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How to pull in any branch of Wetherspoons, by Rupert Murdoch

BILLIONAIRE media magnate Rupert Murdoch is marrying again aged 92, due to these seduction techniques guaranteed to work in any branch of JD Wetherspoons: 

Step one: get in early

Wetherspoons starts early, so you have to. When I’m out to get lucky at The Last Post in Southend-on-Sea, I’m there with a Fosters in hand no later than 7.20am.

The birds aren’t there that early, only the drinkers, but it means you secure the prime pulling location. Table 34, right outside the ladies’ dunny. From there you can scope every piece coming in or out and ready your quips. You could be balls-deep before Lorraine. 

Step two: get to know the staff

Nobody in The Ernest Willows in Cardiff knows that I run News Corp, with a turnover of $10bn, but a nod from the duty manager Carol makes me look like real hot shit. Relative values.

Step three: bring pound coins

Women love a winner. So when you’re in The Weeping Ash in St Neots, saunter over to the fruity and start firing quids in. Before long you’ll have attracted chicks, and after a pitcher of Strawberry Delight you’ll be fingering her against the side of the Deal Or No Deal machine. Jackpot.

Step four: send chips to their table

Got a particular dame on your mind? Use the Spoons app on your phone to order a bowl of chips, direct to their table, and wave and wink when they’re dropped off. When she beckons you over, say ‘Need some mayo for those?’ and slap out two sachets of Hellmans’s and your phone number written on a discarded Ladbrokes slip.

Step five: don’t get too shitfaced

It’s too easy to get drunk in a Wethers. It costs piss-all, even for Sun readers. But you try necking some tart in the Counting House, Dundee when your beef madras is sitting uneasily on six pints of Guinness, and you won’t want to do it twice. Have a fag between each one at least.

Step six: Tell them you know Tim Martin

He might look like a tattered, racist scarecrow, but nothing excites the lasses in Spoons like telling them you know the gaffer. Hint that Brexit Tim is a close personal friend of yours and you’re already doing her from behind against the bins round the back of the Six Chimneys, Wakefield in minutes. No, I’ve never met him. I wouldn’t lower myself.

Not many women turn on TV to watch their husband in a live car crash. Just whoever's married to Formula One drivers and me

From the diary of Carrie Johnson, wife of the member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip

TURNING on afternoon television to watch your husband smash his entire career due to a desperate miscalculation at least makes a change from Pointless. 

Big Dog’s worked hard for this one. Lord Pannick’s been here so much I’d have charged him rent if we weren’t rent-free. He was up half the night doing childish scribbled notes.

But then I turn on the TV and there he is doing his mean stare at Harriet Harman like Paddington’s evil twin and before I unmute I know he’s fucked it.

‘I’m one of the best liars in the country,’ he said yesterday, an unusual boast for most husbands but is one I hear regularly. ‘Yes, love,’ I said, ‘but you’re not usually quite so pinned down.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, draining a Beaujolais from the Bamfords’ cellar. ‘A fudge here, a hedge here, a swell of self-righteousness about saving Britain, and they won’t know up from down.’

‘Last time you got pinned down by a lawyer,’ I remind him, ‘was Marina. Over me. And that left you homeless, flat broke, with two out of four kids calling you an arsehole.’

‘Mm,’ he said, which for him is something of an admission. ‘It’s women, you see? Don’t like being questioned by them. Gets my back up. And she’s a lefty. And plain.

‘Still, as long as I believed in my heart that I was following the guidance at all times they can’t touch me. And they can’t know what was in my heart, can they? The Boris Comeback Special, they’ll call it.’

I don’t say anything. I keep my counsel. And then I turn on the TV and watch my idiot husband crash and burn in real time.

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