Why returning to the office is a smart move

Ed Amory | 9th November 2021 | Comment, Uncategorised

My nostalgia for the office is not a sad, sub-David Brent fantasy – it’s a vision of our working future

I can still remember my first office. David Cameron, my boss, had the cubicle next door and shouted a lot. Further along was Laura Adshead, once David’s girlfriend, later a nun. Down the hall, Alistair Cooke, now a member of the House of Lords, bizarrely, presided over pamphlet publishing. Andrew Lansley, the proprietor of the Conservative Research Department, of which I was the most junior member, had an office down the hall. I loved the location in Smith Square, which had a mulberry tree where you could pick fruit and eat it on the way to work in the morning. The building was later bought by the European Union, which I always assumed had been a deliberate act of revenge. It was a strange group of people, but my first real community of like-minded individuals. I met some of my best friends and still remember it all fondly.

Which is perhaps why I am reluctant to accept the death of the office. For my working life has in some strange way been a succession of offices, of physical spaces inhabited by different collections of individuals, each of which has given a character to the years that I spent there. Frank Johnson, the best-educated man I ever met and one of the nicest, presiding over the double-sided editors desk at The Spectator in Doughty Street, refusing to speak to Kimberley Fortier, the publisher, while I crouched over my desk in a garret upstairs. Standing in the …

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