close its doors for the last time in June.

A combination of spiralling overheads, including business rates and rent, and a slump in lunchtime bookings – with politicians no longer prepared to trek over from Westminster for inevitably lengthy alcohol-fuelled lunches – has sounded the death knell for the eccentric establishment. Its owner, Corus Hotels, is closing the restaurant and selling the lease. Distraught staff have been told to expect to serve up the final meals on 21 June.

The three-storey restaurant in Greek Street staved off a threat of closure in 2013 when Corus – the UK arm of a Malaysian conglomerate that also owns Laura Ashley – put it on the market. That led to 160 politicians and journalists banding together as the so-called Goulash Co-operative, requiring aPeter Mandelson. Photograph: Heathcliff O'Malley/REX/Shutterstock

Since it opened in 1953 it has been a haunt and popular watering hole of politicians, writers and artists. Devoted regulars have included the Labour grandees Roy Hattersley and Michael Foot – who celebrated his 90th birthday there – and more recently Gordon Brown. Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams had a regular table on the first floor, where he would bellow out whispered titbits from his informants. Election victories have been celebrated there and sorrows and defeats drowned with copious amounts of bull’s blood.

It was founded by Victor Sassie, son of a Swiss father and Welsh mother, who trained for the restaurant trade partly in Hungary and opened his own establishment, the Budapest, in London in 1939. During the second world war, he worked