It’s right to be bitter about Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin’s knighthood

Happy New Year to you – and may I ask what you got for Christmas? As you’re a New European reader, I’m guessing it wasn’t a peerage, damehood or knighthood.

Whenever these are doled out (every New Year, or on the ceremonial flushings away of Conservative prime ministers) a good proportion seem to be reserved for people who are either Tory donors with very deep pockets, people who were wrong about Brexit, or preferably both. Thus the last seven months – thanks to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – have seen:

Truss-awarded peerages for Matthew Elliott, CEO of the lying and rule-breaking Vote Leave campaign, who said in 2020 that a combination of Brexit and Boris Johnson would make Britain “the most prosperous country in Europe”, and for John Moynihan, chair of the same lying and rule-breaking organisation, who said in 2016: “The EU needs a trade deal with us more than we need a trade deal with them”.

Johnson-awarded knighthoods for Jacob Rees-Mogg (who promised that Brexit would reduce the costs of clothes, food and wine by 20% and that there would be no need for customs checks at Dover) and Michael Fabricant (who said that Britain would be “far wealthier” after Brexit but that migration should stay as “years ago when we had our party conferences in Blackpool, this rather gorgeous girl from Lithuania was doing the vacuum cleaning and I thought ‘great, what’s wrong with that?’”)

Johnson-awarded damehoods for Andrea Jenkyns (who nicknamed her infant son ‘Brexit’ and stuck up a middle finger to anti-Johnson protestors outside Downing Street) and Priti Patel (who promised that ending free movement would enable us to control our borders and cut immigration – a stunning success there).

A Johnson-awarded Membership of the Order of the Companions of Honour for Bill Cash, who last February said “Brexit is working, it’s going well, it is creating a new dimension” – presumably the rose-tinted dimension that Cash lives in.

And, perhaps most controversial of all, the Sunak-awarded knighthood to Brexiteer Wetherspoon pub boss Tim Martin, who promised in 2016 that Britain would be better off “financially, in business and wealth” if we left the EU and told the New European last May that the country had suffered any economic damage whatsoever from Brexit. “I just don’t see it. I mean, your readers aren’t going to agree with me, I know. I just don’t think it’s true, I don’t think it’s true at all,” he said.

Despite his inability to discern what is staring him in the face, Martin is a clever businessman whose outlets lack joy but do provide a social space with cheap food and drink for those who might otherwise stay at home alone. He deserves some credit, too, for keeping the lights on in some remarkable buildings that otherwise might be standing empty or falling victim to cookie-cutter redevelopment.

Whether that makes up for active participation in the destruction of the British hospitality industry, by supporting something that has made everyone poorer and seen pubs and restaurants closing at record rates because of a lack of staff from the EU, is another matter.

I can’t help coming back to my encounter with Martin, for this newspaper during the 2019 Brexit wars. Having watched him make a speech in one of his pubs in which he tossed out a much-debunked line about prohibitive EU tariffs, I challenged him on it when we spoke afterwards. People kept telling him it was untrue, he admitted, but he hadn’t done any research on whether they were right, so he was going to keep saying it. Such is the logic of Brexit true believers.

No doubt we can look forward to Martin’s new title granting him an even bigger media profile. But really, I look forward to what all these laughable, cynical honours bring closer: proper reform of the second chamber and the honours system so it no longer rewards cronyism, lies and failure.