Kirsty Strickland: Boris Johnson shouldn’t judge other workers by his own low standards

Saturday’s words of wisdom were on the new frontier of the cultural war so eagerly pursued by some right-wing politicians and commentators.

Working from home has replaced eating avocados and believing in social justice as the new signifier of progressive idiocy.

According to the Prime Minister, employees now can’t be trusted to work from home, as they did so ably during the pandemic. His argument for this is very telling in itself.

Hidden from the watchful eyes of bosses, Boris Johnson thinks it is only natural folk will slack off a bit. They’ll cut corners with their work and their productivity will drop.

“My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing,” he said.

Read that quote again and then remember that this is the man in charge of our nuclear weapons.

It should go without saying that Johnson’s experience of working from home is unlike that of the average person. His is a workplace full of people who apparently couldn’t function during a global pandemic and national lockdown without a constant stream of alcohol-based incentives for doing the job they were paid to do.

It shows a stunning lack of self-awareness on the part of the Prime Minister to complain others might be inclined to take liberties with the rules.

The workplace that he heads, one that also happens to be his home, was party central at a time when it was illegal to visit your dying relatives.

Last week, the Met Police announced that a further 50 fines had been issued over partygate. That brings the total number to more than 100 and makes Downing Street the most law-breaking workplace in the country when it comes to Covid restrictions.

As a freelance columnist, I worked from home before the pandemic as well as during it. So I’m probably not the most representative case study either.

But my friends and family who made that transition from office to home working are. Throughout this tiresome debate about working from home, bad-faith actors only want to talk in extremes and absolutes. In reality, there’s more neutral ground we could discuss these issues on.

Working from home isn’t for everyone. Some of my younger friends were eager to get out of their pokey flatshares and back into the office. Others – parents in particular – have benefited enormously from the flexibility that a hybrid model of working offers.

It’s no surprise that Jacob Rees-Mogg (a man who has fathered enough children to set up a full orchestra but is famously hands-off when it comes to actually caring for the) is one of the government’s most prominent critics of working from home.

When he’s not creeping down Whitehall corridors and leaving passive-aggressive notes for civil servants, Mr Rees-Mogg is waging war against the public sector and defending government plans to axe 90,000 jobs.

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The concept of personal responsibility might be alien to many of the old Etonians we have running the country, but employees are perfectly able to exercise it.

One of the only positive legacies from the pandemic is that it forced companies to be more flexible. They had to find new, creative ways of working while staff couldn’t physically be in many workplaces. It wasn’t without its challenges but the rewards are clear to see.

Those who yearn to be back among colleagues and find that they work better in an office environment should have the opportunity to do so. But let’s not pretend that this is a gold-standard working model that is right for everybody.

The Tory government talks about work-life balance as though it is some fluffy lefty concept that will lead to chaos. In reality, it’s the same privilege many of them enjoy. They just don’t want to see it extended to others.

Spending hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds a year to commute to an office isn’t a vital ingredient for workforce productivity. Boris Johnson shouldn’t judge other workers by his own shoddy standards.

The Prime Minister might have the attention span of an over-tired toddler but ordinary workers do not.

Instead of engaging in a phoney and needless battle to make workplaces function as they did pre-pandemic, Johnson and his ilk should concentrate on their own jobs.

The public won’t take lectures on personal responsibility from a group of people who showed such reckless disregard for their own work obligations during a time of national crisis.