Forget about winning Hastings, this government needs to get into Annabel's nightclub to really be in power. The ultimate in members-only clubs, named after Lady Annabel Goldsmith, feeds arms dealers, European monarchy and big-business executives, all of them so wealthy that they make the Hindujahs seem positively cloth cap. The place reeks of money and influence. Yet not a single member of new Labour's inner circle seems to have ever entered this ultra-exclusive haven. To new Labour mandarins and ministers in search of wealthy sponsors, the door to this networking nirvana remains stubbornly sealed. Despite dining with the Freuds, the Murdochs and even the Windsors, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown et al are still considered too tacky and downmarket to become members of the club in Berkeley Square.

This is particularly bad news for Peter Mandelson, because in Annabel's he could dance the night away with an even more exalted class of celebrity. How happily he'd twirl to Madonna's "Material Girl" with Darcy Bussell for a dancing partner, and how much more comfortable the PM would have felt inviting Honor Blackman or Joan Collins to No 10, instead of Noel Gallagher and Lenny Henry. But it's not to be. Annabel's remains the last bastion of the true blue Tory royalist. Ensconced in the warm, red gloom, you can imagine Diana and Dodi sipping vodkas at the bar and, look, is that Earl Spencer breaking bread with the Aitkens? It could well be. Even the toilets at Annabel's are plush enough to take the breath away.

My host for the evening was the Italian lawyer Carlo Colombotti. He was off to clinch a mega deal the next day and had come to Annabel's to relax ahead of a long day's haggling. But, horror of horrors, on the long table behind us, raucous City types and their scrawny dates were braying rather too loudly. "It's not normally like this, I can assure you," said Carlo in an anxious sotto voce. The problem was that this crowd were blatantly new money to the max dude. It was made clear to me that this sort of crude behaviour was what was to be feared if the guest book were ever opened to members of the government's claque.

The average Annabel's member has several homes and even more offshore bank accounts, but that doesn't mean they have rhythm. It took half a bottle of champagne to coax me on to the dance floor with the least trendy people on the planet. Long-limbed ladies, in dresses two generations too young for them, shook their money-makers opposite short but tanned shipping tycoons. In a corner, a group of game old gals (allowed off the country estate for a weekend) had got overexcited and drunk. They shook their frizzy white heads wildly back and forth, trying to ignore the sexy courtesans who next week (when they were back in the shires) would be dining with their husbands.

It is obvious why the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Alan Clark loved Annabel's: it is the safest place for a rich old rogue to pick up a society gal who's just the wrong side of 35 and desperate for flattery and flirtation. "Look around," said Carlo, "the groups of people all include wives. But any one-to-one dining is girlfriend only. No man here would spend money just to have dinner with his wife."

As I was leaving, I glanced wistfully over my shoulder. It would be rather grand to be a member of Annabel's, but the cost is too high for women members. It would mean either sleeping with Archer types in return for Caribbean holidays, or staying home alone in Surrey while someone younger did.

As for Mandelson and Blair, they shouldn't feel too humiliated at being denied membership: none of the Tory front bench is deemed suitable, either. The countryside and commerce Conservatives sneer at the egg-headed one. In fact, William Hague is the exception proving the rule that "it's not what you do, it's who you know". No one he knows wants dinner with him, either.

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