Meetings are a necessary evil, as far as I am concerned. They seem to take up so much time and involve so much faffing about — the getting there and back, or even (if in the office) greeting people, hanging up coats, offering tea and coffee and so on. I could be spending all that time doing something useful.

Plus, you have to find space for meeting rooms. How much cheaper if we were to outsource most of our meetings to somewhere else; then they are paying the rent, providing the tea, coffee, cloakrooms and so on. And they would be bound to have nice toilets with a lavatory brush — one of the many things we have lost during our recent office move.

One solution is to join a club. Most of these seem to be in Pall Mall, which is easy to get to if you are based in London. I am therefore a member of the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the RAC, which offer great amenities.

In practice, I have never been able to get this working smoothly. The IoD is magnificent and the more informal coffee bar next door is great, although I have never found it a very intimate atmosphere — sinking into a sofa while conducting a meeting doesn’t work for me. You can rent private rooms, but it seems a bit over the top if there are only two or three of you.

I find that the RAC is better, although you can’t get pen and paper out, except in the St James Room, where I would be worried about having too private a conversation. So I tend to meet people there for coffee or breakfast and rush out afterward and write down what they said.

A month ago I invited a senior civil servant from the Treasury to meet me at the RAC for breakfast along with one of my colleagues.

My colleague arrived first and stationed herself in the breakfast room. I arrived next, with my gun. This was simply because I had come straight from home and needed to travel with it that evening. The RAC has two gun cupboards (unlike the IoD, despite Miles Templeman, the charming new Director-General, being a very good and very keen shot). But this day they said that one was full and they could not find the key to the other. And no, I could not take the gun to breakfast.

Just as our debate was hotting up and the coffee was cooling down, our guest (the only senior female civil servant in the Treasury to wear glitter in her make-up) arrived. She is beautiful, but that wasn’t the problem. Once she had taken off her coat and the porter had torn his eyes from her cleavage, we were told that she couldn’t have breakfast either. She was wearing jeans, albeit of the £250 designer variety.

I shall carry on using the IoD for its library and information service and the RAC for its bedroom. But for meetings I will now stick to the office, where we have a gun cupboard and jeans are allowed.





HEATHER McGREGOR

heather.mcgregor@thetimes.co.uk

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