April 22, 2006
Cabinet chips in for a tea set
The Queen’s 80th birthday present from Tony Blair’s Cabinet was a china tea set made by Spode pottery in Staffordshire, and believed to cost about £1,000.
The 25 Cabinet members are thought to have chipped in a minimum of about £30 each for the set in the Stafford Flowers design — described as “one of the great Spode patterns” with 22-carat gilding.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “It was indicated by Buckingham Palace that this was something she wanted and she would value.” Spode said: “The Queen has already got quite a lot from our Stafford Flowers range. The order is for some items she has not already got.”From The London Times
September 27, 2000
Mowlam on the day I made tea for Clinton
By Melissa Kite
MO MOWLAM treated delegates to a plain-spoken view of the world yesterday.
Addressing a fringe meeting, the former Northern Ireland Secretary said it had been part of the peace process to treat terrorists as human beings. Whether you are republican or loyalist, she said, “you shit, you breathe, you are human — apart from your ideology and belief which causes you to kill people”.
The Cabinet Office Minister, who is leaving the Commons at the next election, said that it was an important part of negotiations to treat everybody as normal and find things in common.
Asked about the report in a biography that during the Northern Ireland talks she had told President Clinton she was just the tea lady, Dr Mowlam said: “I used to do weird things — I would wander around with chips and getting Chinese takeaways; making tea for Clinton was to take the piss out of him.” It had been claimed that she felt sidelined by Tony Blair.
Dr Mowlam said again that her decision to retire was one she had made alone, but admitted it was the hardest she had made.
From The London Times
January 9, 2007
Tea Bagged
Britain's favourite brew is a life-saver, milk or no milk
At last! An end to that age-old quandary: milk first or tea first? The answer could not be simpler: no milk at all! That is the conclusion of German research published in European Heart Journal. It suggests that adding milk to black tea (does anyone but a fool add milk to green tea?) blocks the beverage’s famed cardiovascular benefits by eroding the healthy effects of the flavonoids in tea. .....
But should these new findings dishearten the nearly 80 per cent of Britons who among them drink 165 million cups of tea each day?
Should they stain the reputation of an infusion that Sir Edmund Hillary hailed for providing constant “cheer and vigour” during his ascent of Everest?
Anyone who measures the value of tea primarily as a vehicle for delivering flavonoids and antioxidants is like the cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Samuel Johnson would pour tea down his throat by the bucketful, praising its ability to “amuse the idle, and relax the studious”.
Gladstone was such a devotee that he would fill his hot water bottle with tea to sip in bed at night. In his essay, A Nice Cup of Tea, George Orwell purred about how tea made you feel “wiser, braver and more optimistic”.
The first response to any crisis, whether in Downing Street or The Royle Family, is to put the kettle on. Tony Blair is never without a mug (or indeed one full of tea) when striving to appear a man of the people before a TV camera. ....
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