It must also be one of the most journalistically picked-over places in Britain. Reporters have been taking the train here from the capital for years, stopping locals on the street to probe and poll their views; dissect their prejudices; stack their takes. White, deprived and elderly, it has become a stand-in for the large hinterland of Britain so remote from our elites. For some, the attention has become maddening. “Over the past few years we have become a joke and a cliche because of Nigel Farage,” says Sarah Elizabeth Cox, who is drinking a glass of JD Wetherspoons wine as her son snoozes in a buggy parked at the table. “I now say I’m from Clacton for my sins.”

Now, Farage is preparing to take a stand here against the establishment, or at least against a former BBC comedian wearing a bin on his head. If Britain has any unifying institutions left, Spoons must be one. Could I, sitting in the pub from sun-up till closing, plumb a little deeper than the psephologists?

When the Royal Hotel was built, it stood alone on a clifftop. Clacton-on-Sea was just an idea then. For a long time, perhaps forever, the area had been nothing but farmland out on the Essex coast. But then, in 1886, the land was bought up by Peter Bruff, a bearded Victorian engineer, who set about building railways and rerouting steamers and diverting capital flows to justify the construction of a new town. His ambitions were high. It would have, Bruff declared, “no slums or any object that could offend the eye”. The lowest type of London daytripper — “men, women and children who only seem to enjoy themselves when revelling in drink and obscenity” — ought to be discouraged from visiting.

Today, much of what was the Royal Hotel is occupied by the Moon and Starfish. Yet sitting in the garden just after 11am, Cox doesn’t want to talk about the pub’s most famous visitor. In fact, she wants to talk about everything but Farage. She wants to talk about Clacton’s problems, and once she starts it’s seemingly hard for her to stop. There is a huge issue with homelessness, she says. Like so many other English seaside towns, the deprived and the lost wash up here in search of help but end up freezing in tents all throughout the winter. Cox’s mortgage has become extortionate, more than her rent had been in London. Potholes are cracking open everywhere. Fires keep breaking out. Train prices render commuting impossible, even to nearby Colchester. She is angry with a broken social settlement that has allowed places such as Clacton to rot. “It is one of the abandoned seaside towns,” she says. “I love living here but I feel sorry for the young people.”

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Clacton has the highest proportion of economically inactive people in Britain. Jaywick, a ramshackle settlement on Clacton’s western border, is the most deprived place in England. What went wrong? The classic account is that once British holidaymakers were lured to Southern Europe by bargain flights, the seaside towns, deprived of tourists, began to slump. It is notable that at the last general election, Reform UK took three such areas among their five seats — Skegness, Great Yarmouth and Clacton.

But as I wander through the pub, everyone I speak to is happy to be there — resident and daytripper alike. They praise a community feel that, perhaps, they think remains stronger here than elsewhere in Britain. Margaret Clayton and Shirley Sizer have come on an over-sixties group outing from Cambridgeshire. Margaret has been coming here since childhood, when she used to visit with her Salvation Army Sunday school. It hasn’t changed much, she says.

Jean and Terry Williams moved down from London 40-odd years ago. They were married in East Ham, East London, but decided they had to leave when their son went to school and, according to Jean, his class swelled with Indian children who could not speak English. There was no time to teach the native pupils, she says, because they had to provide language tuition for the migrants. That was not a problem in Clacton.

But the Essex coast is not immune to England’s demographic shifts. Jean and Terry describe a local street that, to their eyes, is starting to look like Beirut. Terry thinks many of the vape and kebab shops must be money-laundering operations. Jean is relieved their son is in his forties and that she therefore has no need to worry about the ethnic composition of the schools. They have fled one wave of migration, but are being met here by another.

It is the bright peak of the day and the octogenarian couple are drinking in the garden, their skin wrinkled and puckered by decades of seaside living. They like it here, and bat away any suggestion that its population is too old. People need a place to retire, don’t they? Both plan to vote for Farage, despite his recent travails. “Personally, I don’t mind him,” says Jean. “I think all politicians are the same. I’m not being rude, but they’re all crooks. I’m not going to vote for tin man.”

Her attitude is typical. If they’re all crooks, why single out Farage? A grinning man with a missing front tooth, twisting a £20 note furiously below the table, tells me hasn’t followed the story closely but that Nigel is the bollocks and can keep his £5 million for all he cares. “Did he just pocket it and fuck off?” he laughs. “He’s one of us then.”

The man is angry that immigrants arriving on small boats are housed immediately, fed and watered in three-star establishments across the country. He was recently sectioned and then placed into supported accommodation in Clacton, he says, but then kicked out when he was arrested for “something stupid”. Now the council won’t help him.

He is also archetypal of a category of man that can be found at every asylum protest across Britain: unmoored, his life dissolving around him. Then he takes a call on a tiny black mobile, one small enough that it might be smuggled into prison in a cavity, and excuses himself.

I retreat back into the pub, which is as dim and cool as a cave. Tim Martin, who founded and owns JD Wetherspoons, has attempted to construct his empire along the guidelines detailed by George Orwell in 1946. The clientele must consist of regulars, there for the conversation as much as the beer; the architecture should be “uncompromisingly Victorian”; no radio should drown out conversation. Orwell’s preferred pub name was Moon Under Water, hence Clacton’s maritime twist: Moon and Starfish.

And as in the fictional Moon Under Water, the punters do seem to know each other. Around lunchtime, a group of auld fellas congregate around two tables in front of where I am sitting for what seems a regular meeting. People shout greetings across the room. World Cup bunting zig-zags across the ceiling, while England flags are draped from the bar and over a window. There are paintings of ships on the wall and little brass portholes cut into the walls. It is as if we are all visiting the home of a retired admiral with a mania for vexillology.

The lunch crowd gathers, eats, and departs rapidly. For many of Clacton’s older residents, Spoons is effectively just a cut-price restaurant. I watch an old woman in a wheelchair defeat a popadom the size of her head. Beside me, a man and two women in floral dresses are laying into Farage: the by-election is a farce, a waste of money, and he may be forced to stand again anyway. They would like Count Binface to win, but are concerned he’ll have to remove his headgear in Parliament.

Later, I find Paul, back out in the garden. He isn’t a fan of Farage either. “I don’t think he’s done fuck all for Clacton,” he says. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the by-election is that Farage is a constituency MP at all. Nobody I meet makes any connection between their Member of Parliament and local issues. They like him because they want to cut migration, or they oppose him because they do not. Their views do not seem to be shifting either. Farage is baked in.

Paul is drinking Guinness and holding a spindly silver vape that looks like an alien hookah. Until a few years ago, he lived in Brentwood, in London’s eastern commuter orbit. He worked in construction, breaking tarmac. But Brentwood got too posh for him and, for reasons he does not specify, he doesn’t work anymore. But he had an opportunity to move near the sea and he took it.

“Honestly, I spoke to a copper a while ago,” Paul says, “I said, “is Clacton really bad?” He said it’s no worse than any other seaside town. Every single place has its bad people. I’ve never had any trouble.” Paul normally does not vote, but next month he plans to support Count Binface. “Mate,” he says, “if I had one million I’d be set for life and this fucker got…”

For years, Clactonology has described the place as “weary” or “divided”, even as residents have been held to really be the most powerful people in Britain. The most significant work in the canon was written a little over a decade ago by Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP and Times columnist. Clacton-on-Sea, he claimed, was going nowhere. “This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlor Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.”

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UKIP — then standing Douglas Carswell in a by-election here — was a natural fit for such a place, Parris concluded. “Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21st-century Britain needs to be going.” The Conservative Party had to abandon the voters of such places, were they not to be dragged down themselves.

His words caused such a furor that UKIP began quoting Parris on their leaflets. But today, 2014 feels like a foreign country. After Brexit and Trump, with Marine Le Pen permitted to stand for the French presidency and the AfD leading the polls in Germany, it is hard to imagine anyone dismissing all-our-yesterdays Britain quite so blithely.

Seagulls wheel and bank over left-over lunches as a new crowd materializes, alongside a bouncer in a white shirt. As it grows dark, I speak to Dave, a neat man with silver hair, who bemoans the unfair reputations of Clacton and Jaywick. He lived and worked in London all his life, before retiring from the civil service to see out his days here. “Living in Clacton is like living in the old East End of London,” he tells me. “People chat to you. These days in London, people won’t even look you in the eye. Here, people stop and chat to you when you walk the dog.”

Dave is amiable and relaxed, smoking a cigarette in the summer air. But he seems angry at the state of Britain. “One phrase I hate,” he says, “is when people say, “I’m entitled to this.”” Benefit claimants feel entitled to money; migrants feel entitled to free housing. He would like Farage to crack down on both.

Though JD Wetherspoon pubs don’t show football, as a rule, they seem to make an exception for the World Cup. And at 8pm, Belgium kicks off against Spain. I sit next to a 20-something window fitter, who thinks Clacton is run down with few opportunities for people his age. He doesn’t like Farage, but will vote for him if the alternative is a man dressed as a bin, for whom he evinces a deep contempt. The crowd is different, now, the punters markedly younger. A clutch of men in tight jeans holding little bottles of beer has formed by the bar. When I leave, shortly after midnight, the pub is almost empty; near me just a few teenagers remain, drinking shots and playing a garage track from a phone.

A Friday in the Moon and Starfish, then, is spent mainly with people who came here from London. They relocated for the cheaper cost of living and the clear air and also, in many cases, for somewhere that is still overwhelmingly white British. They are attempting, consciously or otherwise, to recreate a community that used to dominate much of the capital, along with the pie and mash shops that cluster round the pub.

But this is the end of the line for white flight. You cannot move further east than Clacton-on-Sea. You cannot move anywhere poorer than Jaywick. For those who seek greater ethnic homogeneity, there is only one other option left: to fight. That makes the Clacton by-election essentially meaningless. It is a circus. Farage is almost certain to win, risking only mockery in his campaign against Count Binface. What is more significant is the rage pulsating throughout this town, this country. That will remain, and it will decide our future. All-our-yesterdays Britain will have its revenge.

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

If, like the ap Harris and their descendants, you appreciate a ruck then — despite its genteel, beside-the-languid-Wye ambience — Monmouth is your kind of town. As well as the castle ruins, there is the Nelson Museum — the victor of the Nile and Trafalgar performed quite a lot of trysting with Emma Hamilton hereabouts. But my own personal place of “have-a-go” pilgrimage is the Wetherspoons situated (of course) on Agincourt Square.

I am an expert on that watering hole, The King’s Head, a rambling coaching inn dating from the 17th century, since I spent multitudinous hours under its stuccoed ceilings during the interval between collecting one child from Extra-Curricular Activity A at 5pm and waiting for the other to finish Extra-Curricular Activity B at 9pm. (We sometimes even spent the night in the pub, rather than do the 50-mile round trip home and back again to school in the morning. Country life, eh?) There are advantages to Wetherspoons, I find: their reputation as déclassé keeps out sanctimonious snobs. You are pretty safe from Emily Thornberry in a Wetherspoons.

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I have digressed. The truest reason I love The King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice print on the wall of the man — in red jacket, white britches and black boots, all properly Georgian — and a bit of accompanying biographical text.

Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.

His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.

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Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.

Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.

No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:

The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.

One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.

Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.

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When you go to that Wetherspoons yourself, take a copy of Rural Rides with you, sit under Cobbett’s portrait, and ask yourself the following question. Given all the Westminster-overlooked problems of British country people in 2020 — from the absence of public transport to abundance of second-homers — who speaks for us now? Where is our champion, our Cobbett? The one of us who can speak for us? Where?

Cobbett’s solution to the woes of the Regency rural poor was a return to a barter-based Medieval economy under gent paternalists with a sense of noblesse oblige, plus Parliamentary voting reform, creating a Britain where there would be “room for us all, and  plenty for us to eat and to drink”. In the bon mot of his biographer Richard Ingrams, Cobbett sought a “Brave Old World”.

Even in the 19^thcentury, the call to go “back to the land” — vacating the towns and dismantling the factory system — was unrealisable nostalgia. But that is not to say that Cobbett’s proposals were meritless. One in particular needs dusting down today: self-sufficiency, as promoted in his manual and manifesto, Cottage Economy.

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Of course — and I hear your sniggers — self-sufficiency has become a Tom-and-Barbara Good Life laugh, if a slightly strangled one now that, due to Covid “collapsology”, your neighbours are fleeing the Wen for a house with a large garden in Norfolk. If you truly believe self-sufficiency too quaint, ponder this: in France some 20% of the fresh produce consumed is still raised in the kitchen garden, the potager. Then ponder this also: during Covid, France’s newspapers declared “Potagers et jardins, les stars du confinement”. Well, obviously. Soul, stomach, sense of self-reliance, re-connection to healing nature all satisfied by a quarter of an acre. Every one of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” ticked. Voila!

Actually, self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own. Between 1908 and 1914 alone, 205,103 acres were purchased in England and Wales for smallholders and allotmenteers. In return for service in the Great War, 24,000 soldiers were settled on plots in our green and pleasant land. The allotment movement was boosted by Round 2 with militaristic Germany, 1939-45, and the “Dig for Victory” campaign. By 1943 there were 1,400,000 allotments in the UK, producing a gob-smacking 1.3 million tonnes of food.

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Then came the outbreak of peace, the population doubling to 60 million, and an expansion of housing which caused hard-pressed local authorities to sell land to developers. Currently, there are a niggardly 250,000 allotments in the UK, and the waiting lists are as long as rake handles. But now that BoJo has decided that money does, after all, grow on trees, why not spend a casual couple of billion purchasing land around Britain to be divided up into plots for village people and townspeople alike? (I propose this be called “The Cobbett Scheme”.)

So, when you are in Monmouth, do visit The King’s Head. Cobbett, the man who dined alike with Pitt and farmworker, who hated cruelty to animals, and appreciated a good pint, would have been entirely at home in a Wetherspoons —with their CAMRA ale, RSPCA Freedom Food eggs, Marine Stewardship Council fish (I have eaten in Michelin starred restaurants with less ethical food and drinks policies) and its merciful absence of stuffed shirts.And, alongside Rural Rides, have Cottage Economy with you, and ask yourself this ultimate question: do we not need more self-sufficiency in this country?

I say we do. As the Sex Pistols should have sung: “Autarchy for the UK!”