The read-outs from this week’s Cobra meetings held to discuss the Russia-Ukraine crisis do not reveal what, if any, refreshments were available for participants, but it seems unlikely they were asked to bring their own booze.
These are work meetings. There are serious things to discuss. Anyone given security clearance to attend will not find much party spirit in evidence.
But what about the other “work-related events” that have taken place in Downing Street over the past two years and that are now, finally, being investigated by the police? Was this work or play, a bit of both, or some new hybrid and uncategorisable form of activity?
Boris Johnson seems likely to defend his perilous position in myriad ways. That, as allies claim, he thought he was attending work events (raising the question of why he did not halt proceedings when he realised they weren’t). That his (brief, perhaps reluctant) attendance at some of these gatherings was all just part of the job. Of course he had to drop in on morale-boosting parties and leaving dos, to say hello and thank his colleagues. Why, he didn’t even realise these were parties. Such was his commitment to the task of being prime minister that he failed to register that alcohol was being drunk, games were being played and that all of this ran counter to the restrictions he kept announcing in media briefings from his prime ministerial lectern.
All work and no play makes Boris Johnson a dull boy. And we should acknowledge that any useful definition of work must allow for the variety of forms that work can take.
In the past we might simply have described work as “the completing of tasks”. Work is about getting stuff done. In this simple framing, you are either working or you are not. Productivity has to do with output, and quantifying what you have done. In the context of manufacturing and parts of the service sector, you aim to hit targets and deliver goods and services on time and preferably in full.
But clearly the nature of quite a lot of work has changed. The management writer Peter Drucker first started talking about “knowledge workers” 60 years ago. What does knowledge work look like? It might involve creative people chewing their pencils and staring out of the window. It might even mean going to the pub. All this could be part of work and lead to the successful completion of tasks.
This may partly explain why measuring productivity accurately can be difficult. Is work going on or not? And in an increasingly digital economy, what constitutes meaningful output? When does work stop, if it ever does? The push for a “right to disconnect” and moves to introduce a four-day week are both responses to the risk of non-stop permawork.
Work can carry on in unexpected ways. When lawyers and other professionals charge you for their services, they may talk in term of “billable hours”. This refers to the time during which they were working for you. And if your star legal adviser was thinking hard about your case and making a breakthrough while lying in the bath, then that was a billable bath. It was work.
Does this mean that the prime minister is in the clear, and that everything he did at the various parties the police want to investigate in fact constituted work? Not so fast.
For one thing, several of these gatherings seem to have been entirely social in nature. This was downtime. It was not work. Indeed, Johnson has already admitted that at least one of the gatherings should not have taken place at all.
And then we have to ask: what sort of work does Johnson get up to as prime minister? There are the meetings we don’t see – although some witnesses suggest getting him to focus can be difficult. There are a lot of photo-opportunities in hi-vis jackets, a lot of knockabout speeches that prove more or less successful, and there is quite a lot of phrase-making for pooled news clips. It is quite a performance. He seems to be enjoying himself at least some of the time.
But as the American writer and mystic Joseph Campbell said: “Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing.” Is our prime minister really working? It doesn’t always look like it.
For any journalist, this is pot calling the kettle black territory. And perhaps it lies behind the irritation (and worse) that Johnson provokes in his critics. He seems to be getting away with the sort of bad behaviour some journalists might also want to get away with, on expenses, and with a country house to relax in at the weekends. He is world king for now, and the fact that he enjoys it delights his remaining fans and is hard for his enemies to bear.
Now the Metropolitan police have some work to do. Sue Gray will hand in a complete report in due course. When their work is done, Johnson’s time at No 10 may be done, too.
His time in office will not exactly have been a non-stop party. But there has still been too much partying going on by far. “Follow your bliss,” the mystic Campbell also urged. Follow your bliss … but don’t take the piss.
Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre
