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How many of the couples you know met at work? Quite a few, I bet.
Westminster is full of political pairings. Journalism is a hotbed, too: when I married my husband, we were both working at the same newspaper (though technically we met on a skiing holiday). And I’ve lost count of the number of teachers who’ve hooked up over a flirty staff-room cuppa.
It’s the most natural thing in the world, not least because you know you’re with someone who shares your values, interests, talents and ambitions. As long as you are both consenting adults — and ideally single — what’s not to like?
Westminster is full of political pairings. Journalism is a hotbed, too: when I married my husband, we were both working at the same newspaper. Pictured are Sarah Vine and Michael Gove in 2011
As long as you are both consenting adults — and ideally single — what’s not to like? Well, plenty, apparently, if you’re McDonald’s and you find out your chief executive has been moonlighting with another member of staff
Well, plenty, apparently, if you’re McDonald’s and you find out your chief executive has been moonlighting with another member of staff. Or, as they put it, has violated your business standards policy which states that ‘employees who have a direct or indirect reporting relationship to each other are prohibited from dating or having a sexual relationship’.
Fair enough, he is (was) the chief executive, and so perhaps should have shown a little more restraint than your average Joe. But does your head man falling for someone who works for him really justify getting rid of a bloke responsible for almost doubling the company’s share price in just four years?
Of course, we do not yet know all the facts, and maybe never will, but if it was as simple as two consenting adults getting a bit carried away, surely the matter could have been dealt with internally.
After all, Steve Easterbrook — a former Watford Grammar School boy — and his unnamed partner wouldn’t be the first pair to encounter passion over the photocopier (or in this case, perhaps, a Quarter Pounder. Who knows?)
Does your head man falling for someone who works for him really justify getting rid of a bloke responsible for almost doubling the company’s share price in just four years?
Either way, the fact remains that the affair has highlighted a whole new area of censorship of the individual, and it’s a worrying one.
I understand the need to protect vulnerable junior staff from the advances of senior, more powerful bosses. Any organisation would want clear guidelines to safeguard against potential abuse.
But this goes beyond that. Although we don’t know the identity of Mr Easterbrook’s lover, there is no suggestion of coercion.
So why the censorious response? It seems less like a company trying to safeguard its employees — and more an example of the strange post #MeToo puritanism that seems to be engulfing us of late. From the ‘shy’ Cheshire teenager convicted of sexual assault for touching a fellow pupil on the waist, to the hysterical reaction to the notion Boris Johnson might have put his hand on a female journalist’s thigh at a boozy lunch two decades ago, any hint of a physical overture is becoming taboo.
In seeking rightly to curtail the actions of a minority of wicked individuals, we seem to have pitched up somewhere in the late 1800s.
Time to give up the gong, Charlize Charlize Theron has called for the Academy Awards to be gender-neutral. Does this mean she’ll be returning her Best Actress Oscar from 2004?
Pretty soon, junior employees will require a chaperone when attending meetings, a sort of corporate version of the maiden aunt, complete with smelling salts and disapproving frown. Those upcoming Christmas parties will have to be supervised by specially trained sex-monitors intent on ensuring that only those with commensurate pay packets and equal status disappear into the broom cupboard together.
I find this a grotesque intrusion. Why does the fact that someone pays your salary mean they get to make deeply personal choices on your behalf? More to the point, how will anyone ever sleep their way to the top again if the boss is off limits? (Please don’t write in, I’m only joking.)
Surely an office romance is healthier than choosing a random partner based on their Tinder profile? Who cares if one of you earns more than the other? That doesn’t mean the relationship is abusive, it just means at least someone can afford to pay for dinner.
The irony is that at the same time as placing restraints on people’s private lives (who they love, their political opinions, the food they eat), organisations never stop reminding us how much they support acts of ‘self-expression’.
So we end up in the bizarre situation where M&S invites customers to choose ‘which fitting room they feel comfortable to use, in respect of how they identify themselves’ (in other words, a bloke can now use the ladies’ just by saying they are a woman), while a relationship between a boss and an employee becomes a sackable offence.
For most of us, the double standards of modern culture are an amusing inconvenience. But when they become an insidious tool of private censorship, we need to take notice. Because there is such a thing as the thin end of the wedge; if we’re not careful, it will open up an irreparable crack in society.
What did you make of His Dark Materials, the new BBC Sunday night adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novels?
The story takes place in a parallel world where people’s souls materialise in the shape of animal companions, or daemons. The idea is that they represent the essence of the human — thus explorer Lord Asriel’s daemon is a fierce snow leopard, and the perfidious Mrs Coulter has a cunning monkey.
Dog lovers, of course, understand this concept perfectly, since we are inseparable from our animals and they often come to resemble us in character and behaviour. My daemon, Muffin, is a virtually untrainable Lhasa Apso (above) who never does what she’s told, dislikes exercise and always has to be the centre of attention.
I simply can’t imagine where she gets it from.
Emma Watson has every right to live as she chooses — but ‘self-partnered’?
What on earth is wrong with being single?
I shall be consciously uncoupling from anyone who says otherwise.
Oh, the irony.
The white stiletto, that once-proud signifier of working class Essex womanhood, has been reborn for fashion A-listers — the Duchess of Cambridge, Victoria Beckham — and designed by stellar names such as Christian Louboutin (at £600 a pair).
What better way to signal your social superiority than to wear a shoe that makes anything more than a car-to-kerb teeter impossible.
The towering white stiletto is our equivalent of those impractical ensembles favoured by Marie Antoinette. Off with their heels!
It says quite something about the current state of mind of our parliamentarians that more than 60 of them are standing down at this election.
That’s equivalent to a tenth of the entire chamber — which, if the Commons was a business, would represent a serious crisis.
Yet I cannot help thinking, with so many leaving, that now would be the ideal time to carry out the much-needed boundary changes that aim to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600, and make constituencies more equal in terms of their total number of voters.
It’s over to you, (new) Mr Speaker.
Allelujah! The ‘woke’ police have been caught napping.
How else do you explain the issuing of new Christmas stamps depicting actual scenes from the actual Nativity featuring actual Jesus and the actual Virgin Mary?
Snap them up quick!
Allelujah! The ‘woke’ police have been caught napping. How else do you explain the issuing of new Christmas stamps depicting actual scenes from the actual Nativity featuring actual Jesus and the actual Virgin Mary?
They’ll be worth a small fortune when the Royal Mail withdraws them after a hail of right-on protest.
If postal staff are not too busy going on strike to ‘steal Brexit’ . . .
At last, some good news: the end of the excruciating ordeal that is the smear test, replaced by at-home kits that are just as effective but much less unpleasant.
While we’re at it, any chance someone could invent an alternative to the horror of the mammogram?
I know we must all be grateful for breast cancer screening, but there is something about having to stand half-naked in a room with your boobs in the medical equivalent of a Breville sandwich toaster that feels like a humiliation too far.
Why can’t Greta Thunberg just do it all via FaceTime from her bedroom like other teenagers?
A climate conference has had to be moved from South America to Madrid, and so Saint Greta of Thunberg finds herself stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
Oh, what a shame. Now she needs a carbon-neutral lift 6,000 miles from her current location in California. Or does she?
Why can’t she just do it all via FaceTime from her bedroom like other teenagers?
I mean, it’s not like we don’t already know what she’s going to say (stolen my future, how dare you, evil capitalism etc); surely it would be much simpler if she just did it down a video link.
Either that, or she could be beamed up to space in an orbiting satellite, to permanently broadcast her wisdom to a grateful planet.
Time to give up the gong, Charlize
Charlize Theron has called for the Academy Awards to be gender-neutral.
Does this mean she’ll be returning her Best Actress Oscar from 2004?
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