The first few times I met JD Wetherspoon founder Tim Martin I tended to ask him the same question but in different ways. How did you get away with turning the music off at your early pubs? Didn’t you get complaints from your regulars that the lack of music created a sterile atmosphere?  And so on. He always came back with the same hard-to- believe reply. I know that offering a wide range of cask ales at bargain prices was the engine of growth at JD Wetherspoon in the 1980s when London pubs tended to be brewery-owned and limited in their cask range. So, Tim kept telling me in the bit I found hard to fathom, throwing a beer festival would pack-out his pubs and the music issue was quickly forgotten as they over-flowed with happy drinkers. Fast- forward to right now and it feels like Tim’s cask ale retail principle – offer customers a varied and unusual range – is being rediscovered.

The momentum in the direction of “interesting” beer is visible in the off-trade where Tesco reported a record December for quality bottled ales – ales sales were up 65% at one stage as consumers chose the drink to accompany food over the festive period. Tesco ale buyer Kathryn Clarke said: “More people than ever before now drink ale with their meals and the trend has helped drive sales to their highest level since the pre-lager days of the 1950s.”

There’s no doubt that swathes of pubs have cottoned on to cask ale as a resonating point-of-difference. And we’re seeing all sorts of variations on a theme as clever licensees think this one through.

Within the 5,000-strong Punch Taverns estate, where I provide a little public relations assistance, there are many great examples. At the Sussex Arms in Twickenham, the lessee, Twickenham Taverns, is competing very well against a couple of larger managed pub by offering 15 handpulls.

The Wall Heath Tavern, Kingwinsford, a Punch pub operated by local pub company, Inndividual Inns, has forged a unique relationship with a local microbrewery, Enville Ales. Signage at the pub trumpets Enville Ales and it sells five ales produced by the brewer alongside a range of five additional hand pumps that serve rotating guest ales.

Over at the Brandling Villa in Gosforth, licensee Dave Carr has gone one logical step further in terms of partnering a local microbrewery. 
He’s let Ouseburn Valley Brewery set up in his basement and he often nips down to request a particular short-run brew to add variety to his ale offer.

But perhaps it’s the licensee of Punch’s Green Man in Long Itchington, Warwickshire, Mark Carver-Smith has carried the beer festival to its ultimate iteration. He noticed that it’s a struggle to buy much more than a bag of crisps at the average CAMRA beer festival held in a village hall – yet customers turn out in their droves. In a remarkable piece of self-help, he teamed up with the other five pubs in his village to organise a four-day beer festival where each sells four or more different cask ales. Adding to the pulling power is each pub offering its own al fresco food plus live music (from folk to steel bands through to tribute acts), theatre performances, Morris dancers and all manner of additional entertainment. The upshot is 12,000 visitors over a four-day period in May. But, it’s the interest provided by 20-odd cask ales that’s the primary driver here.

It seems that barely a day goes by that another individual or multi- site licensee declares an intention to start brewing themselves. All in all, it amounts to a re-awakening in relation to the pulling power of a quality cask offer.

I have a morning ritual that I’m happy to tell you about. I drive down to our local petrol station, open 24 hours a day, to buy a newspaper and coffee. When I arrive at around 7am I normally have to join the end of a queue of people – invariably builders making an early start – to buy my Coffee Nation cappuccino. The sight of half a dozen people waiting to spend £2.25 to buy a coffee still strikes me as slightly surreal. It is a phenomenon that has a relatively short history. Good coffee has been widely available in a retail context for little more than a decade after all.

It’s an area of the market in exponential growth. The UK branded coffee chain market grew sales by 10% last year to hit an estimated turnover of £2.1bn, with the market doubling since 2005. A remarkable 600 new coffee outlets opened last year, around a dozen a week. One in ten people visit coffee shops daily and 39% of people surveyed by market specialists Allegra Strategies stated they visited coffee shops more often than 12 months ago.

To put this total spend in context, coffee shops now achieve a full 10% of the total annual spend of the entire 50,000-strong pub market.

There’s an obvious need for the pub sector to up its game on the coffee front. It’s an area where even the biggest players have struggled to get their offer right. A board director of a major managed pub company once told me that the main problem is one of finding the right degree of focus. With so many other moving parts in the mainstream pub offer, it’s an obvious challenge to provide the appropriate amount of training and development to ensure quality coffee is served every time. And then there’s the considerable cost, many thousands of pounds, involved in acquiring a decent coffee machine.

To be fair, there is a lot of progress being made. Kevin Sammons, of 46-strong Pub People Company, told me last week that the company has made real inroads on the quality coffee front. One unlikely pub in Lincoln, for example, racks up £1,000-a-week in coffee sales after the company invested heavily in equipment and Barista training.

But it’s still worth reminding ourselves of the size of the prize here. Overall sales in the branded coffee market are forecast to jump by a further £1.1bn in the next three years. At my local petrol station, a helpful employee tells me they sell more than 200 coffees a day during the week, producing £400 of turnover per day. Whitbread’s Costa Coffee arm was advertising just recently in magazines like Forecourt Trader and Convenience Stores, trumpeting the profit potential of one of its Coffee Nation/Costa machines. Stockists, Whitbread reported, could earn £40,000 a year in profit from renting one of its machines.

Coffee, like beer, is a product for which consumers will pay a premium, assuming it’s of the right quality. Like draught beer, good quality coffee isn’t available in the majority of UK homes. But the two products fall into the affordable treat category that consumers are loathe to give up even in the toughest of times. Makes you wonder whether the time has arrived for a quality accreditation body, like Cask Marque, for coffee in UK pubs.

There's an American eating-out research firm making its first foray into the UK market. Technomic, based in Chicago, has been watching the American market for 45 years and has just undertaken a survey of 1,000 UK consumers to test consumer attitudes to the pub.

And plenty of encouraging stuff emerged. For a start, the broadened pub offer is attracting more youngsters. A total of 52 per cent of young consumers reported they are visiting pubs more often than a year ago.

The survey also identified the increasing importance of food.

Consumers are nearly three times as likely to prefer food-led pubs over wet-led pubs. Technomic describes this as a "shift in consumer perception of pubs". Customers, according to the survey, want a mixture of the old and new in food terms – 64% said they prefer pub menus to feature a mix of traditional dishes along with contemporary options.

It's still not entirely about food yet, obviously. A chunky 29% of consumers reported that they regard an extensive beer list of "high importance".

But there's no doubt that pubs with a great value food offer are having a good recession. Last year, pub chains outperformed restaurants by around two per cent in every month with the exception of one. With larger sites and more scale in absolute terms, managed pub chains have been holding their price points and taking share from other parts of the eating out market as consumers trade down.

And there's plenty more business to go for. Pub meals, including drinks sold with food, account for some £9.8bn of a total market worth £45bn per year. Just three managed pub chains – Marston's, Greene King and Mitchells & Butlers – are investing a combined £227.5m in food-led pub capital expenditure this year.

Looking around the multi-site pub companies, it's possible to spot some very fast adaptations to align with the steady withering of beer as the primary driver of the pub experience. This week, I was talking to founder of Ever So Sensible Chris Bulatis. Chris, a former Mitchells & Butlers executive who was heavily involved in setting up student chain Scream, began his own company by opening a couple of cutting edge bars called Dogma. It was a firmly wet-led company – but Chris spotted the trends were heading in a different direction. In 2009, he set up a parallel company Ever So Sensible Restaurants to, essentially, balance his business out. Now at 11 sites, food accounts for 40% of total turnover - and 50% if you exclude the two original Dogma venues.

It's perfectly possible to make money at the wet-led end of the pub spectrum. But latest CGA figures show nightclubs numbers dropped 13% last year while food led managed pubs increased in numbers. It tells you all you need to know about where the real squeeze is happening.

What's already obvious is that December and January is a story of two halves. This week, the bellwether of pub and restaurant trading, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B), provided a very clear steer on the state of trade across the two months.

And it's very much how the forecasters thought life might pan out.

Like a lot of competitors, M&B had a crackerjack December. A remarkable one-third of the entire 1,500-pub estate had their best- ever sales week at some point over Christmas. True, every pub and restaurant retailer was up against very soft comparables from the year before. But licensed retail is proving its resilience, with consumers definitely reluctant to give up on the affordable treats in life, especially during high days and holidays. The company offered up a two-year time frame to prove the point – like-for-like sales were up by around 7% last month compared to December 2009.

Fast forward to January and things are a lot more subdued. The company is reporting an underlying sales increase of 1%. Some weeks in January have been below that and some weeks just above that figure, the company told City analysts last Thursday. Executive chairman Bob Ivell pointed out the obvious – trade has not fallen off a cliff so far this year it's just that consumers are exercising extreme care with their spare cash. "Our pubs still seem very busy - we were pleased with how our pubs performed in December, January is more difficult."

One outcome of becalmed trade this month is an unprecedented level of special offers and discounts being offered by retailers. January normally sees special offers from the likes of JD Wetherspoon and Barracuda. More unlikely types have joined in this time around though. Fuller's has been offering a £5 discount on meals for two.

Manchester-based JW Lees has launched a VAT-free sale and has been knocking 20% off bills. And down in deepest Cornwall, St Austell is running a "buy five pints, get one free" offer. Even independent pubs have revved up the discounts in a way I've not seen before. My own local, the Half Moon in Warninglid has been offering a second main course meal free between Monday and Thursday. It's had the desired effect – we've been using the Half Moon like the office canteen with three or four visits a week throughout this month.

To get ahead in this game there's a need to be a little more creative than your neighbour. Grand Central, which opened in November last year in Basildon after a £200,000 refurbishment, is thought to be the first restaurant in the UK that will recognise vouchers offered by others pubs and restaurants.

Customers who visit the venue will be able to use vouchers from competitors on Tuesdays to trade with staff to obtain discount on their meals – the day has been dubbed Trader Tuesday. Steve Haslam, managing director of TLC Inns, which owns the venue, tells me: "On any Tuesday, customers can bring along a discount voucher from any other restaurant and one of our staff – or floor traders as we are calling them - will trade the food voucher for money off the bill or additional food choices for free. "It's different and it's fun and allows any voucher from any other restaurant to be used."

It also a pretty useful way of scuppering the vouchers that your competitors have been handing out.

Something rather unusual happened this week - an unlikely alliance was formed over an unlikely subject. You may have noticed that there's a campaign afoot to persuade the government that it would be a really good idea to reduce VAT in the hospitality sector from the current punishing 20% to 5%.

The move, it's argued, could create up to 320,000 jobs, with many of these for 16 to 24 year olds.

Now, there are those who argue this is unwinnable. Their argument goes that the nation's balance sheet is too messy right now for the government to contemplate a move that would reduce its tax-take in the short term.

But this week saw real progress in the campaign being led by French entrepreneur and lobbyist Jacques Borel to convince politicians that there's a case for targeted cut in VAT. The family brewers of Britain threw the combined weight of their mash tuns behind Borel. And this wasn't just woolly support in principle but rather proper colour-of- your money stuff. The family brewers stumped up £240,000 to support the lobbying campaign.

At this stage, I should declare an interest – my company, Propel Info, is working with fellow publicist Eddie Gershon to create awareness of the campaign. But regardless of the direct link, I think this is a remarkable step by the family brewers. Chairman of the Independent Family Brewer of Britain Paul Wells tells me he thinks the VAT campaign is more likely to be won than the other major tax bugbear – the punishing duty escalator on beer that means year after year beer prices in pubs climb steeply.

On the VAT campaign, Paul says: "Pubs are beleaguered with tax increases and legislation so this campaign is to kick-start some growth and help licensees get their businesses into growth. Reducing VAT will give a boost to the pub sector and help employment as pubs get busier; this will particularly help youth unemployment as pubs take on junior help."

And so it is that the family brewers move shoulder-to-shoulder with an unusual set of allies – JD Wetherspoon, Pizza Hut and the Mandarin Oriental hotel group have also put hard cash into the campaign.

The job now is to make the case for reduced VAT at every opportunity.

This week, the argument started to penetrate the up-market national media with good coverage across a range of journals.

In a leader column, The Independent stated: "There is a logical business and health case for looking again at the very big difference between the prices charged for drink in supermarkets and those in restaurants and pubs. Many supermarkets clearly use alcohol, especially beer, as a loss leader, and one way they can do this is by cross-subsidising from their VAT-free food."

And in the London Evening Standard columnist Nick Goodway noted: "The campaign is only just starting, but it has big backing and makes sense. It could be just the stimulus package that Chancellor George Osborne might care to announce in his November 2013 statement."

The argument is a long way from being won. But it has one big advantage – it makes sense in all manner of different directions. The family brewers have one thing in common with their allies in the campaign – a business model that has stood the test of time. Anyone in the sector with an eye on the long-term, I believe, will recognize this is a campaign that needs to be pursued with all the tenacity, determination and stamina the sector can muster.

A trip to Burton-on-Trent had us driving through the industrial estate on the edge of town. With time to kill before a meeting, there was a chance to visit one of Mitchells & Butlers’ (M&B) new flagship sites, opened as part of the push into new types of trading opportunities.

The managed behemoth opened Toby Carvery and Harvester sites side-by- side and as close as close can be to the headquarters of rival managed company Spirit just before Christmas. In fact, the two venues work pretty well as a canteen for Spirit staff fed up with the on-site food.

So we went into Toby Carvery for breakfast (as the Harvester hadn’t opened yet). Now, I’d seen web images of the new-look, up-dated Toby Carvery that’s been opened in Lincoln. But in the flesh, it’s still such a radical re-invention of Toby that you can’t help but be impressed by the bravery of the move.

For a start, gone are the myriad layers of characterful clutter adorning every crevice in the old-style Toby. The post-modern version banishes tut completely. The only thing that survives is a respectful nod to the iconic Toby jug with six over-sized examples arranged in two groups of three at opposite ends of the restaurant. But the Toby figurines are artfully displayed like museum pieces.

They are simply respectful acknowledgements of the past in an otherwise sleek, buttoned-down restaurant space. And there’s the rub. There’s no hedging of bets here. M&B has gone the whole hog and decided the new-look Toby Carvery can’t be mistaken for a pub. It’s a restaurant serving buffet-style food - it’s just that the buffet is a roast dinner and limitless vegetables. The styling of the venue shouts modern with its carpet-free floors and sleek design.

Most telling of all is the bar area which has shrunk to the size of most folks’ spare bedroom. Staff explained that the venue simply doesn’t accommodate anyone who simply wants a drink. To underscore the point the draught beer served at the bar is unbadged, making it impossible to know what’s being served without asking. It’s a bold move really because M&B is clearly prepared to wave goodbye to lucrative drinkers in favour of making the family market feel even more comfortable.

Serving breakfast from 8am, M&B clearly wants “New Toby” to grab much earlier day part business. The traditional breakfast items – bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs et al – are laid out on the carvery rather than cooked to order. The degree to which this looks appetizing depends on the volume of business clearing pre-cooked items regularly. It was a less than busy morning.

Still, you can’t fault M&B for taking the size of this leap at Toby and it’s a pretty clever evolution.

With so much talk of economic gloom, it's easy to overlook one of the fundamentals of life. At any given point in the economic cycle, different businesses tend to be experiencing wildly differing trajectories. In tougher times, the differences in direction of travel may be even more stark.

In a downturn quality businesses can pick up market share faster than in the good times. Customers become more discerning about where they spend their money. They want, above all else, value and reward businesses that maintain or improve their standards by actively seeking them out. Other businesses suffer.

No surprise perhaps then that well-invested hospitality sector businesses did especially well over the festive period. Quality operators I have spoken to in the past week are certainly enjoying the warm after-glow of a very, very strong December trading period. The month should be a period of gorging for good pub, bar, restaurant and hotel operators. The takings in the festive period ought to build enough fat to sustain good businesses through the leaner months of January and February.

Helping, too, last month was the mildest weather in recent memory, a stark contrast to the four-week cold spell that blighted the run-up to Christmas last year.

Revolution vodka bar operator Inventive Leisure saw like-for-like sales up around 17% in like-for-like terms during December. Founder Roy Ellis claims it was the best trading result he's ever had over the month. "We've been trading for 21 years and know that once every seven years everything falls perfectly, " he told me. "Last year the weather was very unhelpful. This year the weather couldn't have been more helpful."

Likewise, fellow high street operator, Intertain, operator of the Walkabout chain, found trading beat expectations, with "high single digit" growth. Chief executive John Leslie tells me: "If you'd have offered me the final outcome at the start of December I'd have taken it." Interestingly, though, there appeared to be a north-south divide on New Year's Eve with, for once, the south suffering rather than the north. "I think people in the south have got fed up with spending £100 on a taxi. Certainly my own children opt to go to friends' houses now on New Year's Eve."

Food-led operators also had a strong month. The five-strong pub operator Innventure reported gross sales of £482,000 for the three weeks over Christmas and New Year compared to £421,000 last year, with like-for-likes up 14.5%. Boss Chris Gerard tells me: "People will certainly come out to the pub for quality and it was a very good Christmas – customers were definitely keen to enjoy themselves. But it also didn't feel like one last hurrah – there was a mood of quiet confidence."

Major quoted operators will provide their own indications of how the crucial December trading period went in the coming days and weeks. The best of them had a very solid 2011 anyway, but expect a particularly sharp boost to like-for-likes for December as more results emerge. London-based Novus Leisure, for example, kicked off the mini December reporting season this morning with an impressive 18% jump in like-for-likes.

The family came to stay for a few days between Christmas and New Year. One day, my wife and other female members of the family decided the time was especially right for a shopping trip.

It was, I realised, a God-given opportunity to peel away. So it was that brother Kevin, who runs a few coaching inns around the UK, and me embarked on a three-pub tour of West Sussex.

It was a chance to talk business – and have a look at what some quality pub operators are doing well.

We started at The Cowdray, a Greene King leased pub in Balcombe, run by Alex and Andy Owen, both of whom have experience working in Gordon Ramsay's sprawling empire. Not surprisingly, food's the thing here. It opens at 9am through Monday to Saturday with a full breakfast menu.

Most eye-catching feature, though, is the hugely tempting "Bar Bites" offer for those that don't fancy the whole hog, as it were. We ordered stuffed squid, garlic butter and chorizo (£3.95), pork belly carrot puree and Yorkshire pudding (£4.50) and beer battered cod fingers (£3.95). All three were exceptional and the epitome of the tapas- style offer properly anglicised.

Then it was on to the Wiremill, Lingfield, the first pub opened by three-strong Yummy Pub Company – its 60 staff benefit from CPL Training on-line e-learning courses, incidentally. One of the founders Tim Foster left a marketing job at Carlsberg last month to work on his burgeoning pub empire full-time. The Wiremill has won a number of awards for its all-round offer but has won recognition for its bedrooms and food in particular. What strikes you is the real effort to underscore the values behind the pub and project personality.

There's not a single trick missed. Every chalkboard, inside and out, welcomes customers in an open-hearted way – and invites feedback.

There's depth in the Wiremill customer offer with thoughtful nods to the needs of grazers, pregnant women, vegetarians and children (there's ice creams on sticks for the pesky sweet-toothed varmints).

What we liked most, though, was the way the menu had been turned into a positive conversation with customers, chock-full of values and goodwill gestures. Here's an example from the bottom of the menu: "12.5% service charge will NOT be added to your bill. We HATE service charges. If you feel you have had great service feel free to tip. The team receive all of the money – we don't take a penny." And one last point. If you are good enough to win awards, you should be telling your customers. The Wiremill certainly avoids hiding its light beneath a bushel – there are framed features from trade magazines on the walls and a trophy wall of awards. Quite right, too. It's telling customers the obvious – you can expect a quality experience here.

Final pub on our tour was The Old Dunning Mill in East Grinstead, a Whiting & Hammond pub – another award-winning company that has introduced CPL e-learning for its staff. The company, founded by Brunning & Price director Brian Whiting, now has seven sites and the Old Dunning Mill, a Harvey's pub, was one of the early ones. It's a peach of a site, big and rambling and really cosy. Shabby chic is a description that's verging on the rude. But it's the essence of the Old Dunning Mill because it's like a country cottage with its open fires, slightly care-worn rugs, big displays of books and with almost every square inch of the walls home to framed pictures. The menu is super-appealing. Brian Whiting once told me that his menu choices are guided by a fundamental principle - would he like to eat it. So there's almost nothing that doesn't sit comfortably in what's commonly known as pub classics. It's just that, you know, they are all done with exceptional skill and attention to detail. So, for example, there are three types of chip on offer, dependent on what they accompany.

The honey roast ham and two-fried free range eggs are served with chunky chips (£9.95) while the Old Mill Steak Burger is served with skinny chip and lots of them (£10.95).

It was all going so well that the three-pub tour turned into a four-pub tour. We decided that a visit to my brilliant local, the Half Moon in Warninglid, for dinner would be in order. But that's another (and equally encouraging) story…

So there I was in Charing Cross train station waiting to meet-up with a friend. It's not the sort of place you expect to stop a leading edge piece of licensed retail innovation.

But, to my amazement, I spotted one. SSP operates food and beverage concessions in airports and train stations. Its brands include Café Ritazza, Upper Crust, Camden Food Co, Montreux Jazz Café and Real Food Company. Chances are you've been fed by SSP without realising it.

And there on the Charing Cross concourse was evidence of SSP not just hitching its wagon to a coming trend, but leading the way. An anonymous looking and rather small pub operated by SSP has been turned into The Beer House at Charing Cross.

It offers a Victorian-style shop window to the concourse that stresses its craft beer credentials. Attractive lettering trumpets its retail offer – craft beers, more than 50 of them, from around the world: "Beers from Germany, Beers from Belgium, Beers from Brooklyn".

Don't worry, the UK gets a look-in as well. The Beer House's bottled beer menu lists eight "favourites" – four of which hail from our shores. There's Sam Smith Organic Best Ale, Innis & Gunn Rum Beer, Hogs Back Burma Star Ale and Timothy Taylor Landlord on the menu. The draught selection majors, as you'd expect, on crafty beer with London's Meantime Brewery doing rather well in terms of presence.

The "Beer is the Hero" credentials are underscored by menu "beer pairings". And the menu itself is a return to basics, consisting of five types of pie and The Cheese library – a ploughman's with a choice of four cheeses, each with a couple of beer recommendations.

Décor has an authentic Victorian tinged feel to it with bottled beers proudly displayed by the bar in earthenware sinks. Customers are offered to chance to try before they buy with the draught beers. And there's a permanent offer to try three one-third pint glasses of beer for £5.

All in all, it's another shot in the arm for the beer category, making ale as interesting an experiental journey as wine.

Manager of Kanza Luzolo tells me The Beer House is SSP "raising its game" in terms of its pub offering.

It joins a select group of London pubs and bars – witness the Euston Tap, Cask Ale and Kitchen, Punch Taverns' Sussex Arms in Twickenham, and Charlie McVeigh's Draft House concept - that are all pioneering in the same direction. Beer, with all its many facets and dimensions, can be a powerful Unique Selling Point.

A coming trend this year is the arrival of more high-performing American food concepts in the UK. Chipotle, the Mexican fast-casual concept has paved the way. The chain is America's 25th largest chain operation, with $1.8bn of sales and 1,084 units. Even in a stagnant US food service market it added 13.5% to sales in 2011 – the best performance among the country's top 50 food-service companies. Signs are that its early UK openings are performing well despite industry surprise at its choice of locations.

Now two more of the fastest-growing chains in the US are looking hard at the UK market. Five Guys Burgers and Fries was the fastest-growing chain by unit numbers in 2011. It added 190 new stores in a single year to grow to 737, a remarkable 43% growth in outlets. System sales stood at $716m. The company has, no doubt, noticed the growth of "Better Burger" concepts in the UK – like Byron's and Gourmet Burger Kitchen - and believes its own take on high-quality burger with price points not vastly different to McDonald's will find a ready market in the UK.

A double-trend is the focus on the UK market by Smashburger. It ranks Number Seven in the list of fastest-growing chains in the US with an extra 50 units added in 2011 to grow to 106 outlets and sales of $69m.

It has grown by the dynamic franchising route in the US – and wants to follow the same route in the UK. Licensed retailers in this country have been sent an e-mail by Smashburger reporting that 450 restaurant licences have been awarded in the US to 35 franchise groups. The e- mail adds: "If you have the vision, experience and the resources to build a franchise network of Smashburger restaurants in the UK, we invite you to contact us." The aforementioned double-trend is, firstly, the "Better Burger" category with more American food service franchise content – there's more than 100 on offer in the US - arriving in this country. Watch out, the Yanks are coming.

The campaign to reduce VAT in the UK for the leisure sector

Pub, restaurant owners and hoteliers are mounting a campaign to persuade the government that reducing VAT in the sector would be a great stimulus for the overall economy. But, as was ever the case, there's division among our own ranks. There's a group led by French VAT campaigner Jacques Borel that is mounting a broad campaign around a general argument. And there's a group led by the British Hospitality Association (BHA) that is mounting a two-stage campaign. Stage One is reduced VAT for visitor accommodation and attractions. Stage Two is a reduced VAT rate for out-of-home meals.

Monsier Borel argues that the BHA campaign is wrong-headed because if it is successful it will mean that the second part will, by definition, "follow on". The problem is that, he tells us, "follow on" could well mean many years hence – or not at all.

I'm inclined to take the Borel view on this – the BHA campaign seems to elevate the interests of hoteliers and tourist attractions above those of restaurateurs, pub owners and food service companies.

It's a shame – not least because it's a missed opportunity to present a united front.