It’s the addiction that binds us all together: young, old, rich, poor, the dabblers and the ones who can’t keep themselves from going back for more. It’s a multimillion-dollar industry that brings in an estimated £400,000 a day – and it has hit the headlines again because it turns out that a British MP was indulging while at a parliamentary hearing on the future of work and pensions. Of course, I’m talking about Candy Crush. Tory MP Nigel Mills was photographed switching pieces of brightly coloured candy around his iPad screen for entertainment during a meeting on pensions reform.
Personally, my favourite part of this charade is the fact that, when questioned about his actions, Mills regretted them with all the sincerity of a 10-year-old caught extracting ice pops from the freezer drawer. “I probably had a game or two,” he shrugged. “I shall try not to do it in the future.”
It is hard to resist the call of candy, Nigel, and all we ask is that you try. But I have to say, my sympathies lie with your brazen expression of boredom: a meeting on the financial nuances of pension changes that stretches beyond two and a half hours really does seem cruel. And, lest we forget, you did ask four questions during the proceedings that were relevant to your own constituents. Considering that none of these concerned bonbons, liquorice all-sorts or concerned citizens called Mr Toffee, we can safely assume that you’re still ranking the residents of Derbyshire above the residents of Candy Kingdom, whatever the Daily Mail might think.
Most of us have found our minds wandering in important meetings, and I do find it difficult to feel any genuine anger towards Mills for getting caught out. After all, David Cameron himself has announced before that he likes to relax in front of a game of Angry Birds after a long day pontificating from No 10, so maybe Mills just thought he was following his prime minister’s lead.
Modern life is a constant battle against boredom, one that we begin at the back of the class in triple maths or asking “Are we there yet?” in the car behind our exasperated parents and end in a nursing home, scraping around for activities that will occupy our wandering thoughts. All too often human minds are the square pegs shoved into the round holes of overstretched meetings, endless smallprint, monotonous journeys and unnecessary minor injustices. Candy Crush and its ilk exist because most of us inhabit a daily life and career where the majority of our activities are boring enough to send a person trawling the internet for another humorous listicle just to stem the tide of ennui threatening to permanently engulf us.
Is this indicative of a wider problem with MPs concerning honesty, integrity, arrogance and accountability? I doubt it. Instead, it’s indicative of the average person’s attention span when pitted against a meeting high on bureaucratic necessities and low on House of Cards-esque political wrangling and creation of reform. Let us not forget that Caroline Nokes, a Tory MP elsewhere, once texted her lover from inside the chamber claiming that she was “bored to death” before meeting him for a hotel-room quickie, despite attempting to woo Christian voters at the time with her claims that extramarital affairs were wrong. Demonstrating those levels of hypocrisy is, perhaps, cause for concern. But as far as scandals go, Nigel Mills’s slip-up with Candy Crush is really quite – well – sweet.
