Trouble at the Groucho

It could do for West End drinking clubs what Tiny Rowland vs Mohammed Al Fayed did for big business and Granada vs Forte did for hotelkeeping. Old Etonian socialite Benjy Fry has launched a hostile takeover of London's most famous media watering hole. The Battle for the Groucho has begun.

Of course, the die-hard-drinking louche types who frequent the Groucho Club fear the very worst sort of exploitation from a young man-about-town whose most public foray into the bar and restaurant business has been the K-Bar. They worry that the Groucho will get all Tara 'n' Tamara, while Fry claims he simply wants to inject some youthful zest into its ageing management. Meanwhile, rivals like Teatro and Soho House sit back and enjoy the boho versus business debacle. 'They are ripping themselves apart,' whispered one Soho House member in the ear of a gossip columnist. 'This promises to be fabulous entertainment.'

However, for a man bullish enough to take on the grouches at the Groucho, Benjy Fry is surprisingly sweet. We meet at his scruffy Notting Hill home, which must be worth the thick end of a million quid, maybe more, and perhaps one day, when he has finished decorating, it will look like it.

With wispy blond hair cut in a style that is half Tintin, half Hugh Grant, Benjy - or Benjamin as he prefers to be called now that he has become a serious businessman - looks like just another old Etonian Notting Hill rich kid: sweet, dim, slightly chinless and perfectly harmless. At least, this is what Tony Mackintosh probably thought when he first met the Groucho's young pretender last year.

Mackintosh is king of the rather elderly bohemians, many now of pensionable age, who divide their time between 192 and the Groucho Club. For the last 20 years or so, Mackintosh and his courtiers - people like the rather wonderful if slightly Jurassic Tchaik Chassay - have shaped accepted notions of affluent bourgeois bohemia.

And it was in Notting Hill with Tchaik Chassay that the story of Benjy's attempt to take over the Groucho began. In September of last year, Fry and his partner, colourful club impresario and legendary drinker Orlando Campbell, found a site in Westbourne Grove that is to open this summer as the arty Westbourne Hotel.

'One of the first people I asked to come and see it was Tchaik, one of the founder members of the Groucho and a big shareholder,' recalls Fry. Chassay was enthusiastic and recommended a meeting with Tony Mackintosh. 'We met Tony and I was hoping there would continue to be constructive conversations. He said, "We're not really interested because we want to do our own hotel in the area." I was a bit surprised, but I thought, OK.'

However, the proposed Groucho hotel has yet to happen and, after a time, Fry and Chassay bumped into each other again, when, according to Fry, 'Tchaik said to me it was a shame it didn't go through and I said,"Well, what's the future for you?" and he said, "Well, oddly enough, the other day Tony said to me something like I'm getting too old for this shit!" So we started to talk about it, and worked out that the best way forward was for our company to buy their company and give them some shares.' A price of £2 per share was bandied about. 'Then I met Tony again and he was a bit more formal about it and said, "We're not really talking to you seriously about it unless you can prove that you've got the money".'

And this is when it started to get grown-up.

After Fry had gone to some expense 'in legal and accountancy fees', and Mackintosh had spoken to his key shareholders, Fry was given to understand that the deal was on, albeit for a higher price. And then, 'Ten days later I hadn't heard anything from him [Mackintosh] and then I got an e-mail saying, "I've discussed this with the various people involved and we've decided not to pursue this with you any further".'

Not surprising, says Fry, who proceeds to elaborate on the Groucho and Fry tactics. 'One business has an ageing management which is likely to spend less time running a business; the other has young management, looking to spend more time running a business.'