Tim Martin of Wetherspoon’s: ‘For a while I was hated based on false information’

Tim Martin owes an apology to the rightwing TV channel GB News. Earlier this year, the MP Lee Anderson – a presenter on the channel – suggested that shoplifters were not stealing food to eat but to make money selling it at Wetherspoon’s.

“We hit the roof, as you can imagine,” says the pub chain’s founder and chair.

Wetherspoon’s complained and Anderson’s fellow presenter, the former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, read out an apology on air on his colleague’s behalf.

Days later, Martin was making one of his surprise visits to a branch of the 801-strong chain, the Moon Under Water in Watford. “A guy came up and said: ‘Do you want to buy a steak?’,” recalls Martin, breaking into one of the guffaws that shake his hulking 6ft 6in frame when something tickles him. “I haven’t told GB News.”

The 69-year-old is sitting in that same Wetherspoon’s, the nearest to the chain’s headquarters, and appears very much in his element. Amid a brisk trade for a Wednesday afternoon, Martin is a celebrity, rendered conspicuous by his size and leonine mane of white hair, and the fact that he is probably the most famous landlord in Britain.

Drinkers, some of whom he knows by name, stop to quibble over real ale prices, shake his hand, or take a selfie.

But outside his fiefdom, Martin cuts a more divisive figure. During the pandemic, he drew fire over what some perceived as a callous attitude towards his workforce.

While some businesses promised their staff a fixed period of full pay, Martin warned his that government-funded furlough money might take time to come through. Several media outlets also claimed, incorrectly, that Martin had dismissively told anxious staff that they should go and work in Tesco. In fact, he had said that anyone who chose to answer a Tesco recruitment drive could do so and would get priority on their old jobs once pubs reopened.

Wetherspoon’s secured several corrections from media outlets but the mud stuck. And while Martin has sometimes been cast as a tin-eared bruiser with little regard for what people think of him, he is surprisingly reflective.

“I am scarred by it,” he says. “For a very short time I was hated based on false information. And it’s heavy, you know what I mean? Every few weeks someone gets it, and it’s not always fair. The danger is that it puts people off saying what they think.”

There does not seem to be much danger of Martin pulling his rhetorical punches, voiced in a hard-to-pin-down drawl that betrays a nomadic childhood that began in Norwich but was split mostly between New Zealand and Northern Ireland.

He is famous – infamous to some – for loudly voicing his opinions. One of his more controversial points was his insistence that there was little point in imposing restrictions on pubs during Covid. He sticks by this – citing scientists and governments who shared his stance – but admits it might have been wiser to keep quiet.

Martin, a passionate leaver, making an address for the Brexit party in 2019. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

“There was a ludicrous attempt to stymie debate,” he says. “But it’s an emotional issue because people died and there’s been a lot of trauma during and since. To stick your head above your parapet … from a personal point of view it may have been better not to say anything.”

Martin, who was knighted in the new year honours list for services to hospitality and culture, at the recommendation of the Conservative government, claims not to be political. “I was brought up in Northern Ireland mostly and I could see that people, if they become political enough, become irrational.”

Even his wife does not know, he says, how he voted in the election.

“There are single-issue things that come up if you’re running a business, and I’ve taken those up from time to time,” he says, pointing to past criticisms of Margaret Thatcher’s beer orders and Tony Blair’s licensing policies.

Nothing has made him more of a magnet for public fury than his vehement support for Brexit, which appears to inspire genuine loathing on social media in particular.

Haters of “Spoons” – as the ubiquitous pub chain is known – have gleefully called for boycotts, in the hope of hitting Martin in the pocket.

Their efforts have proved fruitless. The chain sells food and beer for less than almost all of its competitors. In June, it launched a breakfast offer that meant Londoners could get a fried egg, bacon, Lincolnshire sausage, baked beans and hash brown for £2.99. As of a few months ago the cheapest pint it sold, according to analysis by data platform Stocklytics, was Carling for £2.49. In seven of its pubs, drinkers can get a pint of Worthington’s for 99p, the company says.

This, it turns out, is the sort of thing that people quite like.

Sales have risen in every year unaffected by the pandemic, reaching £1.9bn in 2023, double what they were in 2011. Pre-tax profit leapt from £4.6m to £36m in the first six months of the 2024 financial year. The group has also expanded into accommodation and now has more than 50 hotels.

So why wade into politics at all, given its potential to annoy customers? A lot of companies were vocal on Brexit, he says. “The difference is that I was in favour [of it].”

Martin is, however, a supporter of migration from the EU – his pubs would have a hard time finding staff without it. His stance on Brexit was founded more on concerns about a perceived dilution of democracy that came with ceding control over some policies to Brussels.

He insists Brexit has not been the disaster that remainers said it would be, pointing to factors such as low unemployment and comparable economic growth rates to EU member states. As with his views on Covid, he has a tendency to cite statistics and experts that support his conclusions, to the exclusion of those that do not. But even he cannot pretend that everything has gone swimmingly in Britain lately.

“How well has the country been run by the people we elected? Not that well. But democracy is chaotic.”

Martin says he admires politicians who “get an awful slagging off”, something he too is used to by now.

But the publican has learned to roll with the punches that come his way. The family moved around a lot due to his father’s job with the brewer Guinness, and his parents split up. Martin stayed with his father and has said – on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs – that he did not get on as well with his mother.

He wanted to be a barrister and studied law at Nottingham University, but was paralysed by a fear of public speaking. “I went to my first law of contract lecture and the professor started asking questions, so I didn’t go back. It made me very nervous. It sounds pathetic but you can get these little phobias.”

The solution, it turned out, was getting into the pub trade, which he did in 1979 with the opening of Martin’s Free House. The JD Wetherspoon name came later, a mashup of JD Hogg, a character in The Dukes of Hazzard, and Wetherspoon, the name of a teacher who did not think much of him.

At the time, opening a pub required licensing approval from a magistrate. “The aversion therapy was that to get a pub you had to go into the witness box – to go into court and give evidence. Once I’d done that … it was easier than public speaking. That was what cured me.”

And yet, Martin does not seem entirely free of anxiety about being put on the spot. Ask him a question and his usual response is to cite someone else’s opinion rather than his own.

In the course of an hour, he responds to questions with quotes from Muhammad Ali, the hotelier Bill Marriott and Captain Beefheart, among others. Why? “It’s because, as [Walmart founder] Sam Walton said, you don’t have to have a small ego to work at Walmart but you’d better pretend you have.

“I always say ‘I know fuck all’. If you asked me if it should be three sausages or two [in a breakfast], I know that I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what I think.”

What he thinks does matter, though. Martin has been a proficient strategist, recognising early on that it was hard to get the large pub chains to sell him sites and instead choosing to convert retail venues.

He now presides over perhaps the best-known pub chain in the country, with about 40,000 staff and a stock market value of almost £1bn.

He divides his time between the company and his family. Martin has four children and 12 grandchildren, one of whom he regularly helps with physiotherapy to cope with a physical disability.

‘A proficient strategist’: Tim Martin Wetherspoons at the Moon under Water. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

He visits several pubs every week, always unannounced, but insists that if he sees something he does not like, “I never give anyone a bollocking”.

He does, though, own up to his own mistakes – some of which have been very costly. In 2007, the Bank of Scotland offered to fix the interest on £50m of Wetherspoon debt at 5.5%. Martin liked the offer so much, he took it on all £400m of the company’s borrowing. A year later, the bank offered him an exit in exchange for £10m, which he turned down. Then the global financial crisis hit and rates crashed to 0.5%.

“That was a £120m mistake,” he says. “Like Warren Buffett said, if I’d just snuck of to the movies, we’d have been a lot better off.”

He was also wrong, he admits, about the Wetherspoon’s app, which allows punters to order food to their tables – and also to others’ tables, from anywhere. “I thought an integral part of going to the pub was going to the bar and shooting the breeze.”

The revelation that the app has spawned the emergence of the “Spoonspig” – men who derive gratification from paying for women’s drinks and meals – elicits another guffaw. “Bloody hell […] that sounds like an expensive way of, er …”

Martinis not short of cash himself, particularly after selling £10m of shares in the business last month. The sale does not appear to be a sign that he is thinking about succession planning, though.

None of his four children, he says, have expressed an interest in the business and he doesn’t want to “create a dynasty”.

“I’d like to keep on working for 30 or 40 years – as long as I can have a couple of pints in the evening and spend plenty of time at home and travel round the country. You need energy and health. It’s not a gimme.”