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A mug’s game: the politics of Rishi Sunak’s crockery choices

Patriotic teaware was on show from the prime minister this week – the latest round of his mug-based messaging

Boris Johnson is one former prime minister who knows what’s at stake with the wrong mug, having had a single-use plastic one snatched out of his hand by an aide worried about the optics, as he strolled through Tory party conference in 2019. While Michael Gove finally switched to reusable for his walks into Downing Street in 2019, remarkably late in the day for a then-environment secretary supposedly waging war on plastic. In most cases it is impossible to tell what Sunak’s mug holds, unless he helpfully captions it, as he did on a trip to meet Ben Bradley MP in November of last year, saying: “Met up for a cuppa in Worksop yesterday.

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