WFH WTF

Readers of the London Evening Standard will have been presented this week with what appears to be the newspaper’s single-handed attempt to get Londoners back into the office.

“Remote working is killing London. Get back to the office”, the paper thundered with an editorial by Dylan Jones, the editor. In it he recounted now-familiar stories of parts of the city apparently deserted on Mondays and Fridays, of company bosses complaining of empty (and expensive premises), and everyone from restaurants to dry cleaners noting that trade was still down as a result.

“Come Friday, it’s like a bomb has dropped, with deserted streets around Moorgate, empty shops in Broadgate, the surrounding restaurants all starved of trade. And it has got to stop,” Jones opined. “Remote working is killing London. It’s killing trade, killing commerce, and killing the city’s ability to properly get back to work.”

“Speak to any shopkeeper, retailer, or news-seller, or anyone in the hospitality industry, and they will tell you the same,” he continued. “London feels like it is on its way back: commuter patterns are up, West End footfall is up, and tourists are beginning to feel as ubiquitous as they were pre-Covid. But there is still a bewildering lack of urgency among employers regarding full time in-office working. Many companies still only expect their staff to come to work three days a week - usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - making a mockery of the working week.”

We are, of course, talking about the post-pandemic reality (although, with Covid-19 very much on the march again, it’s debatable just how ‘post-‘ things really are). But there is also the view that if there was one good thing to come out of the disease it’s the adoption of more flexible working arrangements for those who can make use of them. It is, though, somewhat arrogantly London-centric to assume that everyone works in an office. But equally, it’s hard to fully get an objective picture of just how our cities are performing in these changed times. 

For the last four months I’ve been working on a fixed-term contract for an industry association whose headquarters is located in the City of London. I’ve been absolutely loving going into the office as often as makes sense. That, though, is the key: ‘as often as makes sense’. Go back 35 years to when I joined Sky TV, then based in the West End, and I was in the office Monday to Friday, and wearing a suit and tie every day. Indeed less than ten years ago I was going into the Paris HQ of the telecoms company I was working for every single day without giving much thought to it (largely as I was living just a handful of Métro stops away and could even walk there if the mood took me).

The Internet age changed everything. The first time I had both my own work-supplied mobile phone and laptop was in the mid-1990s, where remote connectivity was more useful for business trips with the PR agency I was working for at the time. Dial-up access, at home or in a hotel room, was a faff and frankly more novelty than necessity. But over the next couple of decades remote working progressed from something you could do if necessary (for example instead of taking a sick day, or when you needed to be at home for a plumber) to the mandated instruction it was during lockdown. 

I started at my last company a month into the first lockdown in the UK and didn’t see the inside of its headquarters until August the following year. Even the ‘Great Return’ of 2021 seemed tentative. It took months before the so-called ‘TWAT’ syndrome became a thing (people only coming into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). Those who went in on Mondays or Fridays were either contrarians trying to make a point, or the socially awkward, preferring the peace and quiet.

If the Standard’s campaign this week is to be believed, TWATs are still a thing. There’s no doubt that my place of work is quieter on Mondays and quieter still on Fridays , which calls into question the financial logic of renting large commercial office spaces in central London on days like that. But on Tuesdays, increasing through Wednesdays until Thursdays when it is packed, the place is genuinely buzzing with bodies. Desks need to be booked in advance and heaven help anyone needing a meeting room without reserving one first.

Along with the Victorian Pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his absurd pass-agg campaign to get civil servants back into Whitehall post-Covid (when he held the hilariously oxymoronic post of Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency), the most vocal proponents of returning to five-days-a-week in-office working have been the CEOs of large commercial banks. On my own evidence, working in the City, the pubs and bars I walk past appear to be well populated by laddish banker bros quaffing pints at various times of their stressed out days. “Coming together fosters better collaboration and teamwork, enabling us to better serve our clients,” Andrea Rossi, CEO of the City fund M&G told the Evening Standard. Banks have been the most belligerent on this issue, but in-person attendance in other sectors has suffered. “Of course I would prefer to see people, have them in the office,” top advertising industry executive Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of S4 Capital said this week. “It helps in terms of one-to-one creativity”.

Maybe the City of London, where I am currently based, is not reflective of the rest of the capital, or indeed the country. But I certainly haven’t noticed much of the reported deadening of commuter traffic into London on Mondays and Fridays. The Evening Standard kicked off its campaign this week by reporting new travel data which showed that the capital’s three main commuter railway networks – South Western, Southeastern and Thameslink – are carrying 22 million fewer passengers each month than four years ago. “We are not seeing the level of people commuting five days a week that we saw pre-Covid,” Angie Doll, chief executive at GoVia Thameslink Railway, said. “We are seeing people commute on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – and that pattern is absolutely set now. I can’t see that changing again.”

This doesn’t exactly stack up in my own experience: travelling at peak-time from south-west London, even on Mondays and Fridays you’re lucky to get a seat on the 0740 to Waterloo, and on every other day of the working week you’re packed in like sardines. Of course, train strikes make the decision on whether to work at home or not a lot more simpler for those who are able to use the option. 

South Western, one of the largest carriers of commuters from the outer suburbs and southern shires, noted to the Standard that its passenger demographic meant that more were likely to be in senior professional jobs where they could work from home should they choose to (and, I would hazard a guess, have the sort of salaries that put them further outside of London), are more likely to work in senior positions or belong to the managerial classes than other train companies. In other words, they are more likely to have the ability and authority to work from home.

“We have not given up on the weekly commute,” SWR’s customer and commercial director Peter Williams told the Standard. “But commuters are telling us that their travel patterns are fixed in the short term. But there are nuances. Younger people show more willingness to get into the office. It’s important for them to build their profile — and to socialise after work. There are also some employers who hope that at some point they’re able to coax their colleagues into the office more frequently. But with the cost of living pressures, they don’t feel that now is the right time to be insisting on that.”

Which brings us to the notion of ‘hybrid’ working. As someone who has been looking for a permanent job since March, I’ve noticed the amount of hybrid work being advertised. In fact, at one company I interviewed with, its Cambridge office was there largely for collaborative needs when required, and even those who lived locally worked from home on more days of the week than they came in.

Workplace flexibility is clearly here to stay. Many with children or caring responsibilities have found it a boon, as have those whose salaries haven’t kept up with the cost of commuting (not just the price of a return ticket, once you add in the coffees, Pret lunches and all the other ancillary costs that come from leaving the house each morning).

Personally, I love going into the office of my current employer. The work itself is so much more rewarding when you have colleagues to bounce ideas off. Waiting for an e-mail reply or a WhatsApp response is just not the same as walking across to someone’s desk and asking them something. According to research by the Office Group, some 83% of workers would prefer working from some form of company premises than working remotely full-time. 

For me, it’s partly the social interaction but also - oddly - the commute itself. For the lengthiest leg of my journey by Tube from Wimbledon into the City I get a seat for its duration with which to read or listen to podcasts. The overall travel time of an hour each way creates a buffer between home and work life. And even if parts of the commute involve dealing with other people, their headphone noise, phone conversations and sniffing, it’s still a marked improvement on not seeing anyone at all throughout the day during lockdown. 

During the pandemic I had commute envy. My wife, a teacher, was going out every day to teach the children of key workers, which made me deeply envious of her ability to get in the car and drive even just a couple of miles down the road, seeing things other than the hedge outside our living room that was my vista for 18 months. Now, I emerge from Cannon Street station to be confronted with early morning life - people heading in to their offices, going for breakfast, grabbing coffee, being out there.

I don’t have a home office or even a desk at home, so going into company premises provides me with somewhere proper to sit at, a large monitor, hot and cold running tea/coffee/WiFi/toilets and, most importantly, people, as opposed to an over-attentive cat. When lockdown first imposed WFH on the much of the workforce, there were younger members of my then-team perched on beds in flat shares or kitchen tables at their parents’ houses. I felt sorry for them, missing out on the shared office experience that I’d had from the very start of my career. 

While it is nice to go in on a Friday when the place is virtually deserted, being amongst and around busy people making whatever contribution they make to corporate life is without substitute. It’s something those younger workers have lost out on profoundly, and will continue to so if they’re still not going in regularly or even at all. Productivity is, let’s face facts, not what it is when you’re at home.

There are other disadvantages to working from home. Firstly, it’s making us fat. Or fatter. A survey conducted by the fitness app MyFitnessPal has found that Brits consume nearly 800 more calories and take 3,500 fewer steps when they work from home - a not surprising set of statistics, based on my own personal experience. 

Mental health has also taken a battering, especially for those who live alone or with vulnerabilities. In its 2022 New Future of Work Report, Microsoft revealed that, while working remotely can improve job satisfaction, it can also lead to social isolation, guilt and overcompensation. At first, there were countless articles about baking banana bread and going for a spin on the Peleton whenever the opportunity arose, but the reality was that many home workers found themselves working even longer hours. As many as 80% have reported their mental health suffering as a result of being tied to laptops all day long, with human interaction facilitated exclusively by home broadband. 

WFH has also dampened spontaneity. Research by the reservation app Ambi found that 30% of working age adults felt that the pandemic killed off having fun, and that spirit has yet to return. It said that 40% of home workers in the UK found that not being in the office all week has made them boring - either not agreeing to ad hoc drinks after work with colleagues or even getting too comfy to want to go out with their own friends.

The Teams meeting experience...

I would agree with both: on multi-window ‘virtual’ meetings, with an array of colleagues resembling the opening titles of The Brady Bunch, it’s a fair bet that some will be distracted by their mobile phones, or e-mail, social media, web browsing or some other form of partial disengagement. We’ve all done it. We all still do it.

I recognise that mine is a metropolitan view. I can’t speak for those in the regions who might be holding on to working from home for other reasons. But as a general statement, over the 37 years of my professional life, I’ve always only benefitted from being in an office. Perhaps I’ve been lucky: perhaps, working in busy, buzzy newsrooms and for the last couple of decades press offices in corporate headquarters, I’ve been able to enjoy the banter, the exchanges of ideas, the arguments and disagreements, occasional bollockings and even more occasional praise that come with face-to-face working. I couldn’t go back to being perched on my sofa, peering into a laptop camera, all the time. It was a novelty once, but it’s not and never will be where I do my best work. And that is largely down to the fact that my kind of work thrives in a social and sociable environment.

It’s very nice to go trav'ling

© Simon Poulter 2021

The last time I set foot in another country - unless Scotland counts as one - was almost two years ago to the week: a cheeky trip to Palma for a dose of autumnal Majorcan sun. The trip also provided welcome respite from a mad 12 months in which I flew 52 times for a job that I ultimately walked away from. I hate to think what my carbon footprint was for the return on that time and professional investment. 

So, apart from our four days in Edinburgh in August, that’s been it for two years. No Air Miles Andy me - until this week, when I spent a few hours in Amsterdam to sort out some personal finance admin put on hold by COVID-19 travel restrictions. You see, while we’ve all been raving about WFH enabled by technology, some things still require face-to-face contact. In my case, a Dutch bank account requiring in-person attention because, even in the age of fintech, it couldn’t be sorted out over the phone. After 18 months, then, of being unable to do anything about it, I grabbed the opportunity of the current, potentially brief window in travel and burned off some of the Avios points accrued during my insane year of travel and popped over to the Dutch capital. As you do. 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: not very green flying to Amsterdam for just two appointments and then fly straight back again. Well, no it wasn’t, but it was also unavoidable. And, I like to think, unlike the hapless Manchester United squad who recently flew to an away fixture with Leicester City, a journey of 100 miles that could have just as easily been taken by train or coach (except, apparently, they wanted to avoid traffic on the motorway). I, too, could have driven to Amsterdam, or even taken the Eurostar, now the city has been added to its services from St. Pancras. But even with a relatively reasonable journey time of just under four hours each way, the logistics wouldn’t have worked without requiring an overnight stay, with more expense and unnecessary absence.

During that year of near-constant business travel I made frequent day trips to places like Paris, Munich, Madrid and Zurich, invariably taking advantage of London City Airport being only a short DLR ride away from Greenwich, where I was living at the time. The airport was built in the 1980s as part of London’s Docklands regeneration, transforming one of the old Royal Docks wharfs into a gateway for City bankers to jet off to Europe’s financial centres and return within the day. Like all airports, London City has been impacted by the dramatic turndown in air travel over the last year, but this week there was no shortage of young, thrusting types who have barely started shaving, wearing polished shoes and sharp suits, furiously tapping away at laptops as they prepared to fly off to meetings at the big accounting houses like E&Y and PWC. That said, you could hardly say that the airport was bustling at seven in the morning as it once would have been. Travel has understandably taken a back seat, and even though it is gradually being allowed to return - this latest half-term holiday has been the first opportunity for many families to take advantage of the relative easing of restrictions - it is still far from ‘frictionless’. 

Before the pandemic, my day trip to Amsterdam would have been almost as easy as catching a bus to go shopping at Westfield. But even just to visit the city for a few hours I had to go through a lot of rigmarole: first, a ‘fit to fly’ COVID test (£39 - ker-ching!) and pre-book a ‘Day 2’ PCR test for my return (£69 - ker-ching again!), upload my NHS COVID vaccination certification to the British Airways website, along with the fit-to-fly result, plus a completed health declaration form for the Dutch government and a Passenger Locator Form for the UK government. All of this so that someone could check that I’d completed the protocols. So far, no one has been in touch, £110 worth of testing later… 

I must admit, once I’d gone through the stress of securing all these tests and paperwork, the actual business of getting on the plane was quite easy. After satisfying BA that I complied with all requirements, my boarding pass was sent to my phone, allowing me to breeze through the electronic gates at the airport, and then on through the now considerably lighter-touch security screening than it used to be, thanks to the installation of advanced scanners that no longer require you to remove laptops, shoes and belts. Arrival at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was just as easy, save for the fact that we Brits can no longer wave an EU passport through the ‘e-gates’, now we’re outside the Schengen Zone (a bit like the Twilight Zone only less fun). Once passport control was happy with my reasons for visiting, I was on my way for the 15-minute train ride to Centraal Station in the heart of the city. The return journey was a little more arduous as BA’s app and self-service check-in kiosks refused to give me my boarding pass. Evidently not all the paperwork uploaded for the outbound flight had been replicated for the home journey, requiring a torturous wait for the check-in desk to open. I suppose this is the price to pay for any kind of foreign travel at the moment and, possibly, for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps, though, we in the UK have been lulled into a false sense of security by the relative lack of health enforcement compared to elsewhere. The travel experience notwithstanding, my brief trip afforded an opportunity to see life outside the UK for the first time since the pandemic took over the world. Although the British media has kept pace with COVID-19 developments around the world, for most of us the intensity has been in our own back yard. Seeing another city, another country, another people and how they took to, for example, mask wearing, was fascinating, almost from the minute I exited the aircraft walking through the airport and then travelling on the transport system it was notably reassuring to see that masks were de rigueur. There was similar obedience in Edinburgh, come to think of it. Just not on London’s public transport network, where COVidiocy remains stubbornly high. That said, the Dutch haven’t been immune to the virus. In a country of just 17 million people there have been 2.12 million cases to date and an estimated 18,000 deaths, though many believe that number could be higher. While I was in Amsterdam news emerged that the Dutch government is considering reintroducing local restrictions amid some of the fastest rising infection rates in Europe, an increase that was “faster and sooner than expected,” according to the country’s health minister, Hugo De Jonge. 

The Netherlands declared its own ‘freedom day’ at the end of September, ending all restrictions with the introduction of a smartphone app-based pass system, requiring proof of vaccination and a negative test to be shown before entering bars, restaurants, cinemas and other public venues. A month on, there wasn’t any noticeable skittishness in Amsterdam, and in restaurants and cafes customers of all ages and demographics dutifully showed their digital passes to gain entry. It was actually quite reassuring to see such apparent civil compliance. 

“After some early consternation, the majority of pragmatic Dutch accepted the [COVID app] pass as a means of resurrecting their social lives while shrugging off social distancing,” wrote the BBC’s Netherlands correspondent Anna Holligan this week on the BBC News website, in a feature in which the corporation’s journalists in Europe reported on the local approach to curbing the spread of the coronavirus. “When I've asked waiters or box-office workers if they want to see the QR code proving my vaccination the answers vary from ‘no, it’s okay, we trust you’ [which was my experience] to ‘we don't actually have the technology’,” Holligan added, pointing out that a recent study had found that around a third of Dutch cafes and restaurants are not scanning the local corona pass at all. 

My experience was mixed: one cafe made the pass voluntary, another asked to see mine, which I didn’t have, but did have both the NHS Travel Pass and another ‘health passport’ resulting from my expensive pre-flight test. Although not officially recognised abroad (though, since Friday, they should be now), the waitress who greeted me at one cafe in Leidseplein decided that she’d seen enough and had better things to do.

In France, the passe sanitaire has become part of daily life, and is essential to do anything, from entering a bar or cinema to getting on a train. COVidiocy, however, also varies across the continent. The BBC’s Hugh Schofield says that traditional French libertarianism has reared up in response to virus measures: “Of course there are people in France who object on principle to having to prove their credentials at every turn.” he wrote. “Every Saturday there are demonstrations in Paris and other cities, bringing together anti-vaxxers with libertarians and protesters against ’health discrimination’. Contrary to what some expected, though, these have not turned into a mass movement, and are dwindling in strength.” Schofield explained that implementation of the passe sanitaire has seen a rapid uptake of vaccinations, regarding it as the key to returning to some form of French social normality. More than 50 million French people have been totally vaccinated, including a large majority of those over the age of 12. Jabs have been incentivised further by an ending of free tests for the virus, meaning that for the passe sanitaire to allow entry to the bars and cafes that are central to French living, people have to show either proof of vaccination or a recent negative (and paid-for) test.

Compare all this with the United States, for many years my go-to choice for holidays. Next week the US opens up again to foreign visitors, but the Land of the Free won’t be quite as open as it once was. In New York, for example, proof of vaccination is required to get into hospitality settings, theatres, museums and other attractions. Masks aren’t required, but it is strongly advised by the city’s mayor. Chicago is different, with masks mandatory in all indoor spaces. In Los Angeles, proof of vaccination is required to enter bars and restaurants, and masks are even required for anyone over the age of two “in all indoor public settings, venues, gatherings, public and private businesses”, according to the local public health authority with rules covering all outdoor events and public transit. Masks are mandatory in Washington DC, and several states including Nevada, Hawaii and Oregon. Ultra-conservative Florida, perhaps not surprisingly, has gone in the opposite direction, with the state’s governor Ron DeSantis even threatening to fine businesses demanding proof of vaccination from customers. All thus in a country where only 57% of the national population has been vaccinated, although the rate of infection in the US is just 225 cases per million of population. Compare that to the UK’s 621 per million, in a country with 67% vaccination.

© Simon Poulter 2021

Back to my trip this week: perhaps the reality of life during COVID elsewhere were at their most stark at Schiphol Airport. In the 30-plus years that I’ve been travelling through it, it has always been a bustling hub, reflecting the historic internationalist Dutch outlook on trade and, therefore, world travel, but also the fact that it has always been a superior shopping experience. I used to joke that Schiphol was essentially a shopping mall with a runway, but last week, as I returned to its airside walkways in the late afternoon, I was shocked by how many shops were already closed for the day. Even some of the airport’s coffee bars - coffee being the lifeblood of Dutch existence - were closed. It was here that I saw for myself just how the pandemic has impacted travel. Like many other places, the Netherlands has suffered a sharp fall in tourists, with the national tourist board revealing that only seven million foreigners took up hotel accommodation in 2020, a drop of 13 million compared with 2019. Inbound tourism from traditional points of origin like the US and Asia decreased by 83%, but even numbers of tourists entering via the country’s open EU borders fell, with visitors from its southern neighbour Belgium dropping by 58%.

The statement-of-the-bleedin’-obvious conclusion from all this is that the pandemic has affected so many aspects of daily life that we used to take for granted. I won’t deny that the amount of business travel I used to endure was something of a privilege, but if one good thing comes out of this global crisis, it’s that digital communications really is a substitute for the expense and environmental impact of air travel in particular. But we can’t not travel at all. As the world debates climate change in Glasgow this week, aviation in particular will come under scrutiny again, especially given the fact that world leaders have all flown to Prestwick to talk about it. 

The world would be a worse place if we couldn’t move around it. Travel really does broaden the mind. We’ve missed having a week or two on a beach somewhere for the last two summers, the simplest of pleasures to provide escape from the mundanities of everyday life. Yes, there are plenty of beautiful places to explore here at home, but taking a plane somewhere should, also, be possible. For me, this week felt like a start.

Not working from home

Next week I will reach the landmark of having spent 35 years working in an office. Except, obviously, I haven’t. For the last 16 months – the entire time I have been employed by my company – I’ve been working from home. Like everyone else employed to work in an office.

Actually, my anniversary is something of a fraud. In my previous job I worked from home more than I did company premises (partly due to relentless business travel); in the previous company it was mandated that we had to work at a designated corporate site for at least three days a week (mainly, we suspected, so control-freak bigwigs could keep an eye on us); further back still, my job evolved while in-post from five-days-a-week in-office attendance to only going in when it made sense. That was just in the space of five years. 

For some, technology and different company cultures have made working from home nothing that special, but I appreciate that over the last year or so it has been brand new for many. My fiancée, for example, is a primary school teacher and at one point in the pandemic found herself going into school in the morning to teach key workers’ children in person, and then coming home at lunchtime to carry on lessons via Zoom. I think she actually liked it, but would be the first to admit that that classroom provides a tactile engagement you can’t replicate over webcam. 

Office workers, on the other hand, may have found the culture shift to ‘WFH’ a different matter entirely, to the extent that it has been a sub-narrative of the entire Covid drama. In essence, it has marked the nominal end of ‘9 to 5’ and complaints about Tube delays and overcrowded carriages as worklife became conducted in pyjamas and gym gear. City centres became apocalyptic wastelands, devoid of people and their cash being spent in sandwich shops, coffee bars, shirt shops and dry cleaners. Even Marks & Spencer has cut back on formal workwear, completely eradicating suits from some of its branches in favour of the ‘smart casual’ uniform of the blazer-and-chinos combo (ten years ago M&S was selling five million men’s suits a year. Last year it sold only two million).

WFH may have been a change for office workers who’d never before been facilitated to do it, but many people - freelancers, for example - have only ever worked from their kitchens and are quite happy with the arrangement. But, while I might be self-impressed by my own forthcoming gold carriage clock moment, ever since IT departments started handing out access via VPN (which, apparently, doesn’t have anything to do with underwear), working from home while still connected to the corporate environment has been pretty commonplace. I can go back 25 years to the first time I brought home a laptop and hooked up to my work e-mail using a very slow phone line. It was a revolution in my living room, at a stroke untethering me from the generational convention of ’going into the office’ and all that entails.

Picture: BBC

Covid unpicked that convention, and a working environment and its dynamics so brilliantly captured by Ricky Gervais in The Office and films like Horrible Bosses, The Devil Wears Prada and Office Space. I’d forgotten about most of all that the other day when I made a trial run to my own office - for the first time. It was partly out of curiosity to see what it looks like and partly out of desperation to escape the knackered sofa that has been my workplace since April last year, with me increasingly sinking into its un-upholstered depths. It was a Wednesday but could have been a Sunday, such was the lack of anyone else on my floor. In fairness, it was August and officially the office was still closed to all but essential attendance, but it served as a reminder that throughout the pandemic WFH has pretty much worked, and that enabling people to sit in their gym wear and have time to do the school run has not been to the detriment of productivity. 

Personally, I’m ready to return - to the impromptu coffee machine conversations, the sight of people other than the postman, to the commute and the lunchtime trek to Pret for a boxed salad eaten with a pointless - literally - bamboo fork. I’m ready to escape the Teams meeting regime and the view out of the living room window and the hedge beyond it, the cat and Sky News’ presenter rosta for company  And I am desperate to spend my working days sitting on a proper desk chair once more. 

It’s still anyone’s guess as to what occupancy will be like when our office opens next week, and here lies the new reality. There will be colleagues who have joined us since lockdown last week and who have never been in the office. Some younger employees, especially those who joined from university, will have never been in an office working environment at all, and have spent the last 18 months perched on beds in houseshares or sat opposite flatmates at dining tables. Office veterans like me will attest to the professional and social development benefits of being in a vibrant workplace, where decision making is quicker when you can just walk over to someone's desk. On the other hand, living just yards away from your laptop has improved work-life balance beyond all recognition. So hats off, then, to my employer’s very clear message that the notion of presence is over. In-office attendance will be largely down to a combination of personal choice, functional need and management expectations. Even the idea of a formal start and finish time has been relaxed, enabling those with childcare responsibilities to manage that before travelling in and again later in the day. 

Our formal reopening on Monday – two days before my supposed anniversary – will not be a wholesale return to the office life we may have known, but a dipping of toes in the water. Gone will be the expectation of everyone clocking on at 8.30, thus requiring hordes of deskbound staff to cram into the same Tube trains at exactly the same time. Gone will be the expectation that you even have to be in every day of the working week. In fact, it’s all about working out what’s best for you.

It won’t, however, be for everyone. A recent survey of American office workers by accountancy giant PwC found that WFH enthusiasm has risen throughout the pandemic, and that 41% of workers questioned in August wanted to remain at home full-time, a 12% increase from January. Even with July’s ‘Freedom Day’, Google mobility data - which tracks people’s location history - suggested that British workplace presence is just 40% of pre-pandemic figures (compared to 30% in the US and Germany).

Opinion in different business sectors appears divided over whether the return to the office should be made formal: technology giants like Apple, Amazon and Facebook have said that they would not expect employees back at their offices until January, while City firms in London have expressed a different view. Goldman Sachs’ chief executive, David Soloman has described WFH as an “aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible”, adding that it was “not a new normal”. Other financial services companies have adopted a hybrid approach, viewing the office as “collaborative spaces”, according to insurer Aviva, best used for creativity and innovation rather than rows of battery hens doing their e-mail. BT has said that WFH will not last forever, with the company’s HR director writing an official blog post yesterday stating that with the end of the school holidays it was time to return to the office: “Our offices will be the place our graduates and apprentices learn from more senior colleagues,” Alison Wilcox wrote, adding that BT’s sites also played a part in their “surrounding micro and local economies”.

The elephant in the Marie Celeste-like room, of course, is that COVID-19 hasn’t gone away. Employees at city locations will still need to commute, with public transport the prevailing choice. That means dealing with Covidiot anxiety, and the psychological stare-outs between the masked and the maskless on trains and buses. Office managers, too, will have made provisions by implementing polite conventions about wearing masks in lifts and providing socially-distanced desks. This might be mitigated by progressive policies not requiring mandatory in-office attendance, but as we head into the traditional cold and flu season, along with the start of the school term and an exponential increase in ’normality’, there’s nothing to stop the return to office life being thwarted by the Delta variant or other mutations. Some large corporate concerns have been understandably concerned about the legal risks of bringing people back to the office while the coronavirus is still on the lose, fearing the threat of legal challenges on health and safety grounds. 

There has also been evidence of in-office policies having some impact on loyalty. A survey of American workers revealed that 40% would consider changing companies if they had full-time office working imposed on them. Another thorny issue might be companies cutting pay for those who prefer to work from home full time - civil servants in the UK are facing the prospect of their London Weighting being removed, though this raises the argument that while the benefit hasn’t been necessary to cover the cost of commuting, someone has to pay for all that broadband and electricity that has been consumed by people working from home.

The months ahead, I suspect, will be more tentative than definitive. Time and personal confidence might be the determining factors as to whether a gradual return to the office is a trickle or a flood, or exactly how a hybrid approach manifests itself. While politicians push the idea of normality and freedom, it’s still too early to say exactly what “normal” is going to be. I had a taste of it last week with my day trip to an office, but despite the everyday regularity of sitting in front of a laptop, it was still an odd novelty, despite being a setting that I have known - mostly - my entire working life.

Masked anxiety

So there we had it: our first flights in over a year: to Edinburgh and back for a four-day break. The only ‘foreign’ holiday this year, as everywhere else was either booked or that plonker Grant Shapps has placed it on the red list, or the amber list, or the amber-plus list, or the oh-what's-the-point list. Or Iceland. And, yes, it wasn't lost on us that the train from London to Scotland would have been more environmentally friendly, but with exorbitant ticket prices for a family of four, plus a five-hour journey each way, we wanted to both maximise our budget and what little holiday we were actually able to get this time.

Edinburgh was, thanks for asking, very pleasant. So pleasant we got engaged there. Yes, I am now a fiancé. The things you do on holiday, eh? What was noticeable in the charming Scottish capital was, firstly, how relaxed it felt for a busy administrative city, and secondly, how well drilled everyone appeared to be under Ms. Sturgeon's jurisdiction. Call the Scots Nats upstarts if you will, but Covid-discipline was impeccably observed wherever you went, even by the vast majority of tourists. There really was precious little obvious civil disobedience when observing the still-enforced coronavirus etiquettes, both social distancing and mask wearing in shops, restaurants, on buses, and inside attractions. No one, from what I could tell, was abstaining on grounds of belligerence or twattery, and that made for a pleasantly anxiety-free time. Only the occasional tourist - who clearly hadn't received the memo - sauntered around indoor venues with their fizzogs fully on display.

You see, I’m a self-confessed zealot when it comes to observing the COVID rules. Despite having had two jabs and indeed a mild dose of the virus itself back in November, I’m diabetic and over 50, and bloody paranoid about catching this thing again (a possibility - even the double-jabbed health secretary Sajid Javid got it). 

I’ll admit that having a  compromised immune system is partly the result of my own misadventure, but I can’t help being 53. Basically it meant that the final leg of our journey back from Edinburgh, from London City Airport to home, was one tightly knotted ball of anxiety, as every carriage we entered on the DLR, the Tube and the SWR train was full of maskless Covidiots, looking back at my petrified eyes, peering over the top of my mask, as if to say “Yeah? What’s your problem?”.

To be somewhat fair, part of the problem is not necessarily ignorance but our dear Prime Minister. Ever since Boris declared 19 July “freedom day”, the wearing of face masks in England has been largely a matter of personal choice. How very doctrinal. This is despite warnings from the scientists - those people who, it would be decent to point out, know a thing or two - that easing rules on masks will reduce public protection. So with “personal choice” the most ambiguous health and safety stipulation you could make (I could jump out of a hot air balloon without a parachute or cut off my legs with a chainsaw - it’s all a matter of personal choice), it’s no surprise that anyone with an aversion to wearing masks, due to comfort, personal freedom or because being told to do something is not for them leads to people cramming onto our trains with their faces bare, breathing in and breathing out in crowded compartments with little concern for their own wellbeing and, more bluntly, mine.

This all stems from one of the few consistencies throughout the pandemic in the UK: inconsistency. And indecision. Boris Johnson appears so eager to please freedom-loving party acolytes that something as simple as mask wearing in environments where the virus can be passed with amusing ease can not be countenanced out of common sense, above anything else. It’s why London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has deemed that masks will remain mandatory when traveling on all Transport for London services, including the Underground, buses and trains. Not that he’s been able to enforce the rule, as our journey home the other night amply demonstrated.

“I’ve repeatedly made clear that the simplest and safest option would have been for the Government to retain the national requirement for face coverings on public transport,” Khan has said. “But ministers aren’t willing to do what’s right. I’m not prepared to stand by and put Londoners, and our city’s recovery, at risk.” He has since doubled down on that view, last week calling for mask wearing to be made legally enforceable with criminal prosecutions an ultimate sanction for failure to comply. Khan’s view is partly out of the hope that a bye-law on London’s transport network would partly reduce any further spread of COVID-19, but perhaps as importantly, it would increase the confidence of commuters like me in returning to the capital for work or pleasure, giving a much-needed boost to the economy. Sadiq Khan says that 86% of passengers do observe the mask etiquette, but that means that a sizeable 14% don’t, which is a problem as scientists have said repeatedly that masks only curb the spread of the disease if everyone wears them. I think we’ve lived long enough with the Covid numbers to know what risk that represents to public health. 

However, imposing such rules is still reliant on enforcement. Given the number of trains and buses operating in London, most of which now are driver-only (and in the case of the DLR, driverless), restoring guards as, effectively, enforcers, on the scale required would be problematic. Transport for London has some 400 enforcement officers already, but given the prevalence for some of London’s finer citizens to carry knives, you can understand the reluctance for confrontation. This places extra pressure on depleted police ranks to enforce what is at present little more than a polite request.

Picture: TfL

The challenge for Khan, however, isn’t just safety: TfL faces a budget deficit of as much as £500 million over the current financial year, having been severely impacted by the pandemic. As restrictions ease, Khan desperately needs people back on public transport. That said, there are already signs of private car usage increasing, and second-hand car sales have gone through the roof as people spend saved cash on used vehicles to get around in.

Back in Scotland - where Nicola Sturgeon has appeared to be one step ahead of Johnson throughout the last 18 months - the government intends to continue with the wearing of masks “unless exempt for special circumstances” until at least next year. “The law says you must wear a face covering in most indoor public places including public transport,” official guidance states. “The Scottish government recommends that face coverings should be worn when moving around when it is crowded. This is encouraged for busy outdoor events.”

In England, Boris has customarily faffed on the issue, conceding that “If it’s not mandated it probably won’t do any good” and that he “expected” people to carry on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces, which is hardly an imposition. Here, in the midst of all this, is us and especially me, the paranoid. The trouble is that the issue is now at risk of getting bogged sown in politics. One scientist worries that this will mask the actual point about wearing a face covering to begin with: “We know wearing masks, particularly in crowded, poorly ventilated environments, has a big impact on the levels of transmission that can take place,” Professor Clifford Stott, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (Spi-B), told LBC last week. “But also I think [that] wearing a mask is also communicating to others about a sense of responsibility, and I think that’s a key issue in mask-wearing now, unfortunately. It’s become almost a little bit politicised whether one wears one or not, which is I think a shame.” Stott is firmly of the belief that masks have had a “big impact” on stopping transmission.

In truth, according to the Office for National Statistics, mask wearing in England hasn’t changed all that much in the last month since the legal requirement to wear them in enclosed spaces was dropped, with figures showing that 95% of people were still covering their face when leaving the house. Our public transport experience, however, suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s an East London thing, as the majority of abstainers were on the DLR west from London City Airport, and then from Canning Town to Waterloo on the Jubilee Line. That degree of mask-free fellow passengers has done nothing to restore my confidence in getting out and about again. A shame after so many months cooped up at home (including three confined to the sofa following foot surgery). I’ve been desperate for freedom to return, but I won’t hide my anxiety at what I see as other people’s inconsideration and ability to comply with something as relatively simple as wearing a mask.

Perhaps, then, it’s just for me to deal with, but it does rub with me that my liberty can be curtailed by an inconsiderate few. Perhaps I should move to Scotland, where Sturgeon’s position - admittedly, not universally accepted - has at least been unambiguous. “It is my view that if a government believes measures like [face coverings] matter, and this government does, we should say so,” the Scottish First Minister has stressed. I won’t gloss over the fact that the overall numbers are falling, as vaccinations and so-called ‘herd immunity’ take effect. It’s true, too, that the R rate appears to be dipping, but with the school holidays in force, this may well be the ‘circuit break’ needed. 

Come the autumn, and the possible return of colds and flu as more and more companies open up their offices for the first time since March last year, the whole issue of travelling to work on public transport will come under the political and clinical microscope again. This, I’m sure, will put Boris’s chronic prevarication on the line.

Mixed signals: buying records on your high street

Barely a fortnight after Sainsbury’s announced that it will stop selling CDs and DVDs in the face of streaming services dominating media consumption, and just a few days after the second Record Store Day ‘drop’ for 2021, dear old HMV has celebrated its 100th birthday by announcing that it is planning to 10 new shops this year.

While this is hardly a raging endorsement of physical media continuing to enjoy rude health, it at least is a positive sign that the oft-predicted death of such formats is being kept at arm’s length. Sainsbury’s said that its decision was the result of consumers increasingly getting their music and films online, although conversely it added that it would continue to sell vinyl records in some stores, a reflection of vinyl’s hipster appeal amongst everyone from teenagers to the middle-aged getting back into the format and succumbing to impulse buying while out doing the weekly grocery shop.

Notably, Sainsbury’s supermarket competitors are continuing to sell CDs and DVDs, so the decision isn’t necessarily the shock headlines might suggest. There is no denying that CDs, DVDs and even Blu-ray Discs are in long-term decline: I’ve blogged before about the minor conflict this has placed me in, having worked for Philips on the consumer electronics industry’s launches of DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the company having co-developed the CD with Sony in the decade before, starting the rise of the 12cm ‘optical’ disc as a multi-faceted carrier of digital entertainment and media content.

But, progress is progress. The irony of all this is that the CD and its various offspring were meant to kill off the vinyl record, and yet that format has enjoyed a resurgence, with UK salesreaching 4.8 million in 2020. Indeed, the BPI says that LP sales will eclipse CDs this year for the first time since the late 1980s. “Demand [for CDs] has been following a long-term trend as consumers increasingly transition to streaming,” a BPI spokesperson told the BBC. “Resilient demand is likely to continue for many years, enhanced by special editions and other collectible releases. If some retailers now see the format as less of a priority, this will create a further opportunity for others, such as independent shops and specialist chains such as HMV, to cater to the continuing demand.”

While I rarely buy a Blu-ray edition of a film or a box set these days (I now share a house with my family and don’t have the space for masses of media as I had in my single days, so online services make a lot of sense) I do still buy music, with a combination of vinyl, CDs and digital copies, depending on my mood, collectability (e.g. special editions) and even whether I’m purchasing an album on spec, as opposed to a must-have I might want to have on display. I wouldn’t be the only one who sees vinyl collecting as much as an Instagram fetish as about music appreciation. I am also of the High Fidelity mentality, one of those middle-aged men who still derive pleasure from rifling through racks in musty independent shops staffed by ever-so-slightly intimidating cooler-than-you types. It’s an age-old tradition and long may it continue.

There is, though, still a place for the HMVs of this world. When the chain went into administration in December 2018, threatening anyone with entertainment media on their Christmas lists, it cast a pall over the future of buying and owning records. One of HMV’s attractions, from a mass consumer point of view, was that it made ‘supermarket’ shopping for entertainment easy, with multi-buy bundles (e.g. “2 for £10” offers) a cunning ploy to part cash for more than you might have entered a shop in search of. My CD collection is certainly the beneficiary of deals like that (along with regular holiday raids to American chains like the now defunct Tower Records and Amoeba, particularly during the days of more favourable dollar-pound exchange rates).

News that HMV will open 10 new outlets this year is a glimmer of hope on a couple of counts: firstly, COVID-19 has hit the ‘non-essential’ retailing sector hard thanks to high street lockdowns over the last year and a half. This has been accompanied the double- or even triple-whammy of media sales shifting to core online retailers like Amazon for home delivery convenience, along with the continuing growth of streaming services. Doug Putman, the Canadian entrepreneur who bought out the HMV brand from administration in 2019, and has since reopened 107 sites, has warned that the future of on-premises retailing in the UK is still not guaranteed.

Doug Putman
Picture: Joe Fiorino/Canadian Broadcasting Company

Putman says the government needs to urgently fix business rates, which are based on property rates but are notoriously slow to adjust to market levels, resulting in retailers and other high street businesses continuing to pay very high costs in the face of rising competition from online services with a lower cost base. “If the government doesn’t fix the rates, high streets are going to see a lot more vacancies,” says Putman. “Business rates just don’t make much sense. You can pay zero rent and not make a profit on a store as rates are too high.” 

As seen recently by announcements by Gap and other fashion retailers, in-store shopping is facing an existential crisis, and the pandemic hasn’t helped, even accelerating its demise. It is sad, says Putman. “Outside of the illness, when you look at people’s lives, a big part of that is walking outside and going to the high street and doing some shopping. When you see bookstores and coffee shops, and HMVs, closed and everything online it is not as much fun as it used to be. Hopefully people have seen this world where everything is Amazon and it is not all that great.”

Steven Wilson launches his album To The Bone at the HMV store in Oxford Street

One of HMV’s priorities will be to restore its flagship to London’s Oxford Street. The retailer opened its first HMV shop in 1921 when, as the Gramophone Company (which became EMI in 1931), it took over an old clothing shop at no 363. The shop was closed as part of the administration process at the end of 2018, but Putman has said he would like to find a new location in Central London. The prospects of that, however, amid continuing schism in both domestic and foreign tourism to London, might make it unlikely in the short term, given that the cost of commercial property in the city is driving retailers out, rather than drawing them in.

The other challenge for HMV will be market dynamics. While Sainsbury’s might be getting out of CD and DVD sales in the face of slowing turnover for the formats, others, like Tesco and Asda will continue to take “market share” by undercutting traditional music retailers - be it HMV or the independents. Industry writer Graham Jones has noted that supermarkets stick to a narrow choice of CDs from popular chart acts like Ed Sheeran, rather than back catalogues and more eclectic fare. Indeed, in 2008 Jones discovered an independent record shop buying bulk copies of the latest Coldplay CD from Morrisons, rather than wholesale from the record company because the supermarket offered them for less.

Speak to more hardcore music consumers, as opposed to impulse shoppers, and the love of physical media continues to drive behaviour. One of the pillars of CD and vinyl buying to begin with, over streaming, is the belief that it’s always available, a point that does suggest continuing Luddite sentiment that the Internet can go down, or that titles can disappear due to licensing windows ending. This conveniently ignores the fact that lugging 12-inch records and even CDs around isn’t so convenient if you don’t have anything to play them on. But there’s no denying the emotional bond that people - yes, like me - have to the physical format. “I can't imagine a world where media is not in your hands and not yours,” one seasoned consumer recently told the BBC in response to the Sainsbury’s news.

There are, then, two issues at work when it comes to HMV expanding, a little further, as it tries like so many other bricks-and-mortar retailers to remain afloat on the high street. Firstly, there is the inexorable rise of online shopping - regardless of the pandemic - which is a convenience that is now just an established fact. And secondly, in HMV’s case, there is the cultural shift away from physical ownership as the shift continues to digital.

“People obviously love going out shopping,” Doug Putman told the BBC this week. “They like touching and feeling and that’s something that online is not going to replace. He remains sure that the high street, despite increasingly gloomy predictions, will not become one long parade of charity shops and coffee chains, as so many have become. “I’m still very optimistic on the [HMV] business and business as a whole on the high street,” Putnam added. “I still think the high street is just something so special.” He has a point, but it’s one that flies in the face of convention, and that high streets have become centres of the service economy rather than the destinations of discovery they once were. I do know that if HMV were to open up round the corner from me I’d probably be forever in it, but I suspect that I - and perhaps my vinyl-loving teenage step-daughter - would be the exception.

A Gap in the market

Picture: Gap Inc.

For most people living outside of the United States, the 4th of July “holiday” is one of those things they’ve heard about but have probably given very little attention to. Independence Day, to many non-Americans, is just a preposterous Hollywood romp about an alien invasion. To Americans, however, you diss it at your peril, especially if you’re British (you know, after the 1776 brouhaha, and all that…). Thankfully, the 4th of July hasn’t, like several American occasions - and I’m looking at you, Halloween - replicated itself here. But there’s no escaping the fact that pretty much most of our culture has, in one way, shape or form, been influenced by the United States over the last century or so.

 Of the top ten global brands in 2017, seven were US-based. It will not come as any surprise, either, as to who they were: Apple, on whose product this blog post has been written, published and promoted; Microsoft, whose software we make use of pervasively whether we know it or not; Google, without whom we’d know nothing; Facebook whom, without us, would know nothing about us; Coca-Cola who refresh us; and IBM, who largely led the charge of technology to begin with. 

Then there are our high streets: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Subway and Domino’s are all present in mine, and you can add Burger King and Pizza Hut to that list in most other locales. And then we have the American coffee culture - romanticised in Seattle in the ’80s, made fashionable by Friends in the ’90s, and now in more or less every city and town centre you can find, ubiquitous by the branches of Starbucks and their European chain imitators. America is everywhere. Its technology might rely on components from China, but whether it’s posting nonsense on Twitter, or ordering an Uber, one way or another, we are now somewhat enslaved by the US (and Silicon Valley in particular).

When I visited America for the first time (as detailed in my recent post about UFOs), it was partly to satisfy the exposure to American culture that had been a part of most of my life up until that point. As a child, the item of clothing I most coveted was a denim jacket, because Colonel Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man wore one. When I went out on my bike, I pretended to be Jon and Ponch from CHiPs. Z-Cars didn’t even get a look in. 

X marks the spot - Sun Studios
© Simon Poulter 2021

It would be a while before I’d come to appreciate the American DNA in the music I consumed. Little did I know or understand the blues roots of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, or what triggered Lennon, McCartney and Harrison to pick up guitars as teenagers. A trip, many years later, to Sun Studios in Memphis, and standing on the exact spot that Elvis Presley recorded That’s Alright Mama, brought it home to me: how so much of what I’d been consuming since first becoming musically aware, sprang out of that exact spot downstairs at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, with two pieces of black tape marking it.

Such is the influence of American culture - projected through its domination of entertainment and the window on the US world that Hollywood, principally, has provided, that secretly we want to be American. Why else would we spend more than $73 billion last year on jeans, the utilitarian garment of leisure and, increasingly (thanks to Silicon Valley), the office, which began life as workwear for miners in the 1870s in - guess where? - the good ol’ US of A. 

From hoodies and baseball caps, tracky bottoms to trainers (oh, alright then, “sneakers”), we’ve allowed ourselves to be dressed by America. Its clothing is cheap and functional, and for a range of generations, ubiquity itself. Walk through any shopping centre and mentally note how much American fashion dominates: middle aged men in polo shirts, fortysomething mums in All Stars, even the backpacks carried by students. All of which calls into question why Gap has so spectacularly failed in prevailing in the UK and Ireland, this week announcing that it would close all 81 stores in the UK - 23 by the end of July and the remainder by the end of September. 

On that first trip to the US, in 1992, I was like a child in a sweetshop on discovering Gap for myself, and then finding branches everywhere I went. For very little money (even less when the exchange rate was more than two dollars to the pound), I stocked up on American casualwear staples like jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts with logos. True, it would hardly get me profiled in GQ, but this was comfort food for the wardrobe. Over the next couple of decades, as my trips to the US became more frequent - both for leisure and for work - no visit would be complete without stocking up at Gap, especially as my weight fluctuated. Got thin? Throw out the XXLs and stock up at Gap! Piled on the pounds? There’s a size waiting just for you! Likewise with Gap’s sister brands, the even cheaper Old Navy, and the more upmarket Banana Republic.

Picture: Gap Inc.

When Gap opened up in the UK, it offered the same retail experience as its homeland, which meant that for those craving a bit of the America tasted on holidays to Florida, California or New York, you could replicate it here. The brightly lit, white-painted shops, the SoHo loft-style wooden flooring, the colourful arrays of smart-casual standards like chinos and button-down shirts, artfully but functionally arranged. The chain, which was founded in San Francisco in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher, proliferated outside its native America, eventually peaking at 3,800 shops worldwide. It, and its sub-brands, were an unmitigated success, driving fashion uniformity throughout the world. That, of course, was before COVID-19, and we all went online for our work-from-home all-day pyjama bottoms.

Gap’s disappearance from these shores will not be exclusive. The company is undergoing a strategic review of its own US operations, with nearly third of its retail base there being closed by 2024. Here, where its first UK shop opened in 1987, is blaming “market dynamics” on the retreat. In essence, its appeal has gradually eroded, as online retailers have provided alternative clothing ranges - some bordering on designer-level. Basically, it’s the same story that has afflicted other big retailers like Debenhams and Arcadia’s Top Shop, high street perennials, you’d think. 

Picture: Gap Inc.

Not everyone, however, is struggling. Just look at Primark, whose cheap-and-cheerful appeal was highlighted profusely back in April when the rules on ‘general’ retail outlets were eased, and queues for the chain were seen snaking round the block. Gap, on the other hand, isn’t disappearing for good in the UK: the company believes that its brand is strong enough for it to continue online. I’ve certainly found their webstore invaluable over the last year as lockdown coincided with my latest weightloss programme, requiring another eyewatering binge. 

My loyalty is, I’ll admit, the result of laziness, a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to part cash for anything more exotic. In other words, I’m in my ’50s. Summer’s here, and I need a pair of shorts. Gap has what I need, and I can’t be bothered with buying more or less the same thing from Marks & Spencer or Next, for pretty much the same price. Somehow, a pair of cargos from M&S are just not the same as a pair from Gap, where - when paired with a hoodie and a baseball cap - I can faithfully replicate that ‘American dad at barbecue’ look (which, if you ever attend an American barbecue on the 4th of July, will be exclusively attended by American dads in cargo shorts, hoodies and baseball caps).

Picture: Gap Inc.

That, though, is the key to Gap’s success - and its failure. It’s the shop you go to for classics, not to be on-trend. For unimaginative men like me, it’s where you shop to ensure you’re kitted out in the right uniform, the camouflage blend you into the background. That suits me just fine, and I’d expect the same story to be told by most of my peers. For women, on the other hand, the story might be different, and probably more detrimental to Gap’s fortunes. Women with a hankering for following fashion trends more faithfully have increasingly turned off Gap and found other, sharper places to buy their togs. 

Gap’s appeal - both from the clothing it stocked to the shops they sold it in - began to wain. Fashion writers commented on the quality of its lines dropping, and that, frankly, the stores’ Manhattan look becoming passé. On Sky News the other day, as Gap’s exit from British high streets was sinking in, one women commented that the chain had “stopped being relevant”. 

The comments were eerily similar to those which accompany the numerous schisms that Marks & Spencer has gone through, every time disappointing financial results are posted. Perhaps, in Gap’s case, people have stopped wanting to look so American...

Queasy like Sunday morning

Not being equipped with the brain cells for it, I rarely stray into politics on either this blog or social media. Actually, my intellectual heft - or lack of it - doesn’t really come into it: such is the No Man’s Land of embittered trench warfare these days that it’s rarely worth the blood pressure spikes expressing an opinion on anything. But the matter of Matt Hancock’s office indiscretion has left me properly batey, and on many levels.

Firstly, I get it that someone’s private life should be just that, private, and it doesn’t matter what moralistic view you take on the now-former Health Secretary’s affair with Gina Coladangelo, essentially wrecking two families and destroying two marriages in the process. But, as has been frequently stated over the last 48 hours, in times of crisis, we look to leadership, especially when that leadership is setting the rules about what we can and cannot do. So when that same leadership breaks those rules - and flagrantly so - we’ve got a perfect right as villagers to come out shouting, brandishing our pitchforks in a bloodthirsty manner.

I’ve not lost a close relative to Covid-19, but my girlfriend has - her stepfather, who lived with her mother in Spain, enjoying their retirement in a warmer clime. When his death came, only two members of the extended family could fly out to the funeral (which we attended via Zoom). To date, my partner hasn’t been able to hug or even be in the same country as her widowed mother. These are the sacrifices we’ve all been forced to endure over the last 15 months. The same sacrifices that meant I had to stand on my own 91-year-old mother’s doorstep for months on end, waving at her from two metres like friends separated by the Berlin Wall. 

So forgive me for getting all preachy about it, but Hancock, in snogging his mistress in the office as if sneaking off from the Christmas party for hanky-panky over the photocopier, deserves no sympathy or given a bye on the basis that ‘humans are humans’. I get it. Times of crisis, and the proximity that comes from spending long working days together, followed by the “who fancies a quick drink over the road” will lead to office romances. It has happened to me and it may well have happened to you. The difference is that in my case, we were both single at the time and, secondly, not responsible for imposing the most stringent restrictions on social engagement since The Blitz. And therein lies the crux of our ire over Hancock, who was unable to keep it in his pants while telling every else to.

I’ve always found Hancock a politician - amongst many - who seemed rather too pleased with himself. When Theresa May appointed him Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport in 2018, he took it upon himself to demonstrate tech savviness by launching his own smartphone app. “Hi - I’m Matt Hancock and welcome to my app,” he trilled on the opening screen, before inviting users to enter an apparently un-needed tool to showcase what the politician was getting up to, in his professional life, of course. “A chance to find out what's going on, both in my role as MP for West Suffolk and as culture secretary, and most importantly it’s a chance for you to tell me what you think, and to engage with others on issues that matter to you.” Perhaps, now, we know too much.

Just a few months after being appointed to the culture brief, the 39-year-old Hancock was made health secretary, a role which, when May herself resigned, gave him the ambition for even higher office, unsuccessfully contending the Tory leadership that put in power Boris Johnson who, as we all know, has had a problem with marital fidelity all of his own. It could, then, be said that Hancock was in the right place at the wrong time when the pandemic erupted. And, as the many wartime analogies have compared, there are few rulebooks that can be followed in times of real national crisis. But if there’s one thing that has run through Hancock’s political career - and the app episode exemplified - it’s breathtaking hubris. 

On Friday, after The Sun had broken its front page story of Hancock’s “steamy clinch” with Ms. Coladangelo, the line being put out was that his priority was driving the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and getting the country back to normality. This was the same line that Hancock brazenly used to deflect attention when Dominic Cummings’ explosive spleen-venting during the Commons Health Select Committee revealed accusations of “15 or 20 occasions” when “Hancock” (always just that) should have been sacked for failures in the early weeks of the crisis. When Cummings published the infamous WhatsApp screenshot of Johnson apparently calling his health secretary “fucking hopeless”, Hancock continued to style it out with his insistence that he has the country to save.

Even yesterday, in his resignation video, Hancock chose to spend more time alluding to the great work of the department he ran, than apologising to his wife for the humiliation he had caused her. Body language experts have noted how his lengthy tribute to the NHS seemed more to do with reinforcing his political credentials for a future comeback than acknowledgement of what he’d done. “There is still an air of arrogance in his words, though, as he tells us ‘This is why I’ve got to resign’,” said social behaviourist Judi James, pointing out that he appeared to be “steering us to what he sees as the sole problem in his behaviour, rather than addressing what the public might see as a matter of disapproval.”

There was something somewhat crooked about the way Hancock had, last year, set a seemingly impossible target of achieving 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April, which he apparently did before the number plunged dramatically again soon after. It was one of the charges laid at Hancock during Cummings’ explosive testimony. “In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely, because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.” The veracity of all of Cummings’ claims remain to be fully verified, but the accusations over PPE procurement, care homes and even, today in the Sunday Times, allegations that Hancock used his private e-mail account for official government business in breach of strict transparency rules, all start pointing to a “narcissistic and slippery health secretary”, as one source described him to the same newspaper’s Tim Shipman.

No doubt, as with all the political turbulence surrounding Boris Johnson’s government in recent weeks - notably his own travails involving wallpaper and his now-wife’s influence - much of this chatter about Hancock’s conduct will get brushed off by the spin machine as Westminster “rough-and-tumble”. It has, though, become far too easy to just dismiss sleaze as of interest only to the wonks who report on such stuff from within the SW1 bubble. Johnson himself was said to be reluctant to sack Hancock on Friday, and even in accepting his health secretary’s resignation yesterday he gave a glowing endorsement of the minister’s achievements, concluding: “Your contribution to public service is far from over,” depressingly hinting at some sort of return - the equivalent of saying “lay low for 12 months, son, we’ll come and get you when this is all over”. 

Johnson doesn’t do sackings, largely because he abhors being told what to do by the very press he, as a former journalist, was once a part of. Another theory is that Boris has assembled such a lightweight Cabinet that any changes are an admission of his own failure of leadership. With such anaemic opposition at the moment, Johnson can probably afford to let Hancock’s departure go without too much exposure, especially while he still has inadequates like Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel and Grant Shapps on his front bench to act as lightning conductors. The problem for Johnson is that each episode that he manages to brush off - as Hancock had done - as Westminster life erodes from within. The wisdom is that Johnson’s premiership is somewhat Teflon-coated because of the vaccine rollout, but there are signs of exasperation within his own party that the gaffes and own goals are, like coastal erosion, gradual and mostly invisible, but could prove problematic down the line. On Friday, Johnson was backing Hancock, saying that his health secretary had apologised and that the matter was then “closed”. Yesterday, however, that support started to disappear from within the cabinet and the parliamentary Conservative party, in a manner that didn’t even occur when Cummings himself scored an enormous reputational own goal for the coronavirus response by driving his family to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’.

Friday’s front-page splash by The Sun detailing Hancock’s extra-marital relationship with the now famous “Hands. Face. Arse.” CCTV image couldn’t have had worse - or better - timing, depending on your point of view. A story breaking like that on a Friday leaves the weekend open for it to deepen, and thus it did, with the Sunday papers today diving queasily into forensic detail of Hancock’s relationship with Coladangelo, not only examining the legalities of their encounters during lockdown, but even on just how long the relationship had been going no for, how she became a director on the Department of Health & Social Care’s board, how she was sponsored for a House of Commons security pass, and even the fact her brother’s company enjoys a lucrative contract as a supplier of services to the NHS. Coming on top of other allegations about Hancock’s matey network - fellow horse racing enthusiast Dido Harding being put in charge of the patchy £37 million Test & Trace programme, for example - it all points to a ministerial culture lacking rigour and due process. In his blog testimonies, Cummings has accused government departments of using such oversight to thwart efforts to secure things like PPE at speed. He hasn’t held back in his disdain for Hancock, either. This all might seem like more of that rough and tumble, but somewhere in the midst of the syrupy mire is a country starting to lose patience. Matt Hancock would do himself, and the country, a massive favour by disappearing from public view for a very long time. Perhaps apologising to his wife would be a start…