Office parties can never be confused with work

Looking back on my longish working life to date, I am in no doubt that many of the most memorable moments occurred on nights out with office colleagues.

That is not necessarily to say the proudest or most glorious moments, but the ones that have become hardest to forget. There have been other great occasions over the years — my wedding, for example, other friends’ weddings too. But there is something about a work event, if drinks are involved, that tips it over a bacchanalian edge.

I would go as far as saying that if some of the scenes I’ve witnessed at office parties — to give them their proper name — happened at a social gathering in my home, I would be mortified.

That is why I find it surprising, as much of the country must do, that the beleaguered Prime Minister is betting his political life on the fact that the lockdown-breaking party he attended was a “work event.”

Just about nothing conjures up images of excess, and therefore completely contradicts the spirit of the draconian Covid curbs, like a work social. It is the very antithesis of the stay-at-home hairshirt of the pandemic messaging.

As a former journalist, Boris Johnson perhaps more than most people will understand what a “work event” entails. As a one-time editor of the Spectator, he would have hosted such a function every summer in the magazine’s office garden, one of the most coveted invitations in London’s social calendar.

With its long hours and high stakes, the newspaper profession lends itself, or certainly did in its heyday, to a work hard play hard culture. By all accounts, politics does too, thus the preponderance and popularity of watering holes in the House of Commons.

No one from either of these backgrounds will be under any illusions about what constitutes a work event, although the line between work and play can get blurred, particularly in Downing Street, it seems.

Technically, the bring your own bottle (BYOB) do in the Number 10 garden on 20 May 2020, fell within the guidelines, said Johnson. This was because one of the loopholes in the Covid restrictions that he had imposed on the nation was work.

As the garden was used as “an extension of the office”, according to the PM, he was, strictly speaking, still at work. But most of us have had “extensions of the office” in our working lives and would have to concede that not a lot of work is done on such premises.

Some of us have even been lucky enough to have these “extensions” inside the office building, sometimes generously subsidised by our employers. I would argue that the proximity of the “extension” to the place of industry is inversely proportionate to the amount of work that occurs therein.

By this token, the Downing Street knees-up in May 2020, to which 100 people and their bottles were invited, was never likely to be very productive workwise.

And nor were the subsequent jollies, two of them, as we learned on Friday, held concurrently on the eve of Prince Philip’s Covid restricted funeral in April last year.

The government’s own lockdown guidelines made clear that “workers should try to minimise all meetings and other gatherings in the workplace” and that only “absolutely necessary participants should attend meetings and should maintain 2m separation throughout”.

These were guidelines that obviously applied to people at work. There were no corresponding codes of behaviour for workers getting together after work and outside of work because that just wasn’t allowed at the time.

Johnson thinks that if he said he was mingling with workmates then people will believe his work event was work. But most professionals, not all of them better behaved than journalists or politicians, know the difference.

Suggesting that the thing that happened in the Downing Street garden on that evening in May – or on the many other occasions that have emerged and continue to emerge – was anything but an office party is pushing one’s luck.

If we remove the “work event” euphemism, the prime ministerial get-out-of-jail-free card disintegrates instantly. “Office party” cannot be used seriously as a defence in any circumstances, let alone those so politically perilous.

The office party – Christmas, leaving, “lovely weather”, whatever the reason – is where decorum goes to die; the milieu of misjudged manoeuvres, dodgy dancing, and reckless abandon, where ties are loosened, along with tongues, tables are mounted, and last trains missed.

There was plenty of the above at the April incidents, apparently, and a broken swing too. Johnson may have been absent that evening, but precedents had been set, and it was business as usual at party central.

We might not have had many office parties, or work events, lately but a man of the Prime Minister’s past cannot have forgotten the formula: suitcases of Co-op wine, snacks, fellow workers, bonhomie.

When he crossed the Rubicon from office to garden that night, he knowingly passed from work to play.