Indolent bureaucrats

HE coated it with customary jocularity. But in his interview with this paper on Saturday, Boris Johnson delivered to the cossetted civil service a bitter pill: working from home doesn’t work.

Yet all ministerial efforts to persuade officials to ditch their tracksuits and Pelotons and return to their desks have so far been met with defiant resistance.

The anti-Tory Whitehall unions splutter that they’re just as productive at home. What arrant claptrap!

It is ludicrous to believe the exasperating and farcical delays in issuing passports, driving licence and tax rebates are not connected to the insistence of indolent bureaucrats to work from their spare room.

If a sense of professional duty doesn’t persuade the cossetted ‘blob’ to get back to the office, will concern for their own health? A troubling Bupa study finds that it could take years for people to recover from physical and mental health problems linked to a sedentary home-working lifestyle.

Surely this might help to jolt our selfinterested civil service out of its featherbedded idleness?