It’s barely past three o’clock but the drinkers are out in force at the Wetherspoons in the Birmingham suburb of Oldbury. A man with a poppy pinned to his bobble hat paces to the bar for another pint of lager, while in the corner a group of pensioners set the world to rights over bottomless coffee.

Few notice the tall man with a mane of grey hair swept back slipping inside the brass-handled doors. But this is his empire. He is Tim Martin, founder and chairman of Britain’s most well-known pub chain. He sidles his way up to the bar and catches the eye of manager Jodie Harvey, 35. “Tim” she says in a tone that just about masks the shock of seeing the big boss suddenly appear on a random Tuesday afternoon.

The Express is joining Wetherspoon’s chairman on a round of surprise visits to some of his pubs as the sector prepares for Rachel Reeves’s costly National Insurance hike. This measure, combined with other tax rises on booze, is tipped to have a devastating impact on the industry.

The Court of Requests in Oldbury is Tim’s fifth unannounced visit of the day. Since 11am he’s been bombing around the Black Country in the back of a silver Mercedes people carrier and hopes to tick six to eight places off his list before the night is done.

Eager to keep a low profile and get a true snapshot of the place he’s visiting, Tim never pulls up outside. The car is parked half a mile away and he approaches on foot.

“Billy Connelly once said the Queen must think everywhere smells of fresh paint,” Tim says with a loud guffaw. “That’s what I want to avoid.

“I’m looking to see if the tables are clean, if the lights are too bright and if the temperature is too hot or cold.”

Tim’s pattern is the same in every pub. After quietly observing the venue he makes his way to the bar where he gets two samples of ale and a cup of tea.

“I can’t drink pints doing this,” he says with a grin. “I wouldn’t survive.”

Once Jodie is free she joins Tim for a chat. Squinting at his little black notebook, the chairman of an 803-pub empire digs into the smallest details.

“We’ve got a new lager; Poretti, how’s that been doing?” he asks. “And the Kronenburg 1664?”

After the exact number of pints sold is assessed, the conversation turns to how the repurposed courthouse is holding up.

Jodie says it’s doing pretty well. However, she wants to remove the car park and extend the garden. Punters have been gathering at the far end because the building’s shadow obscures the sun for most of the day.

“That’s a no-brainer,” says Tim making a note.

Born in Norwich, the pub chain chairman’s childhood was split between New Zealand and Northern Ireland with a father who first served in the Royal Air Force and then worked for Guinness.

Tim developed the idea for Wetherspoon in the late 1970s after noticing how limited the variety of beer sold in London pubs was compared to Nottingham, where he’d studied for university.

“They had several regional brewers but in London there were just four or five big breweries. There was not much real ale, it was crap,” he says.

He took over a pub in Muswell Hill, North London and attempted to offer an alternative based on a more varied range of beers that would better serve ale drinkers. Quickly, he sensed the potential.

He expanded slowly, adding venues in nearby Holloway Road and Haringey to his portfolio and then spreading out across the capital. By the end of the decade, there were around 50 pubs.

Wetherspoon’s listing on the stock market in 1992 provided the cash to make it a national brand. They expanded aggressively, opening branches from Cornwall to Inverness. By the turn of the century they had 400 pubs, a figure they’ve now doubled.

Unapologetically serving a mainstream market with low prices in an era when all-day drinking was being demonised, becoming Britain’s favourite town centre boozer brought its fair share of snobbery.

A Times opinion piece from 2008 describes it as “the binge drinker’s church”; a place where the writer expects “at best to see women with tattoos pulling out one another’s hair while their track-suited boyfriends puke for England” and at worst “expects to be stabbed”.

Tim pays little notice to the sneering or the occasional “conspiracy theory” about how they manage to keep prices so low.

“Most don’t tend to have a crack, they appreciate the pubs,” he says. “But we used to have people saying we sold short-dated beer. That’s just malicious. I don’t know the origin of the rumour. But we didn’t comment on it for years.

“When a Times journalist started writing about it [as fact] and we had to say something.”

He chuckles: “[Was] the idea that I waited outside the brewery gates in Bury St Edmunds waiting for the beer to be out of date?”

Tim is midway through his conversation with Jodie when the first of many polite interruptions from regulars begins.

“I just wanted to say hello to Tim,” a man with a white moustache and a British Lions rugby shirt says, extending his hand.

“When are you going to be on Question Time again?” he asks, adding “if you ran for PM I’d vote for you.”

He’s far from the only pubgoer who wants to talk politics with Tim. As the Express follows him around three venues in the Black Country, it’s clear his pro-Brexit stance and reputation for speaking his mind play well with the Wetherspoon’s hardcore.

Yet, when I ask him about his feelings about the current crop of political figures, he’s wary of engaging.

“I’ve tried to stay relatively removed from party politics or be too critical of the characters,” he says. “There are only two times I’ve put my head above the parapet, the first was [coming out against] the Euro and the other was on the [Brexit] referendum.”

Often associated with giants of the Vote Leave campaign, like Nigel Farage, Tim says his depiction in the Brexit debate is mischaracterised.

“I haven’t been a member of UKIP and I don’t have any bad feelings about the EU,” he says.

“Funnily enough I agreed with David Cameron who said [before the referendum] the EU needed ‘fundamental reform’.

“He was right. You don’t elect the president through universal suffrage, MEPs can’t initiate legislation and the European Court is not subject to any control of any democratic home.

“When David Cameron came back from his negotiations [a year before the referendum] and he said he had got reform that enraged a lot of people because he was fibbing. It was at that point in March 2016, I decided to vote Brexit

“I never told anyone. But when our results came out in March. I was interviewed by Ian King on Sky. He said, what do you think? So I told him.”

Once he was involved in the debate, Tim says he became “quite impassioned” with the arguments, “especially when we then didn’t leave,” he adds.

He also gets angry with successive governments’ long-standing lack of support for the pub industry.

“The labour cost that goes into a pint in a pub puts us at a major disadvantage to the supermarkets to begin with, as well as property and premises [expenses],” he says.

“But there’s also a big tax advantage. Supermarkets pay no VAT on food and pubs pay 20%, they can use that to discount the price of beer and wine.

“We say there should be tax equality between pubs and supermarkets. Most people agree with that in principle but no government has ever actioned it.

“I think they will have to if they want to keep pubs alive. Pubs in general have lost half their beer trade since the year 2000.”

He thinks part of the problem is that the people who make these decisions are not the type you’d find in the pub.

“I think by and large most politicians are dinner party goers,” he says. “I’ve never wandered into a pub and found a Chancellor of the Exchequer, you know, having a couple of pints and playing dominoes.”

Tim is highly critical of the current incumbent, Rachel Reeves’s National Insurance increase, a hike he has already calculated will substantially increase the costs for every pub in his empire.

“It will cost the business £60 million per year, which is about £1,500 per pub a week and £75,000 per anum. So it’s a very, very big increase.

“It [will be] much more per pint than the tax increase for supermarkets. But once again it’s going to widen the disparity. So I think it’s a mistake.”

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Part of Wetherspoon’s longevity has been retaining a core pub identity while adapting to customers’ changing needs.

People might not necessarily settle down for a heavy session every single Friday at 4pm anymore, but there’s a good chance they pop in for a regular breakfast or family meal.

These days, Wetherspoon’s most popular drinks are tea and coffee, not lager and ale. In fact, the biggest selling draught product is Pepsi.

Tim himself is a testament to that change but I ask him, as he takes a sip of his tea, what makes a pub a pub if people aren’t drinking beer?

“The atmosphere,” he says with a knowing grin.