Gary Monro’s blog

Typhoo has been bought by Indian company, Apeejay Surrendra Group.

One of the brands that come with the deal is the London Fruit and Herb company. Ironic indeed that something with our nation’s capital in the title should be foreign-owned.

It reminds me of an Irish grocer shop that was, for many years, Irish owned and run. It specialised in all those home-grown Irish products and brands that the average ex-pat Irishman misses when he’s abroad. I imagine it was a little piece of heaven for its customers. One day my then house-mate went there for his weekly dose of home and found himself being served by an Indian. It turned out the owners had sold up and an Indian family had bought the place. When I last knew about it the shop hadn’t changed one bit and the new owners had remained loyal to the needs and requirements of their Irish customers.

Typhoo is Britain’s third largest tea brand behind Tetley and PG Tips. Tetley is also Indian owned - by the Tata group. I wonder if they’ll ever try to market Indian-class spiced tea - chai - in this country? It’s an amazing drink - definitely an acquired taste - and I’ve never tasted it in its proper form outside of India. I actually doubt it can be mass-produced but maybe I’ll be proved wrong.

I waited with anticipation this morning for the BBC Breakfast news coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s 80th birthday. They promised to explore her legacy - which to me meant we ought to hear about the routing of the trade unions, the defeat of socialism, the end of the Cold War, extended property rights, the diminishing of local democracy and the failure to address escalating social breakdown. Possibly it would mention her devoted husband, her wayward son and her relentless work ethic. It should end with some detail of how she was deposed.

I shouldn’t have bothered waiting.

The BBC’s coverage was a blatant and pathetic attempt to score points against the Conservative Party on account of it not having more female MPs. On were wheeled two female MPs - one Conservative, one Labour - and the Labour MP proceeded to demonstrate just why it is that all-female lists - such a patronising way of selecting by gender - are no good. She - like a number of her New Labour female counterparts - was abysmal.

Of course, the unstated undercurrent of the whole business is that if women don’t represent 50% of Parliament then there’s discrimination taking place (what else could it possibly be?) and that, in the scheme of things the Conservatives - predictably - are the most discriminatory of the lot. Yawn.

I’m not going to go into the whys and wherefores of social engineering parliament so that it has the ‘correct’ number of blacks, Hindus, Muslims, women, gays, one-legged single-parent lesbians…. But I am enraged that, days after the BBC has the nerve to demand more of our cash it then shows us so unashamedly what it is our cash will be spent on.