BORIS JOHNSON: WFH means at this time’s Bridget Joneses won’t ever meet Darcy
Good Lord’ I said to my wife, as I prepared to fall asleep in the now traditional British way, with the laptop open on the bed, and some film news burbling away. ‘Is there a new Bridget Jones coming out?’
There is, she said.
Good old Bridget, I said to myself, as I was folded in the arms of Morpheus.
Still at it, eh? I mused.
It appears that our heroine will, after 30 years, still be gamely in search of a boyfriend in Mad About The Boy. My eyelids were drooping, but I formed the distinct impression that this time she was actually going to succeed.
Incredible, I thought drowsily, when you think of her age (surely 55 plus?), and when you consider how much more difficult it has all become.
When Bridget Jones first started to record her romantic struggles, back in 1995, she struck a chord with millions of people – especially women – who couldn’t find the right partner.
They wanted love; they wanted happiness, and all other things being equal they probably wanted to get hitched and even to have children. It was the tragicomic predicament of Bridget Jones that she was clever, funny, attractive – and yet couldn’t find the right man.
‘Tick-tock, tick-tock’, her friends would say to her at dinner parties, in a bullying way, to remind her that she might have only a few child-bearing years to go. Since then the obstacles have, if anything, got even bigger.
If you are a professional woman like Bridget – who, in the stories, is a TV news producer – you have to think about the exorbitant costs of childcare, which have been steadily increasing, as a proportion of income. If you are a couple hoping to get married and settle down, you have to think about the cost of housing, even more formidable than it was in 1995.
When Bridget Jones first fell in love with Mr Darcy, house prices were about four or five times average earnings. They are now double that – and in London they are about 14 times average earnings. No wonder people are having children later and later, and no wonder there has been such a fall in reproduction.
In 2022 this country saw a 3.1 per cent fall in the birth rate – and the number of live births in Britain was down to 605,479 – the smallest number, as a proportion of the overall population total, since records began in the 1930s.
No wonder, given the difficulties and expense, that the younger generation seem so apathetic about the notion of having a family. A recent poll of millennials found 38 per cent of them think having children is too expensive, and 31 per cent are just not interested.
As a tail-end baby-boomer, my heart bleeds for these young people. We should be doing everything in our power to help them. We should, above all, fix this country’s housing market. It was a tragedy that we Conservatives watered down our excellent Planning Bill (after I had gone) in terror of the elderly Lib Dem-leaning Nimbies.
Starmer’s approach is utterly hopeless – abandoning brownfield sites in the metropolitan areas in favour of carving up the countryside. It won’t work, and it won’t deliver the new homes these young people need. Then there is another disadvantage that the younger generation face, a phenomenon that was more or less unknown in 1995. When Bridget Jones started to confide in the rest of us about her search for a soul-mate, she at least had a place she could look. Like any other mammal, she had a habitat where she could be sure of finding breeding partners.
She had an environment with a reasonable number of heterosexual males self-confident and intelligent enough to find her attractive. She had an office!
And now look! Ever since the Covid pandemic, the nation has fallen into the hopeless narcolepsy of ‘working from home’. Like the housing market, like the planning laws, the whole thing appears to be a plot against the interests of younger people. Of course it’s fine for people like me, who have already been through all sorts of careers. I love ‘working’ from home.
In the course of researching this article, I have read 100 pages of Robert Harris’s latest novel (terrific), been down to the fridge to eat my own plum jam, had several cups of coffee, scrolled through about 15 Youtube videos about extreme skiing, and generally skived and procrastinated in my socks – in a way that would be completely impossible in an office.
It suits me fine, now. But would it have been fine, in my 20s and 30s? It would have been a disaster, and an appalling missed opportunity.
When Bridget Jones first fell in love with Mr Darcy, house prices were about four or five times average earnings, writes Boris Johnson. They are now double that
When I was in my early 20s I spent almost an entire year, in an office, sitting next to WF (Lord) Deedes, the former Conservative Cabinet minister and Editor of the Daily Telegraph; and we talked, on and off, every day. I listened to the way he weaselled stories out of people, how he booked his lunches on the Strand. I saw his charm, and his genius.
I got an education, in life and in style, that would have been absolutely impossible if I had been stuck – as so many young people are these days – on a Zoom call in my broom-cupboard flat.
You can do all sorts of things from home; and you can certainly watch Arsenal from home, my dear old Starmer, rather than taking some enormous freebie-cum-bung from a business you are in the throes of regulating. Try it, Starmer. It’s called a TV. They have action replays. It’s amazing.
What you can’t do at home is recreate the energy and excitement of the office, and above all the competitive spirit that produces new ideas.
Labour seems to be determined to get everything wrong, in its first 100 days in office: inflation-busting public sector pay increases, and new anti-business laws on employment and workers’ rights that amount to an all-out assault on UK productivity.
Just as businesses like Amazon have decided enough is enough, and are calling their employees back into the office, Labour is going in precisely the wrong direction. They are going to legislate in favour of working from home. They are going to make it impossible for bosses to contact you out of hours.
They do not seem to understand how the UK economy works, or how London rose to be the greatest city on Earth. It depends on buzz, on sharing ideas; on full offices, full bars, full restaurants. The UK metropolitan economy is a great cyclotron of talent that produces flashes of inspiration, and you will not get the necessary collisions if the subatomic particles are all working from home.
Working from home may be OK for the older generation, but for younger people, who need to get into the office, it is a sham, a snare and a delusion. If the current birth rates are anything to go by, WFH is also proving thoroughly unromantic.
I don’t believe Mother Nature is going to stand for it. She is going to want young people back in the office, for all sorts of good evolutionary reasons, and if older people want to keep their jobs, they will get back there, too.
