“Oh my God,” I said to my wife as I prepared to fall asleep in traditional British style, with my laptop open on the bed and some movie news. “Is there a new Bridget Jones movie coming out?”
Yes, there is, she said.
Good old Bridget! I said to myself, as I lay in the arms of Morpheus.
Still, huh? I mused.
It seems that our heroine, after 30 years, will continue to search hard for a boyfriend in Mad About The Boy. My eyes closed, but I had the clear impression that this time she would get it.
Amazing, I thought sleepily, when you think about his age (surely 55 or older?), and when you consider how much more difficult everything has become.
When Bridget Jones began chronicling her romantic struggles in 1995, she struck a chord with millions of people, especially women, who couldn’t find the right partner.
They wanted love, they wanted happiness, and all things being equal, they probably wanted to get married and even have children. Bridget Jones’s tragicomic situation was that she was smart, funny, attractive, and yet she couldn’t find the right man.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock,” her friends would tell her at dinner parties, in a frightening tone, to remind her that she might only have a few years of fertility left. Since then, the obstacles have become even greater.
If you’re a professional woman like Bridget – who, in the stories, is a television news producer – you have to think about the exorbitant costs of childcare, which have been steadily increasing as a proportion of income. If you’re a couple hoping to get married and settle down, you have to think about the cost of housing, which is even higher than it was in 1995.
When Bridget Jones first fell in love with Darcy, house prices were four or five times the average income. Now they are twice as high, and in London they are about fourteen times higher. No wonder people are having children later and later, and no wonder there has been such a big drop in reproduction.
In 2022, the country saw a 3.1 per cent drop in the birth rate, with the number of live births in Britain falling to 605,479 – the smallest figure, as a proportion of the total general population, since records began in the 1930s.
It’s no wonder that, given the difficulties and expenses, the younger generation seems so apathetic to the idea of having a family. A recent survey of millennials found that 38% of them think having children is too expensive and 31% are simply not interested.
As a member of the last generation of baby boomers, I feel sorry for these young people. We should do everything in our power to help them. We should, above all, fix the housing market in this country. It was a tragedy that we, the Conservatives, watered down our excellent planning bill (after I left) out of fear of the elderly Nimbies with Liberal Democrat leanings.
Starmer’s approach is utterly pointless – abandoning brownfields in metropolitan areas in favour of dividing up the countryside. It won’t work and it won’t provide the new homes these young people need. And there is another disadvantage facing younger generations, a phenomenon that was more or less unknown in 1995. When Bridget Jones began confiding to the rest of us her search for a soul mate, she at least had somewhere to look. Like any other mammal, she had a habitat in which she could be sure of finding breeding partners.
She had an environment with a reasonable number of straight, confident, intelligent men who found her attractive. She had an office!
And now, look! Since the Covid pandemic, the country has fallen into the hopeless narcolepsy of “working from home”. Like the property market, like planning laws, this all seems to be a conspiracy against the interests of young people. Of course, it’s fine for people like me, who have already been through all kinds of careers. I love “working” from home.
In the course of researching this article, I read 100 pages of Robert Harris’ latest (fantastic) novel, went down to the fridge to eat my own plum jam, drank several cups of coffee, watched about 15 YouTube videos about extreme skiing, and generally snuck around and procrastinated in my socks, in a way that would be completely impossible in an office.
I think that’s fine now, but would it have been fine when I was in my 20s or 30s? It would have been a disaster and a terrible missed opportunity.
When Bridget Jones first fell in love with Mr Darcy, house prices were roughly four or five times the average income, writes Boris Johnson. Now they are twice as high.
When I was in my early twenties, I spent almost a whole year in an office, sitting next to WF (Lord) Deedes, the former Conservative cabinet minister and editor of the Daily Telegraph; we talked, off and on, every day. I listened to him pry stories out of people, to how he booked their lunches in the Strand. I saw his charm and his genius.
I received an education, in life and style, that would have been utterly impossible had I been stuck, like so many young people today, on a Zoom call in my broom closet apartment.
You can do all sorts of things from home, and you can certainly watch Arsenal from home, my dear Starmer, rather than accepting a huge gift from a company you are trying to regulate. Try it, Starmer. It’s called TV. They have replays of the action. It’s amazing.
What you can’t do at home is recreate the energy and enthusiasm of the office, and especially the competitive spirit that produces new ideas.
Labour seems determined to get everything wrong during its first 100 days in power: public sector pay rises that outpace inflation and new anti-business laws on employment and workers’ rights that represent a frontal attack on UK productivity.
In the same way that companies like Amazon have decided that enough is enough and are calling their employees back to the office, the Labour Party is going in the wrong direction. They are going to legislate in favour of working from home. They are going to make it impossible for bosses to contact employees outside of working hours.
They don’t seem to understand how the UK economy works, or how London became the biggest city on the planet. It depends on activity, on the exchange of ideas, on full offices, full bars, full restaurants. The UK metropolitan economy is a great cyclotron of talent, producing flashes of inspiration, and the necessary collisions won’t happen if all the subatomic particles work from home.
Working from home may be acceptable for older generations, but for young people, who need to go to the office, it is a farce, a trap and an illusion. If current birth rates are anything to go by, teleworking is also proving to be totally unromantic.
I don’t think Mother Nature will tolerate this. She’ll want young people back in the office for all sorts of good evolutionary reasons, and if older people want to keep their jobs, they’ll go back too.
