Our problems aren’t down to ‘quiet quitters’, but our lack of barmy politicians to stir them into labour
: Future Publishing
Guess who’s to blame for our nation’s woes? According to a Gallup report it’s the “quiet quitters” who cost the economy £257 billion in lost output last year. They’re the reason our country has plunged down the league table of the wealthiest nations. And the people at Gallup have figured out that this lack of productivity stems from a growing sense of sadness, stress and anger; all of which cause that loss of motivation. The polling company supposes that only 10 per cent of the workforce puts extra effort into their jobs and the laziness of the rest could be costing the UK 11 per cent of GDP.
Maybe this is where Rishi Sunak pins his hopes of gaining revenue without tax rises. As he said in his BBC interview with Nick Robinson this week: “If we recover just to pre-Covid levels of productivity, so nothing heroic, just as productive as we were before the pandemic hit… that productivity gain is worth £20 billion.”
So come on, buck up you lazy so-and-sos, moaning and groaning and whingeing and whining. Stop snoozing from home, get back to the coalface, get out there and get selling and put your back into it.
Except, of course, to stir us into labour we need leaders: people of substance, grit, style, and verve. And, sorry about this Mr Sunak, but the barmier the better.
Because it must really pain the Prime Minister that he looks into the mirror and considers himself a decent man, a polite chap, a very hard working individual, resilient, determined, focused, all over the detail and with the country’s best interests in his heart. (And I genuinely believe this of him, and no, Nick Robinson, he did not “bunk off D-Day”, he simply made a catastrophic diary error, a presentation misjudgment, and he apologised for it. What do people further want from this man? To flog himself in public, or offer himself as a sacrifice?)
And yet, Tory supporters are now flocking to Nigel Farage, with his city-trader-at-the-races coat, his frog-like expression, his bombast, his fags and pints and chucked milkshakes, all protest and no policy but a sense of humour, and, crucially, the sense that he’s enjoying himself. “A vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Labour,” he chuckled this week, as his party, Reform UK, nudged ahead in the polls. Boris Johnson was the same when he was on his own campaign trail in 2019: he looked like he was having fun. He made zany videos for social media that parodied the film Love Actually, and he was not all over the detail and his hair was a mess and he looked like he couldn’t even match a pair of socks.
: PA
And that’s what Conservative supporters warmed to. His barmy, nutty, bonkers style of leadership. And that’s actually what we all want. Britain’s barmy army demands a barmy leader. The best bosses I’ve had have been decidedly nuts.
For many years, while I worked at a media firm called John Brown, the man in charge was John Brown. Every month he rallied the troops in the office café standing on a chair and reading extracts from Viz, a magazine he published. In winning the business, he’d beaten off competing publishers who flew the Viz owners down to London in a helicopter. John went to Newcastle, took them to the nearest pub and wrote a business plan for them on the back of a napkin.
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