My first job was working behind the bar of the Richmond Conservative Club in North Yorkshire. The place was as you might expect: dark blue doors, no women in the bar – other than on Fridays – and a ban on red ties. There were portraits on the walls of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. The local MP, William Hague, sometimes held his surgeries there.
The Richmond club is still open, but many others have closed since the 1950s, when more than a thousand clubs offered cheap beer, snooker and bingo to almost three million Tory members. The party’s membership is now a fraction of what it once was; only 95,000 people voted in last year’s leadership election.
Last month, in the run-up to the local elections, Nigel Farage visited the recently closed Frodsham club in Cheshire. He joked that he was ‘thinking of putting a bid in and making it the Reform club’. Another Conservative club liked the idea. A few weeks later, The Spectator broke the news that the Talbot in Blackpool had been repainted in teal and reborn as the first ‘Reform UK pub’.
From the Talbot, which was converted from two interwar terraced houses, you can see Blackpool Tower rising in the distance. In contrast to Richmond’s 18th-century townhouse, the Talbot has a modern aesthetic. Neon signs for Coors and Budweiser glow behind the faux-slate bar. The television in Richmond was only put on for special occasions; at the Talbot, GB News plays continuously across three screens. When I visited, the older men took turns to chat to a girl in a lurid yellow dress or play the fruit machines. The prices are reasonable: a pint of Premier pilsner costs £2.80.
When I asked one customer if there had been much media attention, she told me they had been inundated. ‘They should have all gone by the end of the week,’ the barmaid added, hopefully. Journalists weren’t the only visitors attracted by the rebrand: one local couple had returned after more than a decade. Another couple visit Blackpool from Harrogate every year on their holidays, and promised to return for bingo at the Talbot on Tuesday. As I stood at the bar, the owner received a phone call from someone who makes pub benches. He wanted to donate six in return for a photo op, an offer he extended to every future Reform club. One punter asked if there were any party-joining forms. Nobody ever asked me that in Richmond.
Many Conservatives in Westminster worry about the loss of their old networks of clubs and associations that once tied the party to their voters. But Conservative clubs have, at best, a tangential relation to the party. When I made the mistake of wearing a red tie in Richmond, one regular winked at me and said: ‘Up the revolution, brother.’ He’d voted Labour all his life.
Despite this relaxed approach to ideology, Conservative clubs did ensure that there was some kind of Tory presence in most towns. Reform appeals more to instinct than tradition: a sense that something’s gone wrong and someone ought to say so. One of the regulars at the Talbot told me that after a few drinks in a nearby Wetherspoons, she had walked over to speak to the local MP and mayor, who had also been drinking there. She was trying to get help from the Labour-run council with a patient hoist for her disabled husband: ‘I told them exactly what I bloody thought.’
Swearing is forbidden in the Richmond Conservative Club, governed as it is by a sense of propriety. The place is hushed and restrained, even at its busiest times. The Talbot feels much more suited to Reform: direct, provocative and openly dismissive of authority. The Tories have little answer to this new energy.
The local Tory association responded to the rebranding of the Talbot by claiming that they had no records of it ever being a Conservative club – which is hard to believe when the words ‘Talbot Conservative Club 1927’ are engraved above its door. The Conservatives have not controlled the council for over a decade. Three weeks ago, Reform took control of Lancashire Council, bordering Blackpool.
When he visited Frodsham, Farage began with a photoshoot outside, telling the media: ‘The club’s closed, the party’s closing down, and Reform are moving in!’ There are already rumours of a second Reform pub in nearby Fleetwood.
Outside the Talbot are three foundation stones, inscribed with the names of three long-forgotten local Tory grandees. Over the years they have been chipped away so much you can barely read them. Since the club switched from Tory to Reform, the names have been painted over, in Farage-friendly teal.
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