Pick of the week’s Gossip

Football fans have been left aghast by a revelation from Michael Owen: the former England striker has never drunk a cup of tea or coffee. Owen, who made the admission in a fans’ Q&A for Joe.com, offered no explanation as to why he had shunned the hot beverages, but said he had recently learnt “how to make” tea. The 38-year-old also admitted his dislike for films. “I was forced to watch about ten when I was a kid,” he said. “Can’t stand them.” Of the movies he could recall sitting through – Cool Runnings, Heat, Rocky, Jurassic Park (twice) and Ghost – Owen said Cool Runnings was his favourite. Margaret Thatcher has been hailed as a feminist icon by an unlikely source: the multi-platinum-selling US rapper Nicki Minaj (above). “Sometimes queens and women of power have to do things that even they aren’t happy about doing,” the former American Idol judge said on her radio show. “But they know it’s for the betterment of what’s to come and who’s to come.” Minaj, one of the world’s best-selling musicians, has likened herself to Harriet Tubman, the 19th century civil rights hero who escaped slavery and helped free hundreds of other slaves.

The late Peter Tapsell was an approachable MP – but he could be fierce in debate. Once, when David Owen grandly declared of one of his policies, “history will judge it”, Tapsell asked: “Has the right honourable gentleman not considered that history may have something better to do?”