The writer is literary editor of The Spectator
I have only one general principle in life, which is that If Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks something is a good idea — or, at least, says so publicly — then I’m against it. So it is with the return to the office.
The Brexit opportunities and government efficiency minister has, it’s reported, taken to stalking the corridors of Whitehall pinning passive-aggressive notes on civil servants’ doors. “Sorry you were out when I visited,” these notes say. “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.”
I’m not sure he thought that one through: if the civil servants in question are working from home, they won’t see his note in any case. But many are, by report, determined to stay away from the office — and I can’t blame them.
When the pandemic started and we were all locked down, just like hundreds of thousands of people around the country, I was forced to retool my way of working. As the Spectator’s literary editor, I have gone from being a glorified postal worker to being a glorified logistics manager. Where once I spent my days opening dozens of jiffy bags of new books and packing a handful into fresh jiffy bags to send off to critics, now I spend it answering emails, compiling spreadsheets and ripping page numbers and publication dates from Amazon to update the vast database of forthcoming titles I need to select from for review each week.
I still spend 20 per cent of my time reminding publicists not to send unsolicited hard copies to the office. All I have seen of my colleagues for nearly three years is their pasty green-yellow faces over Zoom.
But it’s more than just a new and more efficient way of doing my job that keeps me in leafy East Finchley. The truth, which I suspect holds for many of us in these straitened times, is that I don’t think I could afford to go to work any more even if I wanted to. For a Londoner, working from home saves 200-odd quid a month on travel. For people who commute in from suburbia on the train or in a car, that figure will be some way higher. And by being at home for the school run, you save a small fortune on after-school clubs or nannies.
Then there are the incidental expenses. We could call it the “Pret tax”. You can’t really get lunch al desko for less than a tenner these days — not once you’ve supplemented your sandwich with a coffee, a packet of crisps, a yoghurt pot, one of those nice popcorn bars and, if peckish, another sandwich. There’ll be the coffee in the morning on your way in, obviously, too. Plus a croissant to keep your strength up. Perhaps an afternoon run for a cup of Assam, or pints after work with colleagues.
At home, lunch every day is a bowl of home-made lentil soup and a cheese sandwich. You scratch-cook more and grab takeaway or ready meals less in the evenings. If you’re after treats, a quid or so gets you five oatmeal-and-raisin cookies from Sainsbury’s on the way back from dropping the kids at school. And getting a flat white in a paper cup from the local Caffè Nero, these days, feels like a foreign holiday. You are richer in time, working from home, and richer in riches.
The Pret tax really is, in a sense, a tax: a dent in personal income that benefits society. It’s plausibly suggested that the government’s enthusiasm for returning the drones to their hives at the first sign of the pandemic easing was motivated by terror that the town-centre economy would collapse. They wanted to save Pret A Manger — imagining that if more of the country’s white-collar salaries came to be salted away (or spent on heating homes) rather than leaking out through billions of popcorn bars and skinny lattes, a whole tranche of tax revenue and entry-level jobs would vanish. Perhaps they were right.
But that’s Rees-Mogg’s problem. Speaking as a rational utility maximiser, I’m staying put.
