I was walking to work in November 2019 and noticed several casual-looking police officers standing outside of the Lych Gate Tavern in Wolverhampton. I asked one of the officers whether somebody important was inside – thinking perhaps that the uncrowned champion of pub photo opportunities, Nigel Farage, might be within. The officer would not comment, but when I got to work, the local news helpfully informed me that the visitors had been none other than PM Boris Johnson and Defence Secretary Johnny Mercer, just weeks after the snap general election had been called. An opportunity to get a few good pictures, and talk to some “regular” voters, I reflected…
It was in the same city, though a different pub (The Mount Tavern), that Johnson supped his first (public) pint following the lifting of COVID restrictions in April 2021, as The Sun reported with the excellent headline “Thirst Past the Post”. This photo opportunity was occasioned by the PM’s visit to the West Midlands to support the mayoral re-election bid of Andy Street, with whom he shared this thirst quenching moment. The pub – not for the first or last time – was the centre of political attention, covered in the nation’s most-read, paid-for newspaper. It was also playing host to a political meeting and photo opportunity that has become something of a fixture in British political life.
The link between PMs and pubs is long-established and this particular type of photo opportunity has long been used to portray politicians on a less-elite, more convivial level. Pubs being regarded as venues of relative equality, where people from various backgrounds can get together and enjoy a drink. What is more, they have also played host to events supposed to strengthen informal bonds between politicians of many different stripes.
John Major – who gave “warm beer” a shout out in his famous 1993 speech to the Conservative Group for Europe – staged a Dublin pub photo opportunity in 1995 with the then Irish Taoiseach, John Bruton. Official state papers have recently shown that the event, where the two leaders enjoyed a pint of Guinness together at Foley’s Bar, was engineered to illustrate “natural bonding”.
This pub-summit was echoed by Major’s successor, Tony Blair, who took US President George W. Bush for a pub lunch at the Dun Cow in his Sedgefield constituency in the November following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The PM invited the leader of the free world to his “local” where they could dine on the finest British fish and chips, and Bush could pose, hand on beer tap – despite the fact that Bush had been teetotal since 1986.
David Cameron followed Blair’s model when in 2015 he took Chinese premier Xi Jinping to The Plough, near Chequers, where both leaders enjoyed “mini” fish and chips and a pint of real ale. Incidentally, this was the same pub in which the PM and his wife had mistakenly left their eight-year-old daughter back in 2012 – an error they speedily rectified once they had returned home and realised…
In 2018, in the midst of Brexit negotiations with the EU, embattled PM Theresa May hosted a pub summit with French leader Emmanuel Macron – though May selected a rather high-brow establishment for the discerning French leader – the pub boasting a coveted Michelin star. Yet, to balance out the pub’s French culinary credentials, it also had the quintessentially English name of The Royal Oak. A few years later, the press reported that the ill-fated Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng “mini budget” was dreamt up during meetings in the Richard the First pub in Greenwich. Perhaps politics and the pub are not always a marriage made in heaven, as May’s Brexit deal and Truss’s economic policy didn’t quite get the warm receptions the respective PMs might have desired.
Indeed, staying clear of the booze is something both PM Gordon Brown (at least while in office) and Rishi Sunak had in common. For this understandable reason, neither made quite so much mileage out of posing with pints in pubs. That said, in the summer of 2023 Sunak did make a visit to the British Beer Festival in west London (albeit not in a pub). This minor event made bigger news than expected when Labour MP Karl Turner shared a doctored version of Sunak’s pint-pouring skills on social media. The image had been edited to make it appear the PM was incapable of pouring a “proper pint”, and Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, was called upon to intervene.
Only recently in office, Sir Keir was frequently seen posing with a pint while in opposition. Who can forget Starmer posing with a can of BrewDog's “Barnard Castle Eye Test” beer, commemorating Dominic Cumming’s controversial COVID trip? Almost as soon as he had settled into his role as PM, he echoed John Major’s Guinness photo opportunity that started off this thread. Only a couple of weeks into his administration, Starmer was photographed posing with the Irish Taoiseach, Simon Harris, raising a glass of Guinness at Chequers. Almost three decades apart and not a massive departure in style, although not in an Irish pub this time…
Whether it results in positive outcomes or not, the link between PMs, pubs and posing with pints seems unlikely to disappear any time soon. As Gordon Brown once disparagingly said of then UKIP leader Nigel Farage, “Britain cannot be Britain without seeing a photograph of Nigel Farage with a pint in his hand…”. It would seem that Farage is far from alone…
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