Ian, we've just had a message from Donald Trump who said he wanted to come to one of the lunches next week.

Would that be all right?

Yeah, that'd be great. I'll put him next to Sadiq Khan.

Unless Sadiq objects, sharing a table with extremists, He might not want to do it.

Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome back to page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and in this episode

we are going to be discussing pubs and

lunches pubs with reporters Tim Minogue and Sarah Shannon and lunches as in the

eyes famous fortnightly bash with Adam McQueen and Maisee Glaesbrook. But first pubs

there are about 50,000 pubs across the country which sounds like an enormous

number until you remember that 1400 of them close every single year, meaning that at the current rate

of decline it won't be long before they are an amusing novelty from history, much like

space-hoppers or home ownership. A lot of people have put the blame for these

closures squarely at the feet of the pub companies. They're the guys who own thousands and

thousands of pubs and they lease them out to pub landlords. But how did we get into a situation like this? To explain

we have to look at the rise of the Pubco empires in the first place. Here is Tim Minogue,

private eye correspondent on how it came to be.

In the 1980s, people got very concerned about the big breweries, people like Bass and

Scottish and Newcastle and people like that. They owned most of the pubs and the

Thatcher government with its mission to bring more competition and choice for the

consumer and decided to break up these competition and choice for the consumer.

They decided to break up these monopolies and they brought in some regulations called the beer orders,

...