Why politicians and pubs don’t mix

After Nigel Farage mocked Keir Starmer’s ill-fated trip to the pub on Monday, Sean O’Grady considers why recent episodes show that bars aren’t really the place for politics

A glass apart: politicians enjoy a pint (Getty)

The barney between the leader of the opposition and a publican in Bath was unfortunate. There to support Labour’s campaign for the May elections, Keir Starmer thought he had come across a random heckler when he took shelter in The Raven. Instead, the gentleman was in fact his host at the establishment and the landlord duly ordered the Labour leader out of his pub. The enraged proprietor was unaware that his co-landlord had in fact invited Starmer in the first place. Red faces all round. The television pictures weren’t a spin doctor’s dream, with the angry landlord being restrained by a security officer, but neither were they a disaster. It could have been worse.

Politicians and pubs generally don’t mix. Ironically, Nigel Farage, former leader of Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform UK, mocked Starmer’s photo op, despite multiple examples of pub-based embarrassments, admittedly not all of his own making, over the years. Farage, for example, was himself asked politely to leave a pub in Bath, in 2014, when the Bell Inn’s manager objected to the arrival of “Nigel Farage and his be-suited henchmen”.

“Avoiding any actual political argument, I told him that he was welcome as a citizen to have a pint – we are after all a public house – but it was inappropriate for him to be using our premises for his hustings,” the manager said. Farage graciously withdrew.

Less elegant was his hurried exit from The Canons’ Gait pub on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. On an ill-advised foray into Scotland in 2013, the champion of Brexit had to be first locked in the pub for his own safety and then rescued from a baying mob hollering “scum” at him. His subsequent “milkshaking” during campaigning suggests that Farage’s security team weren’t as professional as Starmer’s.

There have been other incidents, but the one that was most calculated to spill his pint, so to speak, was orchestrated by a gang of what Farage would no doubt describe as “militant woke extremists”, who thought they’d disturb his lunchtime with some pointed performances, back in 2015. The colourfully dressed mob first invaded his local, the George and Dragon, in Downe, but then discovered he had craftily gone to a different pub. Forming what has been repeated as “an aggressive multicultural conga” they made their way down the road to the Queens Head, where they made their presence felt. The organiser of the protest, Dan Glass, described to Vice UK their exquisite programme of torture: “We went down because that’s where Nigel’s local is, and for far too long he’s been spreading prejudice and hate, targeting communities with sexism, racism, homophobia, HIV prejudice, Islamophobia, and a whole lot more. We’d had enough, so a group of us got together to make a celebration of diversity down at his local, to show him what it’s all about, so he knows there’s nothing to be scared of.”

“We had a Muslim call to prayer, an HIV anti-stigma class, a talk from a Holocaust survivor, a jig from a Palestinian dance group, a bunch of Mexicans came along with a piñata, there were language classes, breastfeeding mothers, an ‘It’s Raining Men’ gay dance group. You get the idea.”

Farage outside a pub in Margate in 2015 (AFP/Getty)

We do indeed, though it doesn’t seem to have greatly altered Farage’s world view.

No other front-rank politician has had such difficulty with the pub, but there have been a few other “incidents”. Little Nancy Cameron was left behind by her absent-minded father, the prime minister, after his Sunday roast at the Plough Inn, Cadsden, Buckinghamshire. When the news became public, it was especially embarrassing for Cameron as he was about to launch his £450m “troubled families” programme.

In the lower leagues, there have been allegations of groping, indecent exposure and of an MP trashing Strangers’ Bar in parliament itself. Politicians would be much better off sticking to coffee houses and tea rooms, or not venturing out at all.