Wetherspoons

Of all the stories I’ve heard about the fallout from Brexit — families divided, work jeopardised, friendships ended — the saddest was someone on Facebook who declared that he would never again visit a Wetherspoons because the proprietor, Tim Martin, pushed for a Leave vote. This seemed to me the definition of cutting your nose off to spite your face; imagine turning down cheap beer because of the EU! But it also disrupts one of the fundamentals of a liberal society: that you do business even with those whom you disagree. Voltaire marvelled at this concept on his visit to the London Stock Exchange: ‘Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.’

But it’s then long been fashionable to sneer at Wetherspoons. Perhaps it’s because they sell such cheap beer. In London a pint in Wetherspoons will cost you less than two thirds of what you’ll pay in the place with gastro pretensions up the hill. They can offer these prices because they have massive buying power: more than 1,000 pubs around the country. It’s a far cry from when Tim Martin bought his first pub in 1979 and decided to name the company after one of his old teachers who couldn’t control the class — which was how Martin felt about trying to run a pub.

It has to be said, those prices do mean that you get some colourful characters in a Spoons. The one in Liverpool Street station is particularly intimidating, full of loud men with shaven heads having a few before their trains back to Billericay. In a cavernous converted bank or cinema — typical Spoons venues — you’re not going to get the burble of conversation, the crackle of an open fire and the landlord’s wife’s shepherd’s pie.