It may not have the luxury cachet of newly restored London hotels such as the Savoy or the Corinthia, but glamour can come in many guises. If you can picture James Bond at the Savoy’s American Bar, demanding something shaken, not stirred, then St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster might argue that it can go one better.
It was here, close to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, that Guy Burgess photographed secret documents before handing them to his Soviet controllers; here, too, that Anthony Blunt, another of the infamous Cambridge Four, spent time; and here, in 1940, far less infamously and when Britain’s war effort was at a low ebb, that Winston Churchill gathered together the volunteers who would become the Special Operations Executive and called