Inside the Conservative clubs that are turning Reform
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
