In its glory days, it was flash and brash and expensive. Merchant bankers and Americans in white tuxedos and their ladies in evening dress perched on stools at the long bar, eating tournedos Rossini and drinking over-priced champagne.

On the adjacent stage just below their noses, within touching distance, the “girls” wriggled and wiggled and performed intimate exercises with bottles and boa constrictors. It was the smart place for the well-heeled louche to go. And it was the Mecca for an (exorbitant) night out in Soho in the Swinging Sixties.

But sexual liberation coincided with the rise of feminism. Stripping no longer seemed glamorous or a giggle, but the seedy exploitation of desperate women. Lap-dancing chains have invaded the high street. Porn is readily available on the internet and video for Americans, without the expense or danger of travelling to Soho.

Raymond has been driven out of business by increased competition, tawdrification of its supposed glamour, and the fall-off of its clientele which lately came mainly from the Far and Middle East. 9/11, Sars, the economic downturn and avian flu have destroyed Raymond’s income.

Back in the Sixties, Frank Pakenham (as the late Lord Longford then was) got sex on the brain (an endearingly eccentric place for such an endearingly eccentric man). So he proposed to hold an inquiry into pornography. He rang his friend, a cub reporter on The Times, and said: “Philip. I am very worried about all this sex. Do you think that your employers would pay for us to go to a strip club and see what it’s all about?”

Times expenses have always been serious-minded and frugal. So, with some misgivings, we set out for Soho on a rainy lunchtime, two improbable funsters out on the town in macs and carrying briefcases. I paid £10 a head entrance fee. There was then a £10 cloakroom charge, and protestations that we would prefer to keep our macs on were dismissed. We bought two glasses of beer which must have been brewed with gold-dust. And there on the stage, alarmingly close to us, a thin young woman was writhing to a Beatles tune. Her only clothes were her wrist watch, at which she kept looking. For she was due for her next gig in Brewer Street in half an hour’s time.

We watched. The manager and bouncer stood behind, watching us. And Frank said, in his loud whisper: “Philip, does this rouse you? It has no effect on me. But I am an older man than you.” I could sense the girl listening for my reply. The manager and the bouncer pricked up their ears. I blushed and wriggled. Any reply seemed rude to somebody, and might lose the girl her job. So I mumbled non-committally and inaudibly, but politely. And shortly thereafter we left, with the manager hot on our heels, crying: “Sir Pakenham! Sir Pakenham! Aren’t you going to stay for the real simulated sex scene?”

The Pakenham Porn Inquiry took evidence around Soho, and even went to Copenhagen to inspect the anecdotally more liberated Danish attitudes to porn. Cliff Richard was a member. I made my excuses and lapsed, on the ground that journalists should never have joined problematic and embarrassing committees, and that The Times could not afford any more Soho expenses. Eventually the committee reported a lot of pious cobblers. But the glory days of Raymond’s Revue Bar were already setting. It was no longer smart or sexy. It never really had been.

Just for a brief glory period at a turning-point in the history of Britain and Soho, it had seemed glitzy, bling-bling and glamorous. But as with Nineveh and Tyre, which also had their red-light districts, the spurious glamour has long gone.

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