Why can’t politicians keep out of pubs, especially when they’re adding to their cost - Jayne Dowle
What is it with this Cabinet and pubs? Whilst disposable incomes plummet and the rest of us calculate whether we can actually go out at all, our senior politicians can’t keep out of the places.
It was hardly edifying to see Chancellor John Healey behaving like a rugby club boor after delivering his Budget, flipping his red tie over his shoulder, downing a pint in one, then upturning the glass on his head.
I think the last time I saw that kind of carry-on was in my student days. We girls weren’t impressed then, and more than half the population won’t be now.
I’m also old enough to remember the likes of 1970s Labour Chancellor Denis Healey (no relation), sipping a brandy and water at the dispatch box as if he was in a gentlemen’s club.
Times have certainly changed, but at the age of 66, the MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough really should know better, especially as he’d just added 2p onto a pint, and according to the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), almost 300 pubs permanently closed across Great Britain during the first nine months of 2026.
No 10 has already been told by its social media and data analytics team to “tone down some of the blokiness” according to a source speaking to The Times back in August. This warning followed the cringeworthy bar snacks stunt in which Healey and PM Andy Burnham ranked crisps, pork scratchings, scampi fries, and Twiglets on TikTok to promote a planned 20 per cent cut in business rates for pubs, clubs, and live music venues.
Frequented as it is by politicos, civil servants and journalists, there seems little chance of the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster - where Healey’s stunt took place, accompanied by TV crews apparently - shutting its doors for good any time soon. Booze is the oil that keeps these political wheels turning.
When the same contingent streamed back to London from Liverpool after the Labour conference in September, my daughter, who works in a well-known food retailer at Lime Street station, told me she could not believe the amount of wine and beer they sold to the smartly-dressed folk boarding the Euston train. “A bottle of red or a six pack each,” she said, incredulously. “Each. For a two hour or so journey.”
An interesting insight indeed, but it could be argued that people can do what they want in the relative privacy of their train carriages. And, after weeks of hard work attempting to make the national sums add up, no-one would begrudge Healey a drink if he fancied one.
But was it really a good idea - when millions will still struggle desperately with the cost of living - to allow himself to be filmed behind the bar, whilst his colleagues cheered him on? What kind of message does that send to a nation wondering how they're going to make ends meet as Christmas approaches, questioning why the threshold for income tax remains frozen and worrying about both heating and eating?
A few hours earlier, the Chancellor of the Exchequer - a Cabinet role second in seniority only to the Prime Minister - had been standing in front of cheering and jeering MPs, announcing a plan to hand out a £100 council tax rebate this winter to help with punishing energy price rises looming in January.
This paltry sum really will make all the difference, he insisted to a stream of media interviewers afterwards. However, energy bills are projected to rise by at least £300; knocking off about a third is just a dent, or perhaps, an insult.
The Resolution Foundation think tank described Healey’s rebate a “complete failure”, pointing out too that the 2020s are on track to be the worst decade in terms of rising living standards since the 1950s.
Clearly no-one had thought these after-work drinks through properly. Hopefully, Healey, until now one of the most dependable and steady members of the Cabinet, had seemed a voice of reason.
Perhaps we didn’t quite expect him to follow in the footsteps of Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, say, who has recently shared that she will be packing a bottle of sauvignon blanc in her Armageddon Day survival pack.
Especially after Sir Keir Starmer’s social awkwardness and robotic attempts to prove his ‘son of a toolmaker’ credentials, no-one wants senior politicians to be remote and unrelatable figures.
However, we do still expect a certain degree of decorum. As we’re told to prepare ourselves for natural disasters or potential attacks by other countries, these are the people who will have their fingers on the trigger. We don’t want to imagine them rabble-rousing down the pub when the alarms go off.