BORIS JOHNSON: WFH may be OK for the older generation, but for the Bridget Joneses of today it’s a sham and a snare – and they’ll never meet their Mr Darcy

“My God,” I said to my wife, as I prepared to fall asleep in the now traditional British way, with the laptop open on the bed and some movie news running through my head. “Is there a new Bridget Jones coming out?”

Yes, she said.

Good old Bridget, I said to myself, as I lay in Morpheus’ arms.

Still at it, huh? I thought.

It seems that our heroine, after 30 years, is still valiantly looking for a boyfriend in Mad About The Boy. My eyelids drooped, but I got the distinct impression that this time she would really succeed.

Unbelievable, I thought sleepily, considering how old she is (certainly 55 or older?) and how much more difficult it has all become.

When Bridget Jones first began chronicling her romantic struggles in 1995, she struck a chord with millions of people – especially women – who couldn’t find the right partner.

They wanted love; they wanted happiness, and all other things being equal, they probably wanted to get married and even have children. It was Bridget Jones’ tragicomic dilemma that she was smart, funny, attractive – and yet she couldn’t find the right man.

“Tick-tock, tick-tock,” her friends would tease her at dinner parties, reminding her that she might only have a few years left to have children. Since then, the obstacles have only grown.

If you’re a professional woman like Bridget—who, in the stories, is a TV news producer—you have to think about the exorbitant cost of child care, which is steadily increasing as a percentage of income. If you’re a couple hoping to marry and settle down, you have to think about the cost of housing, which is even more prohibitive than it was in 1995.

When Bridget Jones first fell in love with Mr. Darcy, house prices were about four or five times the average income. Now they are double that – and in London they are about 14 times the average income. No wonder people are having children later and later, and no wonder reproduction has declined.

In 2022, the country saw a 3.1 per cent drop in its birth rate – with the number of live births in Britain falling to 605,479 – the lowest number, as a percentage of the total population, since records began in the 1930s.

No wonder, given the challenges and costs, that the younger generation seems so apathetic about the idea of ​​a family. A recent poll of millennials found that 38 percent of them think having children is too expensive, and 31 percent simply aren’t interested.

As a baby boomer at the end of the road, my heart bleeds for these youngsters. We should be doing everything we can to help them. We should especially be fixing this country’s housing market. It was a tragedy that we Conservatives watered down our excellent Planning Bill (after I left) out of fear of the older Lib Dem nymphs.

Starmer’s approach is utterly hopeless: abandoning brownfield sites in metropolitan areas in favour of dividing up the countryside. It won’t work and it won’t provide the new homes these young people need. And then there’s another disadvantage that the younger generation will face, a phenomenon that was more or less unknown in 1995. When Bridget Jones began telling us about her search for a soul mate, at least she had a place to look. Like every other mammal, she had a habitat where she could be sure of finding breeding partners.

She had an environment with a fair number of heterosexual men who were confident and intelligent enough to find her attractive. She had an office!

And now look! Since the Covid pandemic, the nation has been plunged into the hopeless narcolepsy of ‘working from home’. Like the housing market, like the planning laws, the whole thing seems to be a plot against the interests of young people. Of course, it’s fine for people like me, who have had all sorts of careers. I love ‘working from home’.

In the course of researching this article, I read 100 pages of Robert Harris’ latest novel (amazing), went to the fridge to eat my own plum jam, drank several cups of coffee, watched about 15 YouTube videos about extreme skiing, and generally procrastinated in my socks – in a way that would be utterly impossible in an office.

I’m fine with it now. But would it have been fine when I was 20 or 30? It would have been a disaster, and a terrible missed opportunity.

When I was in my early 20s I spent nearly a year in an office next to WF (Lord) Deedes, the former Tory Cabinet minister and editor of the Daily Telegraph; and we spoke, on and off, every day. I listened to the way he smuggled stories out of people, how he booked his lunches on the Strand. I saw his charm and his genius.

I have had an education, in life and in style, that would have been absolutely impossible if I had been stuck – like so many young people these days – in a Zoom call in my broom closet apartment.

You can do all sorts of things from home; and you can certainly watch Arsenal from home, my dear old Starmer, rather than taking a huge freebie-cum-bung from a company that has you in the clutches of regulating. Try it, Starmer. It’s called a TV. They have action replays. It’s great.

What you can’t do at home is replicate the energy and excitement of the office, and especially the competitive spirit that drives new ideas.

It appears Labour is determined to get everything wrong in its first 100 days in office: inflation-busting public sector pay rises and new anti-corporate employment and workers’ rights laws that amount to a full-blown assault on productivity in the UK.

Just as companies like Amazon have decided enough is enough and are calling their workers back to the office, Labour is going in exactly the wrong direction. They are going to introduce legislation in favour of working from home. They are going to make it impossible for bosses to contact you outside of work hours.

They don’t seem to understand how the British economy works, or how London became the greatest city on earth. It depends on buzz, on sharing ideas; on full offices, full bars, full restaurants. The British metropolitan economy is a great cyclotron of talent producing flashes of inspiration, and you don’t get the necessary collisions if the subatomic particles are all working from home.

Working from home may be okay for the older generation, but for younger people who have to go to the office, it is a sham, a trap and a delusion. If current birth rates are anything to go by, working from home is also completely unromantic.

I don’t believe Mother Nature will tolerate this. She wants young people back in the office, for all sorts of good evolutionary reasons, and if older people want to keep their jobs, they’ll be back there too.