arsenal away at Newcastle. Some prime ministers work to the last second. Others simply let death take them. In one of those final interviews, Sir Keir was asked for his proudest moment. He chose walking up Downing Street the day after the general election. It was winning for the sake of winning. Why he wanted the job,
Britain never quite learned. Sir Keir composed his own epitaph before he had even come to power, during one of Labour’s interminable internal rows: “There is no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be.” How right he was.■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/07/16/sir-keirs-bucket-list
Sovereign AI, independent of America and China, is a pipe dream When China’s open-source AI is a trap
Sovereign AI, independent of America and China, is a pipe dream But a degree of protection from coercion remains possible July 16th 2026 WHEN THE leaders of the biggest Western economies gathered last month in the French Alps for the G7 summit, it was not just presidents and prime ministers in attendance. The bosses of America’s leading artificial- intelligence firms—Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic—were seated alongside the political bigwigs. Even the stewards of the mightiest economies, it turns out, are buttering up the potentates of AI. Days before the summit, America’s government had barred Anthropic from making its most advanced model available to foreigners. OpenAI soon imposed similar restrictions on some of its frontier systems. The move turned a simmering concern into a burning one: might countries without their own, home-grown AI firms end up excluded from the world-changing technology? Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, warned that no one would buy American AI if it could “turn off the switch” at will. The American AI labs’ Chinese rivals offer only faint reassurance. On July 7th Reuters reported that Chinese officials, too, were considering restricting foreigners’ access to leading AI models. Caught between the world’s two AI superpowers, governments are increasingly pinning their hopes on “sovereign AI”: the idea that countries should limit their dependence on foreign providers of AI by actively developing domestic AI firms and infrastructure. Announcements of such initiatives are proliferating. The European Union has unveiled a technology- sovereignty package encompassing semiconductors, AI and cloud computing. Canada has launched its own plan to reduce reliance on American technology providers. India, Japan and Singapore are backing