Lady Annabel Goldsmith did not mind having the most famous celebrity nightspot in London named after her: “A person might have a rose named after them, but seldom a nightclub. That’s pretty good,” she told the Observer in 2009. Not only good but lucrative.
The nightclub set up by her first husband, the businessman Mark Birley, on borrowed money in the summer of 1963 – the same week as the Profumo scandal broke – in the Berkeley Square basement of their friend John Aspinall’s notorious private casino, the Clermont Club, was eventually sold in 2007 for £90m.
