The Sunday Times May 29, 2022 19
NEWS REVIEW
tection to stop any vehicular incursion,”
says Bell.
Cliff Evans, treasurer of the Devizes
Rotary Club, in Wiltshire, is an ideas man.
He is organising the Devizes Jubilee Trol-
ley Olympics, with teams taking part in a
number of track events over the course of
the day. “We did a trial run in the Morri-
sons’ car park and controlling [these
things] is really difficult,” says Evans. The
supermarket is loaning them the trolleys
for the occasion.
“The teams are made up of a pusher —
someone pushing the trolley — then a
catcher, to catch the ball inside the trol-
ley, and a thrower,” he says.
He wanted to do a race where the trol-
lies were wheeled backwards, but that,
said the Rotary Club, was a step too far.
Back in Bromsgrove, the committee is
putting the finishing touches to the day’s
plans. “We don’t have any barriers to go
around the stage,” says Jules, “so that’s an
issue. We don’t want people just walking
close to the stage or putting the chairs
around it in case someone falls out.” Jo
has seen some barriers on Church Lane,
where they are doing some building
work. “I’ll ask if we can borrow them,”
she says. Jane, meanwhile, is going up to
her attic later to pull out the glitter and
pom-poms for the craft stall.
They may not have received permis-
sion for the laser beams or the insurance
for the drones, but what they do have is a
playlist. Jules was a rocker in the 1970s.
“We could have gone with an Abba trib-
ute, but we’re not,” she says. “We’re
going to be listening to punk instead.”
@MeganAgnewand Chelsea, full of grand townhouses
with big white pillars overlooking
Hyde Park, the Victoria Road street party
— a Morris dancer’s hop away from Buck-
ingham Palace — will have private secu-
rity.
“Normally we have a security organi-
sation going around the area day and
night, 24/7, paid for by a few house-
holds,” says Bettina Wagner, who is orga-
nising the event. “On the Jubilee they will
be checking on the empty houses, so they
are protected, but also seeing that every-
thing is fine at the party.”turned to new lows. Just
70,000 people were made
redundant between January
and March, a fall of 54 per
cent on the same period last
year. Since the “great
resignation” — when workers
quit the rat race for the good
life — those who stayed have
never been more in demand.
There are now a record
1.3 million job vacancies,
according to the Office for
National Statistics, a figure
that for the first time
outstrips the number of
people out of work. In short,
the data suggests it has never
been harder to get sacked. So
how much can employees get
away with?
In lieu of finding out first
hand — I have an appraisal inA
few months ago I was
on a stag do in Bristol
playing footgolf (think
golf, but with footballs).
At the seventh
oversized hole, a friend
wearing full Arsenal kit was
languishing somewhere on
the fifth, mid-phone call. “Is
he in the doghouse with the
missus?” queried one punter.
“Nah, he’s making sure his
boss thinks he’s busy,” said
another.
The age of the slacker is
upon us. Eighteen months
ago, job security was payslip-
thin and redundancies sky-
high. More than 400,
workers were sacked
between September and
November 2020.
Yet record highs haveAs firms struggle for staff, employees
are discovering how much they can get
away with. Tom Calver asks if we’re
becoming a nation of Homers
One group has
been filling out
risk assessments
for their
pantomime horse
Grand National
We’re all fighting over a much
smaller pool.”
Amid the uncertainty and
difficulty in hiring, some are
sticking to what they know.
The number of so-called
“boomerang” employees —
those returning to former
places of work — has risen to 5
per cent of all UK hires,
according to LinkedIn. One
US survey suggests a sixth of
managers would be willing to
take on anyone right now,
regardless of skill.
How employers assess CVs
is also changing. “It used to
be that you needed [several]
years’ experience,” said
Susan Steele, chief human
resources officer at Ocean
Technologies, a data
company. “Now people are
getting hired based on their
current capabilities.”
Ministers have queued up
to associate working from
home with unproductivity,
but is that really a feature of
the pandemic age? As Homer
Simpson has shown since the
1980s, being in a workplace is
no guarantee of productivity
— or competence.
“Actually, with so many
people remote-working, it’s a
lot easier to make sure people
are delivering than it was in
the past,” said Steele.Besides, economic output per
hour worked is actually above
pre-pandemic levels.
“If I wanted to, I could
instantly see if my team is
online,” she adds. “But
organisations are having to be
more flexible about when the
work gets done. Do I care if
they step away for an hour, as
long as that work gets done?”
Matteo Berlucchi is chief
executive of a health
technology firm. Unable to
compete with big tech
companies for salaries, his
company has instead been
offering perks such as
unlimited holidays. “What’s
changed for companies is that
they’re basically treating
employees like grown-ups,
when before they were
treated like teenagers,” he
said.
Yet he concedes this
laissez-faire approach does
not work across most
industries. Berlucchi is a
regular visitor to an upmarket
hotel in central London.
“All the Europeans have
disappeared, so you have
young English graduates
standing there, looking
puzzled,” he said. “The
quality of service has
declined quite sharply.”
@TomHCalverClock in — and slack off. It’s the
era of the ‘unsackable’ worker I’d take naps,
do life admin,
get a tattoo.
I didn’t care
food preparation job posted
on Indeed is up 21 per cent
from three years ago.
Ed Thaw runs Leroy, a
Michelin-starred restaurant
in Shoreditch, east London.
Despite paying staff more, he
has noticed an industry-wide
drop in standards. “It’s not
like there’s gross misconduct,
[more] things like coming in
and finding the dishwasher
not cleaned properly.”
But employers are
having to be less
picky. “Before, we’d
be willing to wait
until we found
exactly the right fit,”
said Thaw. “Now
we’re saying, ‘Well,
this is good
enough’. There’s
just not a big volume
of applications any more.cutting a cake with the
caption: “At work doing just
enough to not get fired.”
Few sectors are as
desperate to hold on to staff
as hospitality. The industry
has a vacancy rate of 7.8 per
cent, higher than any other.
Hotels and restaurants have
not only lost European staff
since Brexit, but many chefs,
waiters and cleaners have
changed careers since the
pandemic, opting out of
antisocial hours and low pay.
The job site Indeed has
been measuring the number
of clicks on ads. Interest in
software development and
legal jobs are up considerably
since the pandemic — yet
clicks on ads for cleaning
jobs, hospitality and food
preparation have all suffered
(down 41, 21 and 27 per cent
respectively). And salaries are
rising: the average wage for atalent,” she said. “Some
employers are having to be a
bit casual when staff don’t
turn up on time. They don’t
want to aggravate and
demotivate the staff they’ve
got, or rock the boat.”
Staff in some sectors, it
seems, are taking note. On
Reddit, another social
network, an “overemployed”
community that encourages
workers to take on two or
three remote jobs at once has
amassed more than 50,
members. Some boast of
securing combined salaries
well above £200,000. One
video post shows the Queentwo weeks — I asked my
followers on the social media
site LinkedIn for skiving
stories. Nobody owned up
publicly but someone did get
in touch to say they survived
for months at a tech company
doing the bare minimum.
“I went from working 70-
hour weeks at the start of
lockdown for fear of losing
my job to doing close to
nothing,” they told me. “I’d
take naps and do ‘life admin’
in the middle of the day. I
even got a tattoo. They knew I
didn’t care.” This person has,
admittedly, since left that job.
But are we really in the
middle of a slacking
epidemic?
Kate Palmer is a director at
Peninsula HR, which manages
40,000 clients ranging from
small garages to corporations
with tens of thousands of
staff. “There’s an acceptance
of things that weren’t
tolerated three years ago —
people just want to hold on toQueen of Our
Times: The Life
of Elizabeth II by
Robert Hardman
(Macmillan)
Finding a really
good biography
of the Queen is
difficult. She is
naturally self-
effacing, sources
remain super-
cautious, and
many of the
better books are
too old now. The
virtue of this one
is that it’s the
most recent. If
you want to know
where The Crown
got things wrong,
say, Hardman is
happy to oblige.Ma’am Darling:
99 Glimpses of
Princess
Margaret by
Craig Brown
(Fourth Estate)
The best recent
royal biography is
not about theQueen but a
sideways look at
the monarch
through her
errant sister.
Brown uses 99
snapshots of
Margaret’s life to
explore her
baroque
eccentricities.The Palace
Papers: Inside
the House of
Windsor — the
Truth and the
Turmoil by Tina
Brown (Century)
If royal gossip is
your thing, then
Brown provides
plenty in this
follow-up to The
Diana Chronicles.
There are no
earth-shattering
revelations, but as
The Times review
said, the book is
“clever, well-
informed and
disgustingly
entertaining”.Philip: The Final
Portrait by Gyles
Brandreth
(Coronet)
This biography of
her husband
allows readers a
sideways look at
the monarch.
Brandreth was
a friend of the
Duke of
Edinburgh’s, and
brings that
informal style to
this portrait. Fun.The Uncommon
Reader by
Alan Bennett
(Faber/Profile)
Perhaps the
best way of
approaching
Elizabeth is
through fiction.
Bennett’s 2008
portrait of how an
accidental
encounter with a
mobile library
changes the
Queen’s life is a
delight.ELIZABETH IN SO MANY WORDS
THE BEST ROYAL BIOGRAPHIES
NEWS REVIEW
At the moment, 170 adults
have bought tickets at £15 each.
Some of the area’s more exclusive
events have introduced wristbands to
keep out interlopers.
For some, preparations will start days
before the big event. At 5am on Friday,
the start of the Jubilee weekend, in Rust-
ington, West Sussex, with its thatched
cottages and pastel-coloured beach huts,
Pam and Celia will be up and baking: five
large cakes, a dozen muffins, a dozen
sweet scones and a dozen cheese scones.
“Pam and Celia have a long morning
ahead of them,” says Polly Revell, one of
the organisers.
The women, both in their seventies,
are proud members of the Platinum Club,
which meets two mornings a week for the
over-60s to share tea, coffee, biscuits and
chitchat. For the Jubilee party, club mem-
bers are looking forward to manning the
stalls in the church hall — tombola, guess
the weight of the cake, guess the sweets in
the jar, crafts, plants, books and
DVDs, silly games — after two
long, isolated years of lock-
downs.
Other, more scaled-up
events are hoping to draw
the crowds. As many as
3,000 are expected in Northal-
lerton, North Yorkshire, in Rishi
Sunak’s Richmond constituency.
“The princesses are getting here fairly
early,” says Graham Bell, who is heading
up the operation. “As are the classic
cars.” An amateur musical theatre com-
pany will also be putting on an original
production inspired by the Jubilee.
With so many people, there will be
stewards and security. “We have barriers
at each entry point of the event for pro-WHOSE PARTY
WILL BE THE MOST
HAPPY AND GLORIOUS?
the jar, cr
DVDs,
lon
de
the
3 ,0 00
lerton, N
Sunak’s R
“The princesse
early,” s ays Gra
J hules Evans regrets asking the
bands if they had any requests.
One group of musicians asked for
cream cakes on the hour every
hour all afternoon. “They are
good cake eaters,” says Evans.
The Bromsgrove High Street
Platinum Jubilee party next
Sunday has six bands and
an orchestra on the ros-
ter. There will be red, white and
blue candy floss, royal sausages
(high meat content, eight spices),
which the butcher “brings out for
special occasions”, and a lifesize
model of the Queen with her corgis
made entirely out of balloons,
which set the organisers back
£400. “I mean, come on,” says
Evans, 61, who by day works as a
chaperone for young actors.
“You’re going to want to come
and see that!”
Theirs is just one of the 2,429 pub-
lic Jubilee events taking place across
the country next weekend, with a
further 2,653 street parties and
private gatherings scheduled. It
is estimated that 39 million adults
will be doing something to celebrate the
Platinum Jubilee, compared with the 10
million who celebrated the Queen’s
90th birthday in 2016. These are
small groups of local people
who, after two years of the pan-
demic, are champing at the bitThey are
ys Evans.
High Street
ty next
ss and
roros-
andnd
gess
es),
forfor a right royal knees-up.
And what is abundantly
clear is that the era of
prawn vol-au-vents and
cheese footballs is long
gone. Today, with newly
minted Zoom skills and street-
wide WhatsApp groups, profession-
alism and paperwork have taken over.
The Bromsgrove group have been
planning their event for two years.
Evans and her team put a moratorium
on gazebos, because they must be prop-
erly weighted in order to pass health and
safety regulations; 500 flyers were
printed that neglected to mention the
event’s address; and they couldn’t get
permission from air traffic control to fea-
ture the lasers they wanted in their light
show. But now they are nearing the final
hurdle and on one of their last organi-
sational video calls, it’s clear the
excitement is building.
“Does anybody know a juggler or
someone who can go on stilts?” asks Jane,
one of Evans’s colleagues. “Everybody
is booked up,” says Jo. Four of the six
committee members have made it.
The agenda for each meeting is set in
advance and timings obeyed, to the best
of their abilities. Their budget of £15,
has been funded by the National Lot-
tery, the local council and private
donations.
Jane tries again. “A magician?”
No luck, says Jo: “Loopy, who used
to do all the magic stuff, our go-to guy,
moved away.”
Most local groups organising events
around the country started planning
months ago. In order to arrange a resi-
dents’ Jubilee street party, people had to
apply to their local council for a road clo-
sure. Public events in parks and on high
streets, however, like in Bromsgrove,
have to be licensed and insured and
undergo full risk assessments.
Decorations must not damage
street lighting or roads. Anti-terror-
ism security advice has been issued,
requiring everyone to come up with
an evacuation plan.And some organis-
ers have been told they are not allowed to
hang bunting on lampposts because it is
“not designed for this purpose”.
Ewan Jones, the mayor of Bruton, in
Somerset, reckons his team have spent a
total of 100 hours completing risk assess-
ments for their pantomime horse Grand
National (one person at the front, the
other at the back) in the park.
“We wanted to recognise the Queen’s
love for horses,” says Jones. “But we have
to make very small jumps, so we are satis-
fied that they are not creating undue risk,
and we have qualified first-aiders
present, of which I am one myself.”
The council has been planning
the event for more than six
months. It also includes a pic-
nic, tree planting and a shop
window competition.
“We’ve got the town decked
out in flags,” says Jones. “We
went with red, white and blue
flags rather than the Jubilee purple —
after a bit of debate, mind you.”
In the Royal Borough of Kensingtone
c
o
b
says
as a
ors.
ome29 pub-
ce across
with a
and
dItesize
corg
oons
backe
gis
s,
kJugglers, laser shows and
giant bake-offs. Britain is
gearing up for the Platinum Jubilee
and our desire to best the neighbours
is as fierce as ever, Megan Agnew reports
RUI VIEIRA/PAple had to
road clo-
d on high
grove,
d andmage
rror-
ued,
p with
organis-
allowed to
cause it is
.ng undue risk,
d first-aiders
myself.”
anning
n six
pic-
shopcked
“We
d blue
purple —
ou.”
of Kensingtonn over.
been
years.
atorium
be prop-
ealth and
rs wereA
have b
Some ofy
eet-
fessi
akenon-
nover