One of the few opinions I have that I’d actually go to war for is that work Christmas parties should not be allowed to be rescheduled for January. The idea should not even be floated. Before a number of people in Crocs send me aggressive messages on every possible platform of communication: I will allow a caveat only for people working in the hospitality industry, whose selfless sacrifice through December to keep me and millions of others fed and watered should be rightly rewarded with a weird early Tuesday lunchtime party, which ends up with at least one person paying the soiling charge for a taxi.
But the rest of us: no. It’s December or nothing. “Oh, but we couldn’t get it booked in time” – sack your HR person, then, whose only actual job is to get that done. “Oh, but it’s slightly cheaper if we book it for January” – no, not allowed. If your staff aren’t worth the £35 a head, then you, simply, cannot afford your staff. I do not want to see a scrap of tinsel in the first month of the year! I don’t want to see anyone wearing a Santa hat and pretending they still want to eat a mince pie! January is for shell shock, sobriety and a weird eight-day period where you tell yourself you’re “getting really into juice, now, actually” before putting the blender away for ever. Nothing else.
I do recognise this opinion is absurd, stupid and the symptom of a dangerously failing mind (if you’re short on time you can also just read this as “being British”). The point is, as the past week of politics has proved, that the work Christmas party is oddly holy in this country. To recap, last December – around the time that families said goodbye to their loved ones with socially distanced funerals, while grandparents waved at their new grandchildren through windows and a late-in-the-day tiered lockdown ruined Christmas for many – a select group of Conservatives we now know, were partying hard. Various alleged events included a 40-person shindig at Downing Street involving a Secret Santa and a Zoom quiz hosted by Boris Johnson.
Often as I drift off to sleep, I idly imagine what hell (which is surely where I’m going) will look like for me. The answer now is this: it’s me eating a small piece of cheese with Rishi Sunak while Boris Johnson uneasily reads quiz questions his aides have prepared for him, forever. Dominic Cummings keeps jostling up to ask if I want to go on a cashpoint run. Laura Kuenssberg keeps laughing at her phone. And, ah don’t – don’t turn around. Matt Hancock’s been trying to catch my eye all evening. I told him about face filters and now he won’t stop doing selfies.
If we lived in a real country, this scandal – the government brazenly breaking the restrictions it itself enforced, then aides laughing about it at a faux press conference a couple of days later – would have been enough to cause some shift in power. But instead what happened was: Carrie Johnson emitted a baby, Allegra Stratton sobbed outside her house for a bit, and Keir Starmer did one of those curious anti-zingers of his, like a deputy head doing standup at a teachers’ talent show then never coming back for spring term. Now we have to wait until the next scandal, which I have set for about six weeks’ time.
But what’s unique about this one is it’s the first time in two years of catastrophe and 11 years of horror that the Tories have misjudged the importance of a number of this country’s sacred cows. It’s this – not, say, the number of preventable deaths, or the various chummy contracts scandals, or the way every single parent with a child in school has just had to resign themselves to getting phenomenally ill this winter – that has threatened them the most. So, for example: as has been pointed out, fairness in this country is the idea that everyone is miserable at the same time, so it rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way that some Tory MPs laughed and ate cheese while we had to sit at home and watch those “It’s been a tough year” Christmas adverts with none of our family.
And, as proven by the fact that even the country’s finest thinkers have extreme opinions about Christmas parties (see my previous paragraph about Christmas parties), they are incredibly vital to the grinding ecosystem of working for a living, even the crap ones. More evidence that the shock was really felt lay in the fact that one of the hardest disses that came the prime minister’s way last week was from Ant and Dec. Properly weaponised, Ant and Dec have the power to directly influence about 60% of this country’s swing voters. Lose Ant and Dec, I’ve always thought, and you lose the country.
But sadly, I think this brush with the raw edge of the British psyche will, in the long run, galvanise the Tories. They can see just how close they came to stepping on a cultural landmine, and they will be especially careful about not doing it again.
Without this uproar, Boris Johnson might have blundered blindly into his next affront to the bedrock of our culture – calling a press conference to say “cauliflower cheese definitely belongs on a roast dinner”, getting photographed putting his milk in first while making a clumsy round of teas for NHS workers and so on. Instead he’ll be on his best behaviour, right up until Priti Patel mobilises her Border Force to boot the door of Downing Street in and stages a coup.
It would have been nice if this year ended in the cosmic joke of Britain having to find its fourth leader in five years because of a Christmas party. Instead, people are just incredibly disgruntled about it and nothing significant will happen as a result. 2021, frankly, in a nutshell.
Joel Golby is a writer for the Guardian and Vice and the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
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