Tim Martin: still riding the waves

JD Wetherspoon is 30 years old, but founder Tim Martin is as active and outspoken as ever, as Andrew Pring discovers.

With a very personal legal victory under his belt, the company he chairs outperforming the market, and surfing's joys rediscovered for the first time since New Zealand school days, you could say the founder of JD Wetherspoon is riding on the crest of a wave.

It's 30 years now since Timothy Randall Martin launched the company that was to revolutionise the face of licensed retailing and transform the way Britons drink. No specific celebrations are planned. "The whole year is a celebration," quips the 54-year-old. He's quick to add, tongue half in cheek, he knows the gods are watching for anything that might smack of inappropriate excess.

No danger of that. The famously down-to-earth Martin looks more at home in any of his pubs than he would in a ritzy restaurant, and does anything to avoid a dinner party.

He's worth £130m (£40m more than last year), but the car is still a Volvo estate. And while he may not have carried his Van de Berg legal documents into the High Court recently in the usual Tesco carrier bag he favours, that's probably because they were so voluminous.

MA caught up recently with the only man most people in this country could name as a pub-chain owner. We meet one early evening in his preferred venue for media chats, the Met Bar above Baker Street station. Even minus his trade-mark mullet, he is instantly recognisable — the bulky 6ft 5 inch frame helps — and is hailed warmly by several locals.

Offered an Abbot Ale, his normal tipple of choice, he plumps instead for a cup of tea. (This is simply because he feels like one, not because of recent ructions with Greene King over the headline-making 99p-a-pint IPA offer, which after some weeks led to the switch to Ruddles. "A good company Greene King — we changed because we were making their life difficult.")

Binge drinking​

He's come hot foot from a long round-table discussion hosted by The Guardian on, almost inevitably, binge drinking. "Nothing was agreed, no one could decide what was appropriate. But everyone there admitted to starting drinking at around 15.

"And we all know most parents allow their children to go into pubs at the same age as they did, because it's safer to go into pubs rather than drink out on the streets."

He stopped short of calling for the age to be lowered to 16, but said the licensed trade needs "sensible guidelines, a code of conduct, as to what's allowed, and decide what are we really trying to prohibit, which is aggressive behaviour. We've got to be realistic about it all." He says the police should not adopt "such draconian attitudes to underage drinking — it just exacerbates bingeing by making kids drink vodka at parties."

Supermarkets​

What he won't do is blame binge drinking on the supermarkets and their low pricing. Perhaps not surprising, you'd say, given his success as the drinks discounter par excellence — which, of course, has made him as disliked as the supermarkets by many licensees. Nor will he accept cheap supermarket pricing is unfair competition for pubs. And he hates the idea of minimum pricing.

"If you put up prices, people will just go to Calais for their drink. You've really got to look at this issue through the eyes of the consumer."

In fact, he gets rather angry with the Morning Advertiser for siding with pubs that want Government to act to restrain the supermarkets. "It's wrong for the trade to blame supermarkets for their problems. It gives carte blanche for Government to interfere.

"It's because pubs have attacked supermarkets, and made the link between cheap prices and bingeing, that we have more and more red tape. And by saying the price of alcohol should be higher, we're really out on a branch sawing. If governments have the power to put up prices, we're all stuffed."

He's prepared to accept, however, that the case for some legal intervention can be argued. "I could see how it would arguably be OK to sell a can of beer at 50p, but not six for £2. And I can see how it might be logical to ban happy hours, and suchlike short-term discounting. Happy hours are difficult to justify — they encourage people to drink quickly. You can make that argument."

Supermarkets are just helping consumers get a better deal, says Martin, who's based his whole discount business on the philosophy of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. "They've done a magnificent job, and particularly for pensioners and students and people on a fixed income.

"Instead of being cry babies, the trade has just got to learn how to compete. Starbucks didn't complain when we started selling coffee. We're now up to 600,000 cups a week."

Government to blame​

Martin prefers to train his fire on the Government. Tax and red tape have held back earnings growth at his 724 pubs for years. Wetherspoon pays £11 in tax for every £1 of profit. Duty rises he partly blames on the trade's attacks on supermarkets ("It's encouraged Government to put up taxes"), and partly on trade inability to be consistent and united. "We've shot ourselves so many times in the foot, we've got no toes left."

He describes Axe the Tax as "revoltingly short term" — and speaks approvingly of Stuart Neame — "He was bloody good." He blasts away in his frequent media appearances at the tax and regulation that's killing the golden goose in corporate Britain. And the tax is wasted by Gordon Brown, "the worst prime minister ever," who "failed in his primary duty as Chancellor, which was to take the punch bowl away when the party was clearly getting out of control," as he wrote in the Mail the other day. His remedy is a freeze on taxes and red tape for a decade.

Venture capitalists​

Another bête noire, perhaps even more so, is the venture capitalist brigade who have pillaged the pub trade so lucratively. He wrote in the same Mail article: "The Government's economic lunacy spilled over into the pub world as the laws of common sense were suspended and the banks loaned billions to a variety of likely lads armed with little or no talent or inclination for the mundane and hard work necessary to run a pub company.

"Guy Hands, Hugh Osmond and Robert Tchenguiz, among others, saddled Britain's pubs with unprecedented amounts of debt, creating a toxic mixture that has resulted in unsustainable rents and beer prices for swathes of licensees."

And while we're on the City boys, he's not forgiven people like Ted Tuppen and Giles Thorley for standing by while licensing control was given to the local authorities, which has increased running costs. "They should have listened to people like Michael Turner at Fuller's."

Van de Berg​

Our meeting at the Met Bar is a few days before the verdict in the Van de Berg court case, which centred on whether the property agent who'd found more than 600 pubs for Martin between 1989 and 2005 had defrauded him by secretly offering numerous freeholds to rivals rather than to JDW. It was an extraordinary case, with more than 1,200 pages of closely argued written submissions, and the result went in Martin's and the company's favour. Judge Peter Smith's 190-page verdict gives a unique insight into how Martin grew the company, with deals being done purely by himself on the advice of Van de Berg and without reference to JD Wetherspoon's legal and executive team. And with nothing put in writing between the two of them.

When Martin met Van de Berg principal Christian Braun, he was 33 and Braun just 20. They spoke on the phone at least once a day, almost every day, throughout that period. The judge said there was "a strong personal empathy between the two".

For Martin to be betrayed by someone so close must have been traumatic. The judge certainly believed Martin became "obsessive" about the case, sitting in court for every one of the 35-day hearing and spending £3.6m of company money in his pursuit of justice — a figure the judge suggested was "d