A sloppy political delivery

There's no mystery as to why the Red Lion is the most popular pub in the House of Commons: it's simply the nearest.

No London watering hole is guaranteed to attract such a high number of MPs, spin doctors and lobby correspondents, particularly on Friday evenings when all the bars in the House of Commons have shut up shop for the weekend.

To underline this fact, there's even a division bell in the bar to alert the pub's customers to the fact that a vote is about to take place in the House of Commons.

There's been an inn on this site since 1435, and the Red Lion itself dates back to 1900, but it didn't become famous - not really famous - until 1997 when Charlie Whelan was overheard making a phone call to a journalist about the government's decision not to join the euro.

Whelan was Gordon Brown's spin doctor at the time, and had he made this call inside the Palace of Westminster no one would have batted an eyelid. But the fact that such a momentous U-turn should have been leaked from a public house guaranteed the Red Lion a place in the history books.

It's appropriate that Charlie 'Chainsaw' Whelan should have been the person to immortalise this pub because it's always been more popular with the left than the right. Maybe if it were called the Blue Lion things might be different, but the Tories tend to favour the Marquis of Granby instead. In addition to being the second closest pub to the House of Commons, the

Marquis of Granby is a stone's throw from Central Office, the Conservative Party's headquarters. But just as a week is a long time in politics, more than 200 yards is a long walk for an MP, so some Conservatives have been known to leave party politics at the dispatch box when it comes to their choice of watering hole.

You can eat at the bar or in the restaurant upstairs - neither is particularly plush. Part of the Red Lion's charm is that it looks like a typical olde worlde English pub, though, given its proximity to Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, a large percentage of its patrons are tourists.

When I went - a Wednesday lunchtime - the only other customers in the restaurant were American and, having sampled the food, I can now understand how it's possible that Americans can spend two weeks in London and leave with all their prejudices about British cuisine intact.

The food isn't awful; it's just bog standard. The Red Lion is not a pub that anyone would ever dream of appending the word 'gastro' to. I imagine they've been dishing up the same slop - fish and chips, steak and kidney pie, sausage and mash - for at least 100 years.