Wetherspoons’ Tim Martin: Get rid of the f***ing tariffs and Brexit works

It takes only 15 minutes and a few sips of his diet Pepsi for Tim Martin to alight on his favourite topic. After spending months trotting up and down the country and appearing on any television station that would have him, he rejoiced when Britain voted to leave the European Union. But the rejoicing didn’t last long.

“Tony Blair hit the nail on the head when he said Boris doesn’t have a plan,” he booms, causing three customers to look up warily from a nearby table at the JD Wetherspoon Metropolitan Bar in London’s Baker Street. “One of the big advantages of Brexit is to get rid of the f***ing tariffs,” he fumes. In his view, Britain should become a free trade economy – striking more international agreements. “They haven’t done it! If you criticise the EU for its protectionism, there’s an implicit promise you’re going to do something different.”

If Martin feels let down with how the government has handled Brexit, it has so far done nothing to knock his resolve. The major thing about democracy, he says, is that “in spite of the chaos, and it’s often chaotic, it does work better than the alternative, as Churchill said”.

Martin, 67, is a familiar face as much for his outspoken views on the economy and politics as for running one of the UK’s biggest pub groups. Over the past 40 years he has built Wetherspoons from a single pub in Muswell Hill to a chain of vast drinking holes, set up in former opera houses, cinemas and theatres. He’s also gone head-to-head with the Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who accused him of paying “poverty wages”, has raged about lockdown and attacked No 10 “hypocrisy” for holding parties while restrictions forced pubs to close.

He increasingly takes aim at journalists, meaning sitting down for an interview with Martin is not without its risks. Halfway through our chat he whips out Wetherspoon News — the inhouse magazine he prints and leaves out for customers in his pubs. This copy is a special edition of all the apologies and corrections that Martin has secured across Fleet Street. In his opening remarks Martin writes how comments from an internal staff video early in the first lockdown in March 2020 were “taken out of context and distorted outrageously”. Reports had suggested that Martin told his 43,000 staff to go and work for Tesco. Would he like to set the record straight? There’s a long pause. Time for Darryl, the pub manager, to pop over with a Pepsi top-up. “In a way, I dread to go there,” he admits. “Once lockdown was announced, we were contacted by a major supermarket chain, just one, looking for 45,000 staff. So I said, ‘if you want to work there, that’s understandable’. The economy needed a vast transfer of people from the hospitality industry to the supermarkets, but what I said was taken out of context.” He pauses and hands over a copy of the magazine — although it’s not clear if it’s a gift, or a threat. “Do have a read of at least one or two of them in there,” he says.

At 6ft 6in, enhanced by a long-ish crop of grey hair, Martin sticks out among the families and post-work drinkers at the Metropolitan Bar. Rarely seen out of a polo shirt, today he is in a blue Gant T-shirt, shorts and casual brown shoes.

The eldest of four children, Martin was born in Norwich, Norfolk, but lived in New Zealand and Northern Ireland after his father left the Royal Air Force and took the family overseas with his new job at Guinness. Martin’s parents “got on very badly”, divorcing when he was 15. He looks down as he considers how to describe his upbringing, coming up with just one word: “fraught”. After the divorce his three younger siblings were sent to boarding school, but Martin refused, moving in with a “kindly family” in Belfast. “My old man was pretty good but he lived overseas after that. I didn’t get on with my mother who I never really saw much from when I was 15.”

His nomadic upbringing has had an effect on his accent — a slow drawl which in one sentence can travel from New Zealand to Northern Ireland and settle in the West Country. After studying law at Nottingham, he moved to London to train as a barrister but decided against a legal career. He was more interested in propping up another kind of bar and decided to make it a business. He ended up buying an independent pub in London’s Muswell Hill and named it Wetherspoons — after a teacher at one of his schools.

Martin’s model was to target volume by keeping prices low. He avoided buying pubs with ties to brewers and converted other properties instead. The Metropolitan Bar is the former headquarters of the Metropolitan Railway. The bar is adorned with railway memorabilia, from framed Underground posters to decorative ceiling crests.

His model goes like this: pubs open at 8am for breakfast and coffee (from a self-service machine) and stay open until midnight during the week, extending trading hours. Food has risen from 18 per cent of sales in 2000 to 36 per cent of its £772.6 million sales in the year to July 2021 across 861 pubs. Wetherspoons has a reputation for driving a hard bargain with suppliers — ordering large volumes and demanding a discount.

Brewers are usually happy to oblige because they have a big enough order to cover the cost of running the brewery and make the higher margins on smaller orders. “If you’ve got that Wetherspoons volume, you’re prepared to take a price that reflects that volume . . . but you can’t do that with everybody,” says one supplier.

Martin’s model was to target volume by keeping prices low. He avoided buying pubs with ties to brewers and converted other properties instead

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER TOM STOCKILL

Martin insists that there is no “magic formula”. “If price was all it was about . . . everyone would be at the British Legion.” Wetherspoons pubs play no music because “not everyone likes it”, but Martin says it’s the atmosphere that attracts people by “having a busy pub”. Design is also important — the Metropolitan is a cavernous hall, painted red. “Most Sunday Times readers won’t believe it, but I feel sure Wetherspoons has won more design awards than any other company in the history of the world.”

Geof Collyer, a veteran pub consultant, says that Wetherspoon has become almost the “quasi working men’s pub on the high street”. “They’ve priced things like coffee to compete with McDonald’s rather than Costa or Caffè Nero, which has highlighted the permanent value for money,” he says. “They’ve got the lowest average pricing of anyone in the sector.”

Wetherspoons customers are a dedicated bunch. A Facebook page devoted to the number of chips on a plate — Wetherspoons Paltry Chip Count — has more than 260,000 members. It came after the pub chain had been called out for allegedly providing varying amounts of chips with its meals. Martin is good-natured about the criticism. He says that it’s “quite right to count the number of chips”. “If someone has a criticism we try and absorb the criticism and correct it.”

Martin himself has also been the subject of attention, sparking a parody Twitter account set up in his name, @GroovyTimbo. It was funny for a while, until it claimed that “my son was taking over the business”. Martin’s press guy has, at times, got a “bit shirty” with the owner of the account but Martin is fairly relaxed. “I imagine now most people realise he’s talking bollocks.”

After his crusade to extract Britain from the EU, he now has supermarkets — the “main competitor” to the pub — in his sights. “A lot of customers are saying ‘It’s cheaper in the supermarket so I’m going to stay at home and drink’,” he says. Wetherspoons customers are typically more value driven. There will be even stiffer competition going into winter, as the cost-of-living crisis bites.

“As I said before, 40 years ago when I started in the business, pubs had 90 per cent of the beer trade. Pre-pandemic they had 50 [per cent]. I don’t know what it is now, but it’s lower than 50 [per cent].” Grocers pay no VAT on most food, and can sell alcohol cheaply. “They have found, especially now, that if they pitch beer prices very very low, and we say they do that because they have a tax advantage, it’s very good for their trade,” Martin says.

A recent visit to a pub in Bedford has sharpened his fears. “A customer said to another customer, ‘Bob, I haven’t seen you in a while’. And he said ‘No, I only come here for a top-up now’. That was drinking a pint at £1.99.”

Days before our chat, a survey from industry magazine The Morning Advertiser said that seven in ten pubs would go bust this winter without government support. Businesses are not protected by an energy price cap, meaning they must pay market rates for gas and electricity.

Martin has been cautious. “I’ve been predicting inflation incorrectly for 25 years but the slight advantage of that is that we fixed quite a lot of our costs,” he says. “We fixed our interest rates for ten years, most of our lease-held property is on fixed uplifts rather than open market, and we’ve got a lot of long-term contracts for our suppliers.”

He’s also furious about how fear of Covid has been “stoked to an unreasonable level”, leaving older customers more reluctant to come out. He was “relieved to see that Rishi said the approach to Covid was wrong”, after Rishi Sunak last month criticised lockdown. That’s as far as the praise for the former chancellor goes, however. He has higher hopes for Liz Truss. “Rishi has to carry a considerable amount of the can for what’s gone on so far, and that’s my worry about Rishi,” he says. On Truss, who is married to the accountant Hugh O’Leary, he’s “encouraged by the fact that she qualified as an accountant”.

“I’m hoping that from two accountants there will be some financial gravitas to introduce common-sense policies for the economy,” he says. “If we pay the same VAT rates on food and drink I will personally deliver a bottle of champagne to 11 Downing Street — I may get turned away at the door.”

Despite Martin’s campaign for Brexit, he is quick to reject suggestions he is against immigration. And despite staff shortages in the sector, he insists Wetherspoons has enough workers. “A reasonable level of legal immigration based on a points system is a plus,” he says.

The bar around Martin is beginning to fill up as groups pile in for a cheap drink after work. Martin finishes up his second Pepsi. He’ll be back next week — retirement is likely to be some time off. Not least because the Wetherspoons share price is languishing at about 70 per cent below its peak in December 2019. “I’m happy working,” he says. “I can still go for a couple of pints, I can still do an hour or two of exercise and still spend a fair amount of time with the family. I don’t go to nightclubs or Formula One events, so what else is there to do? Keep on walking and don’t look back.”

The life of Tim Martin

Martin enjoys the book The Years of Ross, his iPhone, the Isles of Scilly and the film Some Like it Hot

REX FEATURES/ALAMY

Vital statistics

Born: April 28, 1955Status: married to Felicity, with four children and “nine or ten” grandchildren. “I haven’t counted them up.” School: Campbell College, Belfast, and Westlake Boys High School in Auckland, New Zealand.University: law at NottinghamFirst job: pork pie factorySalary: £324,000 last year before a voluntary £51,000 Covid deduction.Home: Exeter and central LondonCar: 2005 Blue Volvo estate. “Touch wood, it’s been a good Volvo”.Favourite book: The Years with Ross, by James ThurberDrink: Greene King Abbot Ale and MerlotFilm: Some Like it HotMusic: JJ CaleGadget: iPhoneWatch: £45 Gant. “It’s a burden to have an expensive watch.”Last holiday: last month on the Isles of ScillyCharity: Young Lives vs Cancer

Working day

The executive chairman of JD Wetherspoon usually wakes at 6.30am and spends an hour doing “exercises which keep a 6ft 6in former second row mobile”. That usually includes some stretching and a few push-ups. Tim Martin spends two or three days a week on the road, taking the train from his home in Exeter to Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool. His visits are always unannounced. On Wednesday evenings he heads to London to work in the head office on Thursday.

He usually goes to bed between 12.30am and 1am. “The reason people are sleeping badly is they go to bed too early. I know loads of people who say they are insomniacs, and they go to bed at 9[pm], and wake up at 3[am]. But that’s a full night’s sleep . . . once you get to my age, if you get six or seven hours, that’s a full quota.”

Downtime

Martin, 67, walks at least 10 kilometres a day, and spends a large portion of his weekends looking after his grandson, who is disabled.