Rishi Sunak appeared on his Instagram feed on Tuesday morning holding a mug emblazoned with the St George’s flag. “Perfect way to start the day,” was the caption: “Happy St George’s Day!”
It is not the only time the prime minister has raised a symbolic piece of teaware. On the same day he appeared en route to Warsaw holding a white mug marked only with the number “10”, presumably a reference to his current home address. Last year one enveloped in a union jack print was his choice for a trip to a Nato summit in Lithuania. Personal branding clearly doesn’t take note of international airspace.
On other occasions, Sunak has been photographed with a gamut of branded company mugs, from a Selco one on a visit to a builders’ warehouse in London to a National Gas mug on a visit to the Bacton terminals in Norfolk.
So what is Sunak saying with all these mugs? Because even on site visits, it is a choice to leave in frame a hot drink receptacle rather than make sure it is out of shot.
“There is an imperative to signal that he is somewhat normal,” says political journalist and political mug collector Stephen Bush, whose most recent acquisition was the “In Liz we Truss” mug that remained very much in stock at the end of Tory party conference in 2022.
“He’s signalling he’s an everyday person by doing something people do every day,” he says. With the populist credentials of some multimillionaires seemingly easier to cultivate, the padded-gilet-wearing Sunak needs all the help crockery can give him.
Mugs are also, according to Bush, a relatively low-key way of signalling patriotism in a British context where an outright flag “would be quite try-hard”. “They’re a good way of being like, ‘Oh yeah look I’m a normal guy. I love this country. Look at me drinking from my normal guy cup’.”
Sunak’s mugs have shifted tone. Last year the half-pint mug on his desk, alongside a celebratory slice of cake, to mark one year in office, depicted five interlocked red Labradors. It was the work of the squarely middle-class brand Emma Bridgewater. As chancellor in 2020 it was a tech-bro-ish £180 smart mug that allows an exact drinking temperature to be set.
Bush thinks he’s more recently trying both to signal he is more “everyman” and, “crucially, more manly”. His newer mugs are perhaps the crockery equivalent of the Timberland boots he wore to call for boats to be stopped.
He wasn’t the first politician to mobilise teaware. Tony Blair was regularly pictured with a mug, using his casual appearance sipping from it to semaphore the sort of modernising tendencies upon which New Labour set out its stall. Bush notes that before the Blair years, in pictures of politicians meeting in Downing Street, everyone would be using cups and saucers. The mug, he says, was “part of a visual language of early New Labour … we’re modern and we’re different”.
And of course mugs have long been the site of political slogans and campaigning – almost everyone uses them and it’s a low-stakes way of signalling allegiance. But that doesn’t mean they always hit the mark. In 2015, Ed Miliband’s Labour released one promising “Controls on immigration,” which Bush at the time wrote was “condemned as unspeakably naff at best and outright racist at worst”. He collected it as a “great physical reminder of the problems of that election campaign”.
While, for most British politicians, the idea that even their most ardent supporters would be willing to wear a T-shirt declaring that support is a pipe dream – “Tony Blair in 1999 is maybe the last time that you might have been able to wear a T-shirt with a British politician on it without a derogatory slogan and still pull,” says Bush – a mug is a less full-throated mouthpiece.
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. We both agree that when the East Midlands succeeds, the whole country succeeds”. But tea feels like a safe assumption.
“Tea itself carries a message of bringing people together, calming everybody down,” says tea expert Jane Pettigrew, who points out that it contains L-theanine, “an amino acid, which actually calms us and de-stresses us”. It is “very much a drink of the people” and, particularly “with an election on the horizon,” she says, “he’s trying to win the public vote”.
So how could Sunak better leverage the power of the mug to win the heart of the nation? Considering the polls and the reliable Conservative voters who feel currently unloved by the party, Bush thinks he would be better off going back to Emma Bridgewater. Instead of “trying to convince us all that he’s like some kind of gritty man of the people who uses the word ‘cuppa’”.