What is it about tea that brings out the worst in people? Not those who drink it. Those who sell it.
In Scotland, the celebrated Wee Tea Plantation Company has turned out to be a massive scam, with cheap tea imported from abroad then passed off as tea lovingly grown in a field in Perthshire, and sold off at 100 times the cost to grand hotels such as Gleneagles, the Balmoral in Edinburgh and the Dorchester in London. Ten years ago there was a launch in New York attended by then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and actor Alan Cumming.
The fake Scottish tea was served at a Holyrood Palace garden party, I personally have sipped a cup of it on the Caledonian Sleeper train service and a rhubarb flavoured variant – rich in antioxidants! – won a major award at the Scottish Retail Food and Drink Awards in 2021.
The Scottish Antlers Tea blend was ‘the Queen’s favourite tea’ said shameless Wee Tea boss Thomas Robinson, aka Tam O’Braan, aka Mr Tea, who now faces three-and-a-half years in jail for defrauding hotels, customers and businesses of over £500,000.
It is enough to make you choke on your shortbread, even if I almost admire the audacious puffery and the Del Boy energy.
On his website, 55-year-old Tam urges customers to drink ‘the Breakfast Blend tea that’ll have you shouting “Och aye!”’ and to indulge in his Irn Bru, Whisky Black and Formosa Oolong luxury blends.
In Scotland, the celebrated Wee Tea Plantation Company has turned out to be a massive scam – despite a grand opening attended by Nicola Sturgeon and actor Alan Cumming
The sheer gall of the man! The inventiveness! If Wee Tea Tam had just stayed on the right side of the law, he might have ended up a teabag billionaire as opposed to a looseleaf lag. All of which only reinforces my long-infused belief that fancy tea is for mugs.
You only have to look at the calibre of the grasping celebrities and sundry notables falling over themselves to flog teas to the public. Front and centre is the Duchess of Sussex, of course, who sells her As Ever hibiscus, lemon ginger and peppermint teas at three times the price of identical blends available elsewhere.
But be fair. Meghan is hardly the first duchess-on-the-make to cash in on the glorious racket of selling posh teas to gullible Americans.
Dear old Fergie has had several attempts: a Tea Collection sold in the US in 2007, her Sarah Senses pudding-flavoured diet teas in 2014 and a range of ‘quintessentially British’ teas sold in her short-lived Ginger & Moss lifestyle range a year later.
There is also her Duchess range of teas and biscuits floating about in the opportunistic ether somewhere, but none of these ventures appear to have come to much.
You’d think Fergie would read her own tea leaves and see the ephemeral pattern that always evolves with her tea-based adventures, but no. Learning from experience was never, shall we say, her superpower.
Still there is one royal with a fantastically successful range of expensive teas – and no one ever criticises him. King Charles sells five different teas in his Highgrove range, including an Organic Prince of Wales Blend Tea, 100g for £10.95,
Yes, the same amount of PG Tips costs only £1.36, but it doesn’t come in a lovely caddy that ‘makes for a wonderful memento’, does it? Or induce customers to believe they are drinking the same tea as the monarch and his missus.
Meghan is hardly the first duchess-on-the-make to cash in on the glorious racket of selling posh teas to gullible Americans. Dear old Fergie has had several attempts
And we haven’t even started on the celebrity wellness teas. Sad news on that front, as Kate Moss’s health and beauty brand Cosmoss has just gone bust, which must mean her overpriced tea range may have also boiled its last.
Kate’s Dusk Tea (£20 for 20 teabags) featured ‘crushed cinnamon and fennel fruits’ and promised to ‘soothe the soul’ of an evening, while her Dawn Tea (same price) was ‘inspired by the sunrise in a summer garden and the language of herbs and flowers’. Language?
If these plants really could talk they’d be saying, wake up and smell the coffee, Mossy. There is a cost-of-living crisis going on, and no one is spending a quid on a single teabag any more.
Other celebs with their own tea ranges include Elle Macpherson, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow –although no one has quite taken the great tea swindle to the lengths of Wee Tea.
Based in Dunfermline, it was sold in a shop called Must Be Crackers while visitors to the Perthshire farm were told that in-house varieties such as Dalreoch White, Highland Green and Silver Needles were grown in the surrounding fields.
How, you might wonder, given the climate and the cold? By using ‘degradable polymers’ around the plants to ‘reflect the sun’s own goodness upwards’ said Wee Tea Tam, talking about his miracle invention that observers said looked ‘just like bin bags’.
Robinson told anyone who would listen that it was possible to grow tea in Scotland and the rest of the UK at an altitude of 230 metres above sea level.
This led to many putative tea growers buying fake plants from him – hoping to emulate his success; investing their savings in a business and a crop that was bound to fail.
In addition, con men like him taint the well of consumer trust. Shoppers are encouraged to support small businesses and independent traders –– and we do, in spite of the higher prices. Only to have our trust crushed like the spices in a cup of Kate Moss tea.
It is one thing for the Duchess of Sussex to graciously tell the world what to do with a teabag (‘steep in hot water’) or burble on about her hibiscus tea brewed ‘with the warmth of the sun’. It is something else for the Wee Tea Company to perpetrate a hoax of this magnitude and one wonders how they got away with it for so long.
Perhaps, like the promise of Scottish independence, people just convinced themselves it was true. ‘If you didn’t know that we grow tea in Perthshire you soon will, and it’s some of the world’s best,’ said Nicola Sturgeon back in 2014.
Well that all ended well, didn’t it? Och aye, the brew.
Poor Geri! Rude Naga is a real BBC turn-off
The BBC had to apologise to Geri Haliwell-Horner after an interview with Naga Munchetty
First it was ITV’s This Morning, now there are also bullying allegations on the BBC’s Breakfast television show. What do they put in the morning coffee? And who is bullying whom?
It’s hard to know or even care – since I simply cannot watch the show because of presenter Naga Munchetty’s frequent rudeness to guests. She is appalling!
Openly scornful of politicians who don’t subscribe to her Lefty leanings and sneery towards celebs of whom she doesn’t approve, arrogant Naga is a one-woman perfect storm of snotty.
And if she is this discourteous onscreen, what is she like behind the scenes? Naga sighed and moaned when she interviewed then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, sneered at darling little James Blunt and was so awful to Geri Halliwell- Horner BBC bosses had to apologise to the former Spice Girl afterwards.
These are only highlights of the ongoing Naga saga.
How does she hold onto her job?
Sneery towards celebs of whom she doesn’t approve, arrogant Naga is a one-woman perfect storm of snotty, writes Jan Moir
What an unhinged battle over Lake District mosque
Plans have been approved to build a £2.5million three-storey Islamic Centre in Dalton-in-Furness on the edge of the Lake District, amid protests from many locals.
Tensions rose this week when supporters for the mosque held banners that read ‘Stop the Far-Right’ and chanted: ‘Say it loud, say it clear, Islamic Centre is welcome here.’
Meanwhile, opposing protesters waved the Union and Knights Templar flags and shouted across the street during fiery exchanges.
Both sides sound utterly and completely moronic, even unhinged. Even if it does seem inescapable that anyone who raises a bat squeak of objection to the gaudy building will be deemed a fascist racist with proscribed views.
The CGI images of the proposed centre show a glitzy white building with a sunbathing spot on the roof, all the better to worship the Almighty.
The pictures do indeed suggest it will be a horrible blot on the landscape, and one wonders if a similar plans for Christian church would have sailed through the town planners with such ease.
Or is that an ungodly thought? Not to mention Right-wing.
Tampering with facial recognition costs lives
Activist artists in the Greenpeace area of Glastonbury festival held a workshop to teach the foundations of how to cause a glitch in facial recognition software.
It involves painting the face with camouflage style make up — a tactic known as ‘face breaking’ or ‘computer vision dazzle’.
This is meant to confuse the systems so you cannot be identified when you are throwing a statue of a slaver into the dock in Bristol, breaking into Stansted Airport to spray orange paint on Taylor Swift’s jet, throwing a tin of soup on a painting or sitting in front of a car on the M1 to just stop oil.
God only knows how many
serious crimes and terrorist attacks facial recognition software has helped stop.
It keeps us safe rather than being a threat to our civil liberties.
However, this is just the sort of rebellious rot you’d expect from the overprivileged Glasto goons.
Beth, 21, from Birmingham fell so madly in love with Gabriel, 25, from Zakynthos that she got him a job in her dad’s scaffolding company and brought him back to England
Summer headline of the week: ‘I fell in love with a Greek waiter who poured shots into my mouth – now we live together, and I couldn’t be happier.’
Who says romance is dead? Beth, 21, from Birmingham fell so madly in love with Gabriel, 25, from Zakynthos that she got him a job in her dad’s scaffolding company and brought him back to England to live with her.
She’s got navel piercings, he’s got tattoos and one imagines that Carey Mulligan and Tom Hiddleston will not be playing them in any upcoming romcom.
‘He is the love of my life. Greek men aren’t like English men,’ said Beth.
Indeed they are not. They don’t have UK citizenship for a start.
Dear Boris, you are no Princess Diana
How preposterous of Boris Becker to compare himself with Princess Diana. ‘I knew she was constantly on the run from the paparazzi, and that nothing was taboo to these people.
‘I could put myself in her shoes to some extent. Life as a public figure who is pursued at every turn – that is part of my story, too,’ he said.
Not so fast, Boris. Diana attracted attention because of who she was, you attracted attention because of what you did. Which included being found guilty of tax evasion in Germany, being sent to prison in the UK for hiding financial assets from the courts, going bankrupt and fathering a child in a restaurant cupboard.
Speaking of his conviction here, Becker accused the judge of ‘not realising’ he had ‘condemned’ his family alongside him.
No, Boris. You did that all by yourself. Stop deluding yourself that it was anyone’s fault but your own.
