Malcolm Cupis: Real politics happens in the pub, not in Westminster

Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He stood as a Reform UK candidate in the 2024 General Election and was appointed Chairman of the Melksham and Devizes Constituency party branch. He resigned from Reform UK in February 2025 and has since rejoined the Conservative Party. 

When Arthur Dent, the unwitting but highly fortunate hero of Douglas Adams’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, faced the imminent destruction of his house and, unbeknown to him, the entire planet, his eccentric friend Ford Prefect persuaded him to head off to the pub to prepare for something of greater significance.

So, faced with a week of ever-escalating political turmoil, I decided to follow his example and arranged to meet some friends at a local hostelry of fine repute. And so we gathered, at The Barge, just outside Seend, a fine venue next to the Kennet and Avon canal in rural Wiltshire, to let off some steam and compare our fears and aspirations, armed with a few pints of Wadworth’s finest.

I have to tell you it was a revelation. Yes, it is always great to meet friends. Yes, it is a wonderful place and yes, the beer was glorious, but the real revelation was how much political perspective there was to be gained from doing something that – until very recently – was intrinsic to our culture, but which is now, like many other things, rapidly dying out.

We didn’t gather to escape from Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, Zia Yusuf, Nigel Farage, Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer, we gathered to focus on them and to freely vent the true depths of our frustrations and anxieties at what is being foisted upon us. We met to talk about what we hoped for and yearned for. And the real revelation was not just that we found universal agreement on this, but that other people around us couldn’t help but join in and we found universal agreement with them too.

We spoke about the economy, we spoke about spiralling taxes and ever less to show for them, we spoke about our businesses becoming ever harder to be profitable, and ever more jobs being lost. We spoke about basic freedoms being compromised. Even freedom to think and speak – with the particular irony that the government is intent on clamping down specifically on “pub banter” lest anybody choose to be offended. We spoke about law and order. One of the friends runs a business in London and she spoke about how genuinely terrified she is to travel in our capital now. We spoke about Lucy Connelly and about a man who was found guilty of seven counts of indecent exposure this week and fined the sum total of £10.

We spoke about the fundamental state of our democracy. About how our government is forcing its agenda on the nation on less than 20 per cent of the popular vote, but using the Police, the Judiciary and the media to quell the inevitable dissension that results from such intolerable authoritarianism.

We spoke about the political subversion of the media and the entire public sector, from the NHS to education to the civil service. About how it is all captured, unionised and self perpetuating.

We spoke about the news that indigenous British people are now forecasted to be a minority within 40 years and the implications for our culture and our way of life. We spoke about what it means to be British and how citizens of free countries are able to proudly prize their own culture without being constantly attacked for doing so. We spoke about our pride, at all the great things this tiny island has given the world, language, literature, art, sport, engineering…

We spoke about how we have ended up in the situation we face. Open borders, spiralling crime, economic disaster, societal collapse, erosion of fundamental freedoms, two-tiered policing and judiciary, a government giving away sovereign territory at our cost and the dreadful sense that we are being conditioned to view that we are somehow deserving of it all and should accept vilification and, indeed, criminalisation if we dare complain.

We spoke about the degree of responsibility that the Conservative Party has to take for this. About how extraordinary it is that we find ourselves plumbing these depths after 14 years of Conservative-led government. The party of law and order, sovereignty, free market economics, small business, low taxation and personal freedom. About how the party can possibly regain the confidence of voters after delivering this.

And then we spoke about the astonishing acceleration of all of this that has taken place in less than a year of Labour governance. About what hope there can be for the future. About how we can possibly regain all that is lost, not just materially but in terms of our basic freedom, our pride and our identity.

And that brought us to Reform. Which has grown with such phenomenal rapidity by simply holding a mirror to the very real and justified fears of a nation full of people just like us, but which is now showing that it is beset by turmoil, that it increasingly rows back on basic promises, that it is centrally run at all levels by a man whose primary concern appears his personal elevation rather than delivering the salvation of the nation. We spoke about the terrible sense of disappointment that we were increasingly left with, after finding that what we had hoped would be the answer turns out simply to be a different set of problems.

We wanted to leave this meeting with positivity, with hope, with clear targets to aim for and a sense of better days ahead.

What we identified was a common malaise that stretches across politics in this country and across many other countries. That politicians have forgotten the fundamental contract that they enter into in a democracy. That they are elected to serve, not elected to rule. That they exist to listen to people and act for them. To use their support and their taxes to deliver what they need and aspire to. That the voters are the masters and politicians are their servants.

And we agreed that the political opportunity to deliver this is so immense and so clear and obvious, and that any political party that recognises it, commits itself to it and delivers it will be the true and only salvation of this great nation, and would be guaranteed political dominance in perpetuity.

So here is the message to politicians out there. Understand this great lesson. Put down the laptop, leave the Groupthink Teams meeting, delete the centrally issued briefing note. For true political enlightenment remove yourself from your echo chamber and get yourself down to the pub. If you really want to change your perspective, you might want to volunteer to get behind the bar and start serving a few drinks yourself.

The pub needs you, but not half as much as we need the pub.