Trust no one. Line Of Duty is back!

Picture: BBC

It’s the morning after the night before, when AC-12 - Ted Hastings, Kate Fleming and Steve Arnott, Britain’s favourite trio of coppers-investigating-bent-coppers - returned to our screens with the sixth series of Line Of Duty. For the most part, we weren’t disappointed (we being the 9.69 million viewers who tuned in - a whopping 44.5% of those watching telly between 9 and 10pm).

There was something of a slow-burn feel to the opener, a hallmark of both Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, lulling some critics into thinking it was off-par. It wasn't, but with seven episodes to fill in the series (rather than the usual six), creator Jed Mercurio appeared to be using the extra length to plant an array of seeds, with no idea of which might grow out and when. This is his gift - a panoply of potential plotlines with which to tease and antagonise. 

So, we were introduced to the season’s is-she/isn’t-she baddie, Kelly Macdonald’s DCI Joanne Davidson (billed in pre-publicity as “the most enigmatic adversary AC-12 has ever faced”). Like the previous is-she/isn't-she leads, DIs Lindsay Denton and Roz Huntley, Davidson is a mass of smouldering issues - a failing same sex relationship with a junior officer, paranoia, judging by the numerous heavy-duty locks on her front door, and potentially a link to a murdered journalist. Add to that, Hastings having to play things low-key after his final warning at the end of Series 5, Fleming’s home life in, apparently, tatters, and a bored Steve Arnott popping more Nurofen than is good for him as he continues to deal with being thrown down three flights of stairs in Series 4 by Balaclava Man. Oh, and an absolute blizzard of dizzying new acronyms, such as “We can keep it on the DL only if we have a CHIS on the MIT”, which may have been lifted directly from a Snoop Dogg lyric. “CHIS”, we were relieved to later learn on social media, means 'Covert Human Intelligence Source'. All of which sets us up…for what? Well, exactly. Mercurio has proven - with LoD and Bodyguard - as being a master of expect-the-unexpected, and much of the fun of, if you can call it fun, has been trying sift the red herrings from the ciphers that unlock each series over the course of its run. 

Like a more tortured version of a wet bank holiday afternoon’s game of Cluedo, LoD has become something of a national obsession. Social media yesterday was awash with comments of more or less the same ilk - “Why is it not yet 9pm?” (my own tweet). Family WhatsApp groups went quiet for an hour at 9pm and there was notable concern on Facebook when the preceding Top Gear ran two minutes over time.

Picture: BBC

Make no mistake, Line Of Duty has become event television. We sit there on the sofa arguing with ourselves, booing the baddies like pantomime barons, much as we did each Saturday night during The Masked Singer (look, I guessed Blob was Lenny Henry, almost from the beginning, but would the judges give in to the bleedin’ obvious? No.). Line Of Duty and The Masked Singer share in a television tradition that has been in danger of expiring in the era of box set binges: suspense. While we’ve all filled bored evenings (and afternoons and…er…even mornings…) during lockdown by ploughing through entire seasons of shows on Netflix and all the rest, with Line Of Duty the BBC is sticking to the traditions of cliffhanger Doctor Who endings. No, you will not be able to watch all seven episodes now on the iPlayer, and no, it will not be immediately available on DVD as a complete set. You will have to wait for the next episode, and the next one, and the next one after that. 

I’d like to think of another police procedural occupying the coveted 9pm slot to have caught the national imagination quite as this one has done since it made its debut in 2012, first on BBC2 before being promoted to the proverbial officer one rank higher, BBC1. Over that time we have sucked in by the twisting vortex of Mercurio’s mind, as plots have corkscrewed tantalisingly, each series testing our patience and, on occasion, our tolerance of credibility. That’s not to say there have been shark-jumping moments, just more of a tendency for Mercurio to lob in hand grenades of disruptive thinking that have seen pivotal series characters killed off as early as the opening episodes, while others quite consciously left hanging on to, quite honestly, mess with us. 

Like DI Matthew Cottan - delightfully afforded one of my favourite in-series nicknames of all time, ‘Dot’ - who survived three series as arch-villain ‘The Caddy’, embedded nefariously in AC-12 while remaining the principle conduit of terror and manipulation for the “OCG” (organised crime group - another of the myriad acronyms which add to the bandwidth-sapping plot lines). Or Denton, Keeley Hawes’ wonderfully sociopathic detective inspector whom, even up until her resurrection from prison and eventual death in her second series (at the pistol of Cottan), we never fully knew whether she was just misunderstood, if slightly loony, or truly in league with the dark side of ‘The City’, LoD’s fictional geography. Denton, it should be highlighted, is one of a number of prime examples of women being given equal and authentic screen time in the show. Without pandering to obvious wokeism, unbridled female characters have been a mainstay of Mercurio’s invention (including, it must be said, Hawes’ turn as the Home Secretary in his equally compelling Bodyguard). Thus, he’s also given us demented DI Huntley (Thandie Newton), devious lawyer Gill Biggelowe (another in league with the OCG), and in Series 5, the stone-faced Detective Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael (Anna Maxwell-Martin) and the new Deputy Chief Constable, Andrea Wise, all of whom could well reappear in this latest series in either protagonist or antagonist roles. It’s impossible to tell. 

In preparation for last night’s return, I recently gorged through the previous five seasons reminding myself of the threads, Ted Hastings’ zeitgeist-monstering catchphrases (“Mother of God!”, “sucking on diesel”, “bent coppers”, et al) and the somewhat byzantine connections between the police of this one particular city (believed to be in the Midlands) and the OCG. Perhaps because I’d only previously watched Line Of Duty in similar binges on long-haul flights, I’d not previously appreciated the parallels between it and The X-Files which, when it wasn’t doing ‘monster of the week’ episodes, had the recurring thread of a deep-state conspiracy (not entirely dissimilar to the QAnon cobblers) involving shadow governments and aliens. A little more plausibly LoD has featured corruption on a grand scale - and not just the old cliche of masonic handshakes to turn a blind eye to pub lock-ins and local councillors' parking tickets. It has involved largely unseen mobsters’ manipulation of police procedure to enable drug rings, prostitution and child abuse rackets, embedding corrupt officers throughout the Central Police constabulary, and usually in plot-changing positions. 

Picture: Instagram/Vicky McClure

Here we should mention ‘H’, the ruse that has been LoD’s X-Files-style undercurrent: Dot Cottan’s dying revelation of four finger taps cunningly suggested that H may not have been an individual, but four high-ranking coppers. With three now gone, we’re still left to wonder who the fourth is. Ted Hastings is not out of the clear (there have been subtle and not-so subtle suggestions that he might be an H, with actor Adrian Dunbar craftily pictured on social media audaciously wearing a Helly Hansen sweatshirt with its prominent double-H logo…). Towards the end of Series 5 we were fed snippets of doubt about Wise and Carmichael, with the latter’s assistant, Sergeant Tranter attempting to murder Gill Biggelowe in the didn’t-see-that-coming Fatal Attraction denouement in the season's final episode. That also concluded with Ryan Pilkington - recruited into gangster Tommy Hunter’s crime syndicate as a teenager - at his passing out parade at the police training college, teasingly setting up an Alien-style possibility of a spawn-of-the-devil introduction to come.

As amusing as some of this hokum might be, Line Of Duty’s return comes at an awkward time for policing in Britain. Even as the opening episode of Series 6 was going out last night, 12 officers were being injured - two seriously - and police vehicles set on fire in Bristol amid violent protests against the new Police And Crime Bill. The rioting comes soon after the tragic disappearance and murder of Sarah Everard, and the events of Clapham Common in the aftermath. I was in the midst of my Line Of Duty binge when the Everard case was playing out. Fiction began to blur into fact as I switched from the iPlayer to news bulletins revealing the grim outcome and distressing detail of a young woman’s alleged killer being a serving Metropolitan Police officer. All of a sudden, policing and police conduct - and the politics governing them - has come under greater scrutiny than ever before. I’m not being flippant in trying to conflate this with Line Of Duty’s return. It is, without any room for doubt, fiction, and somewhat stylised fiction too. It is no more a documentary about real investigations into police behaviour than The Crown is a factual profile of the royal family. But if it serves any moral purpose, beyond raising the nation’s blood pressure for an hour each Sunday night for the next seven weeks, it is to provide a timely reminder of the importance of trust and accountability in our public institutions.

Line Of Duty treads the finest of lines between escapism and reality. It’s clearly well researched, with Mercurio drawing on well placed sources to enrich his plots and dialogue. The police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and the murder of Jill Dando are believed to have been in the mix of inspiration. Where it goes after this latest run, however, is open to debate. The BBC is yet to commit to a seventh series. “I think as long as there’s an appetite from our audience for the show, we’ll keep going,” Dunbar told Graham Norton in January. “Why would we stop? Jed [Mercurio] has managed to keep the standard so high for so long, and people love the show. I hope it does go on.” Martin Compston (Arnott) recently told The Sun that the cast was aware of how big the show had become, but that they probably had one or two more series in them. “So you do start to become aware of the legacy around it - you want to be remembered as ‘one of the great shows’ and not be remembered for ‘a bad last series’. Mercurio himself recently told Jay Rayner’s Out To Lunch podcast that he hoped the show would continue: “I really want to carry on with Line of Duty,” he said. “I think that Season 6 proves that there is much more ground for us still to cover.” There are certainly plenty of lose ends to be tied up, and on the evidence of last night’s opener, new ones being created. Strap in, we’re not done yet. 

Bridge of sighs

Get ready for the COVID anniversaries, as they will be coming thick and fast over the next few weeks. My first of note lands this evening when Chelsea-v-Everton kicks off at Stamford Bridge. It was this very fixture, on this very date last year, that marked the last time I was sitting in my seat in the East Stand Upper Tier, at the very same venue, watching football "live" (i.e. not on an iPad or with fake crowd noise unhelpfully piped in by Sky Sports). 

The home side won handsomely, 4-0, in what turned out to be a miserable return to the Bridge for Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti (regulars to this blog will have endured, amid my rants-previous about Chelsea's biennial managerial schisms, how Ancelotti was dispatched by the club on the final day of the 2010-11 season at Everton's Goodison Park for leading the Blues to just second in the league...). But tonight, by some quirk of Premier League scheduling, it’s the same fixture on the same date at the same venue, albeit one devoid of supporters, prompting some reflection on the football year gone by. Because that win over Everton last year felt like the season had ended prematurely on a high. But as we walked out of Stamford Bridge, the weirdness that we’d all experienced that afternoon was just the start of things. Most startling was how, almost at a stroke, football dropped down the list of priorities and, to some extent, stayed there, though not immediately for everyone: three days after that Everton match, their rivals from across Stanley Park, Liverpool, hosted Atlético Madrid at Anfield in the Champions League. 

Four weeks later, the city of Liverpool experienced a sudden surge of coronavirus deaths, with 68 recorded across the Royal, Aintree and Broadgreen Hospitals between 7 and 9 April. The suspicion fell on a spike in COVID-19 infections following the Madrid game, which had been attended by 3,000 Spanish fans who'd flown in for it. Madrid was already succumbing to the virus by then, and had strict lockdown rules in place. A week later, 250,000 people descended on the Cheltenham Festival. “People were crammed six deep at the bars,” journalist Alan Tyers, who’d been covering the event for the Daily Telegraph, told The Guardian. “If you were going to design a virus dispersion hub, you could do worse than the indoor bits of a packed racecourse”, he said, as he recalled concourse bars packed with racegoers innocently enjoying some drunken revelry. Tyers’ comments appeared in a comprehensive, forensic examination of last year’s Cheltenham meeting which, combined with the Liverpool-Atlético game, were two notorious ‘superspreader’ events that took place just as the virus was taking a hold in the UK. By the final Cheltenham race on 13 March, The Guardian noted, there had been 2,263 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Britain. That same day, the Premier League suspended all games. 

The government remained unchanged until the 16th, when Imperial College modelling predicted that the country’s death toll from COVID-19 could reach 500,000 if there wasn’t a major intervention. By the following Monday, Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown. That same day 56-year-old decorator Geoff Bodman was put on a ventilator at a Cardiff hospital. The Guardian reported that it was ten days after he’d returned home from the Cheltenham Festival. Eight weeks in intensive care ensued, during which he had a stroke. “They should never have allowed [the festival] to go ahead,” Bodman told the paper. “But it would have cost millions to cancel.” Perhaps if they’d known then what we know now, with the UK death toll approaching 123,000 and over four million cases recorded, the organisers of these events might have thought differently. But, benefit of hindsight, and all that.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

I, for one, shudder at the thought of what I might have been exposed to at Stamford Bridge on this day a year ago, not least because I was soon identified as “clinically extremely vulnerable” to the virus, and technically, should have spent most of the last year shielding. I eventually caught it in November and experienced only a very mild dose, but it could have been worse. Much, much worse. That Sunday, in our section of the East Stand, we didn’t know quite what the protocol was. Old friends, who’d been there week-in, week-out for years, greeted each other awkwardly with elbow bumps rather than conventional handshakes. A large swathe of Row 19 in front of us was empty, the unmistakeable sign of regulars giving the game a swerve. Not that it made much difference to the result.

When the 28th season of the Premier League resumed in June, it was to a very muted return. Matches had to be played behind closed doors with only essential staff allowed inside grounds. Home and away teams are still kept apart before kick-off, with visiting sides invariably forced to use makeshift changing facilities in club car parks, rather than the traditional ‘Away’ dressing room. Match balls and corner flags have to ritually disinfected, and non-playing staff and substitutes were required to sit socially distanced and masked in the stands. Players mingling, hugging and generally mixing is still a moot point. Broadcasters have tried to compensate for the lack of crowds by adding crowd sound effects but it just isn't the same (the one consolation of watching with the sound effects off is that you hear every swearword from the touchline, forcing commentators to regularly have to apologise for pre-watershed expletives).

Football soldiered on under make-do circumstances. Games that went ahead in the first few weeks of the hastily resumed season were notably flat for home viewing, despite the bonanza of live coverage, with all Premier League games televised and 6pm weekday kick-offs (though the Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening kick-offs have eaten into time usually reserved for family entertainment). But despite this bounty of televised football, it would be hard to say that we’ve always had our money’s worth. Graeme Souness recently wrote in The Times that the absence of fans in stadia has had a statistical impact on matches. He noted that home advantage was no longer a factor, with one particular week, recording all five Wednesday night fixtures ending in away wins. We’re now on course for an away win record in the league. 

“People tend to forget that players are performers and entertainers and will all feel the impact to a degree, some by a lot and some by a little, without crowds to play in front of,” Souness wrote. “The vast majority of them enjoy the thrill of having a live audience there, so they are suffering without it.” As a player he recalled feeding off the atmosphere inside the stadium both home and away, especially the latter: “The more hostile it was, the more I thrived on it.” Aggression, Souness said, has been dampened, measured by the minimal number of player scuffles he’s seen during lockdown conditions. He also noted that the absence of baying crowds has also impacted referees’ brandishing of red cards and awarding penalties, though there is no evidence to back up such a claim.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

As forthright in print as he is in the Sky Sports studio, Souness concluded that Premier League football had, throughout the crisis, proved to be less of its traditional value, adding that it can sell itself for “astronomical figures” around the world “because it is deemed the most exciting, honest and entertaining,” but that has been missing. He cited VAR as a factor, and sort of has a point. Greater televisual scrutiny has, indeed, made VAR seem like a bureaucratic burden, with some decisions made using it no better than a referee giving or not giving a decision without it. I can only imagine what those interminable pauses in games would be like inside a stadium. 

Perhaps we will only find out on the last day of the league season, 23 May, when matches will be playable - in theory - in front of crowds for the first and final time, following the expected lifting of lockdown a week before. By then, Manchester City will have walked away with the league title, and it will be probably only the race for third and fourth place that will be of any consequence. For this Chelsea fan, tonight’s encounter with Everton will count greatly in that hunt for a Champions League place. If both teams approach it right, it’ll be - to use one of football’s many clichés - a ‘cup final’. And that’s just the sort of game that I would dearly love to be in my seat at Stamford Bridge to watch.  

Just another housebound Monday

© Simon Poulter 2021

And, so, another month rolls around, and another Monday, too. Like last Monday, and the 40-odd Mondays before that, I’m back on the sofa for another day of e-mail, instant messages and Teams meetings. At best, the most I’ll move is to the kitchen and back, for coffee, lunch, an afternoon bucket of tea, before, early evening, hopping on the exercise bike for half an hour of grunting at whatever early evening kick-off the Premier League has contrived to offer, and in a vague attempt at keeping the inevitable cardiovascular event at bay. For tomorrow, and the days after that, repeat as prescribed, at least until 12 April when, Boris promised us last week, my local swimming pool might reopen, if we all behave ourselves until then.

Despite Johnson presenting his 60-page ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown last Monday, we are still in it. We’re not exactly under house arrest, but even a quick dash to Caffé Nero feels like something from The Great Escape involving a vaulting horse and dislodged earth released surreptitiously down the trouser leg. As we enter the third month of the latest lockdown, and almost the anniversary of the first, reflecting on the routines of these last 12 dystopian months only leaves one longing for the traditions of working somewhere other than where you live. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

I miss being out and about early on a crisp spring morning; I miss the process of deciding what to wear to the office; I miss the vagaries of London commuting and the hour’s buffer between home and work life, work life and home, and a chance to listen to music or read a book; I miss that first Starbucks on the way into the office, and the prospect of a quick pint on the way home. I miss normality, and long for it to replace the new normality imposed upon us. But...

I started my current job on 6 April last year, so I have never known what office life is like at my new company. Apart from my interview, I’ve never even set foot in the building. What I will eventually encounter, fully, for the first time, remains to be seen: while we’ve all been away, my company has been adapting its office space to the new normal. Our CEO recently wrote an op-ed for The Times in which he asked whether the office of the future will ever be the same as it was before, a location around which productivity and collaboration is concentrated, rather than a collection of colleagues working together but meeting physically when required. He observed that 60% of employees’ time is spent on individual activities, while the remaining time is spent working in teams, activities that could still require an office, which by turn would not necessarily require the same amount of floor plan as pre-COVID. While not dismissing the idea of offices altogether, he mooted the idea that a single, Central London location where everyone hubbed together might not even be still valid, with a distributed, regional network of smaller properties possible to drive greater diversity, inclusion and even talent attraction. 

Wherever we work, and however we work, we still need to return to work in some form of how it was. The question is when, rather than if. Last week, Boris, speaking to a Network Rail conference (by video, natch) dismissed concerns that WFH would remain the new norm by gleefully predicting a return to mass commuting within a “few short months”. We would, he said, be “consumed once again” by our desire for social contact. Clearly, judging by the panicked look on the face of his health secretary and the deputy chief medical officer on Friday, ahead of a weekend of spring-like weather, we are already doing quite well in satisfying that desire without the virus being in anything like retreat. The prime minister is, however, clearly, walking a tightrope here (and not a zipline): he needs everyone to Stay Home. Save Lives. Protect The NHS.™, but also desperately needs the economy flowing again. City centres need the sandwich shops and pubs open again. But, perhaps equally as importantly, we need the release of normality to ease the mental health crisis looming of a nation confined to barracks. Just look at the full parks at the first sign of the mercury rising: it’s not civil disobedience (even if a few provocative camera angles in the Daily Mail shock-horror the world into thinking everyone is out giving a massive “up yours” to restrictions). Somewhere between illusion and reality lies the truth. 

The more I think of it, all of the ‘gates’ in Boris’s timetable seem eons away. Even next week’s ridiculous reopening of schools (why can’t they be allowed to stay closed until after Easter, or at least until teachers have all been vaccinated?). But while there will be a social tsunami of pub beer gardens overflowing just as soon as they can, working practices might not, despite Johnson’s conviction that “the British people will be consumed once again with their desire for the genuine face-to-face meeting that makes all the difference to the deal or whatever it is.” 

Once workers have been given a taste of flexible working, they won’t want to go back. When one of my former companies brought in mandatory three-days-a-week working from a designated ‘hub’, there was uproar, especially as desks were being deliberately limited (thus hinting at games of musical chairs first thing in the morning, with the losers ending up on the redundancy list). My last company went the other way - office spaces were there if you needed them, but there were no hard expectation to use them. That, though, was a Silicon Valley software company, a company steeped in digital technology, and obsessed with myriad online collaboration tools that actually became overwhelming to use. For me, personally, I still work best when I can walk over to someone’s desk, or stop them at the coffee machine, or poke my head around the door of their office, when I’ve got something to ask.

Picture: HSBC

I guess it depends on the business. Technology companies - especially those with a collaborative model - will be more adept at remote working via digital tools. Other industries won’t. Goldman Sachs’ chief executive David Soloman has branded remote working as an “aberration” and is urging his staff to come back to its offices as quickly as possible. Soloman actually saw more in common at his bank with tech companies, branding its work recently as an ”innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture”. Working from home was not, he said “a new normal”, adding that he was “a big believer in personal connectivity”. Contrast that with HSBC, which last week said that it would be cutting its office space by 40%. But even that, though, might be at odds with the Canary Wharf estate where HSBC has it's corporate headquarters.

This morning, Canary Wharf's head of strategy, Howard Dawber, told Radio 4's Today programme that he expects the start of a return to the office as early as 29 March, with a 100% return by June when all of the ancillary services around the financial district, like pubs, restaurants and hairdressers, are allowed to open again. I'm not so sure: the area in Paddington where my office is located offers all that, but I don't see any sort of wholesale return from remote working. “We've got about five or six thousand staff working on the wharf at the moment,” Dawber said. “We expect over the next few months a gradual increase there - obviously the government's advice is still to work from home and I think everyone is sticking to that.” But he added: “Where the technology makes it possible to work from home, I think the processes and attitudes of businesses have caught up now to the point where I think it's going to be more socially acceptable to take the occasional day working from home.”

Dawber's point is that he expects working from home to return to an occasional choice - “one day a week or a couple of days a month” - adding that WFH has generated its own fatigue. “When the sun was shining and people were perhaps enjoying a more flexible environment, there was a sense it was going to be a short-term process and we would get through it and return to work.” But now, he says, people are missing the opportunity collaborate and socialise in person. That may be true, but WFH has worked, almost exclusively and the virus will still be out there when the Government's all-clear is eventually sounded. Companies will still, I suspect, have to convince their employees. 

For every one of us desperate to step outside the front door to work again, there are those who will not be comfortable until there is solid evidence that it is safe to do so. Working from home does, at least, provide that refuge. Even as the vaccine rollout makes progress, and the R number gradually comes down, the resistance in some parts of northern England presented on Friday by Professor Jonathan Van-Tam underlined the need for patience. There is still plenty of unknown ahead, too. The “direction of travel” might look promising, but variants of the virus keep showing up. Even though the mantra is that COVID-19 will be a disease that we eventually manage, like flu or measles, it’s not there yet, and we can’t truthfully say when that might occur.

Boris, in his comments last week, was typically effusive when predicting the return of vibrant city centres as people came back to working there. But this, it must be stressed, was no more than a prediction. Despite the Mail headlines, people have, generally, observed the stay-at-home message. In fact, the more you think of it, the more ‘normality’ has shifted. Just count the number of white delivery vans that pass your house on any given day, seven days of the week; how much has urban and suburban traffic increased due to home supermarket deliveries? Buses and trains are, now, only being used by those workers who have no alternative but going out to work, but even then, for the most part, public transport use is well down (despite those horror story scenes of Tube trains packed with construction workers crossing London).

I can easily imagine my local high street bouncing back. The supermarkets have rarely shown much difference throughout lockdown, but with the prevalence of coffee chains and independent cafes interspersed with charity shops, you can easily see these local economies bouncing back, supported by those hanging on to working from home. But what about city centres? Where my nominal office is, there’s a cluster of other corporate towers, all supported by the usual plethora of lunchtime takeaway outlets (and even trendy caravans serving artisan food). The large gym on the same site, plus swankier restaurants and an upmarket hotel would, presumably, all have been barren for the last year or so. Which of these enterprises will return to anything like they were before is hard to predict. Pre-COVID, central London was already slackening off on a Friday. One black cab driver once told me that he no longer bothered coming in on the final day of the working week, such was the shift to ‘casual Fridays’ where a more socially agreeable WFH practice was allowed by employees. So you can imagine what a hybrid model will be like.

Picture: Microsoft

For now, however, all this is academic. The government’s instruction to work from home “if you can” remains in place until at least 21 June, when it will be reviewed, and even then, offices are likely to be reconfigured to accommodate social distancing and the sort of hygiene rules that are now commonplace in supermarkets and garden centres. The sector to keep an eye open on will be the civil service. Once public workers are told to return to the office, the private sector might follow suit. It might depend on how well prepared they are and, equally, how well they’re listening to their employees. Incredibly, the pandemic has returned significant power to employees to depict not just where they work, but how they work.

However, as much as the attention on working culture over the last 11 months or so has been on WFH, Zoom calls, your colleagues’ book collection, cats video-bombing meetings and the ubiquitous battle cry of “You’re on mute!”, we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves. Only 36% of working adults were working exclusively from home last week, according to the Office for National Statistics, and that level is still the highest since June last year, so clearly not everyone. That also needs to be tempered by the fact that 18% of workers aren’t going in because they’re on furlough, with a more alarming 22% of businesses saying that they had “paused” trading. Clearly there is going to be a shift as people return to work, but there’s some debate over just how intense that return will be. 

Before COVID, commuting in London was a litmus test for office occupancy: for most of August, those not on holiday could guarantee a seat on the train, but come September, and the great return, trains became packed again, and the customary British reserve (i.e. the passive-aggressiveness that emerges as entitled City traders and lawyers join the 07.57 to Waterloo - "could you move down please!"). With talk today of a hike in season ticket prices, and rail companies talking of great holes in their finances that might need to be mitigated by flexible arrangements that don’t rely on five-day commuting, we may have witnessed a subtle but significant shift in the way the entire nation goes to work. Not that anything is going to change for the next three months at least. I’m still stuck on the sofa. At least you  know where to find me.