The madness continues

The Guardian reports:

Yorkshire Tea has issued a plea to people to “try to be kind” after it received a deluge of online abuse because the chancellor was photographed with a large packet of its teabags.

The brand had faced a weekend of calls to boycott it after Rishi Sunak, the Conservative MP for the North Yorkshire seat of Richmond, shared the image with the caption: “Quick Budget prep break making tea for the team. Nothing like a good Yorkshire brew.”

Many Twitter users responded by condemning the brand, leading the company to stress that it had not endorsed the association. It tweeted later that day: “Nothing to do with us – people of all political stripes like our brew.”

However, that message seems not to have been enough to silence detractors, as on Monday the curator of Yorkshire Tea’s Twitter account posted a thread saying they had faced a “rough weekend” of angry comments, and calling for a degree of perspective and greater civility online.

“On Friday, the chancellor shared a photo of our tea. Politicians do that sometimes (Jeremy Corbyn did it in 2017),” it said. “We weren’t asked or involved – and we said so the same day. Lots of people got angry with us all the same.

“For some, our tea just being drunk by someone they don’t like means it’s forever tainted, and they’ve made sure we know it.”

It really is madness. People demanding a boycott of a brand of tea because a politician they don’t like said they like that brand of tea.