John May is spearheading the Friends of the Lewes Arms campaign to try to keep Lewes’ favourite beer in Lewes’ most iconic pub. I arrive at the pub in question, The Lewes Arms, buy a pint of the bitter in question, Harveys, and look round for him. At first I don’t see him, then I do. John, a regular, seems to blend into the background. When I greet him, he’s excited. “We’re in Private Eye today,” he says. Since we have first mentioned this issue in these pages, the campaign has gone, quite literally, global. When it was informally reported several weeks ago that Greene King was to stop serving Harveys in the Lewes Arms, one of three pubs the Suffolk company owns in Lewes, and one of over 2,600 it owns nationwide, John put the news on his personal blog, and we reported it in our webmag.

The story has since, in journalistic parlance, got legs. It caught the attention of the Sussex Express and the Argus, then the Financial Times and the Mail on Sunday financial section. Then onto the main section of the Guardian and Radio 4’s Today programme. “Reuters have sent out the story on the wire as well,” says John, one of a number of national-level journalists who is involved in the campaign. “So far we have spotted the story in the Jamaica Gleaner, The Toronto Star, and a couple of African papers.” I drink my Harvey’s Best, CAMRA’s current Champion Best Bitter of Britain, as we conduct the interview. John has an orange juice and lemonade, a reflection of the fact the doors of the pub have just opened. Is this not, ventures the devil’s advocate in me, just a local storm in a provincial beer glass? “Not at all,” says John.
“It is a larger story in microcosm, and it involves some important issues that are of national importance. There is a lot of concern about the loss of local pubs due to the aggressive activities of what we call the PubCos.