Vanity Fair has an extensive article on how the Barclay brothers came to acquire Claridge’s, as Ireland’s economy crashed after the 2008 crisis and one of its Irish owners found himself in a fix. The Barclays wooed Derek Quinlan and bought out his stake in 2011, by buying his debts, to the fury of fellow major shareholder Patrick McKillen.
But the devil of this argument is in the detail.
McKillen had also met with the Barclays the previous autumn but it was loathing on sight. The problem — the dress code at the Ritz, already owned by the reclusive Barclay brothers.
“[Frederick] Barclay says McKillen arrived in an untucked shirt,” reports Vanity Fair but his fellow tea-taker McKillen disagreed. He told VF “he was wearing a jacket and lacked only a tie, a dress-code violation for which he received a lecture in etiquette from Barclay: “He said, ‘Sit down. You’re lucky you’re coming to meet me or you wouldn’t have got into this hotel,’ ” McKillen recalls. “When I sat down I was fuming. I was burning inside, and I said, ‘Do I walk out now? Is this the biggest insult?’”
