‘Work from home culture is ruining our nation – and we’re all going to suffer for it,’ blasts Kelvin MacKenzie

That photo was one of three. In the others, there was nobody going through the ticket barrier to the Underground and just one person on the platform of the Jubilee Line. Remember this is Waterloo station, which prior to Covid was the busiest in Britain.

The station has now fallen to No3 and I presume that’s because in the commuter-dominated South East more and more are choosing to go in part-time. In one way you can understand this with fares being the most expensive in Europe and the cost of nursery places for the children off the scale.

My council-run station car park at Weybridge, Surrey, has just jacked up prices to an eye-watering £11.10 for the day plus a Ringo of 42p.

So you can see that it’s all financial upside for the worker, not to mention being able to fit in the shopping, a game of tennis, a coffee with your chums and the minute you ‘’clock-off’’ at 5 you are around for Pointless.

For the business, there would be some saving. A huge reduction in property costs is the main one and learning how to manage your workforce remotely could be interesting. However, there is absolutely no doubt that the discipline of the office (a mixture of fear and wanting to impress) leads to being productive.

Having the boss looking over your shoulder or having her or him around to ask a question about a difficult issue is simply more creative than a Zoom. Having a quick 60-second discussion with a slightly more senior colleague is a far better use of time than having the faff of sending a link to a Teams three hours later when the urgency has passed.

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And then you come to civil servants. I’m sure there will be hard-working ones out there, but they don’t do their personal PR much good when 1,000 staff at the Office of National Statistics say they are going on strike in protest at being told they must go into the office two days a week.

A whole two days a week. Surely that is not too tough. ONS staff have been allowed to work remotely without a quota to come into the office since the start of the first Covid lockdown in March 2020.

However, they were told in November that they must spend at least one day in the office starting in January, increasing to two days in April. Surely, they could swallow that?

Oh no. Their union, the Public and Commercial Services Union, has argued that many employees had accepted their role on the basis that they would be able to work remotely full-time.

Sounds like tosh to me. Let’s see their contracts. Only half of the workers turned out for the vote and only three-quarters back the action so I imagine the whole strike will collapse like a pack of cards.

But that’s not the point. When Labour are elected there will be much more of this. You can be sure Rayner and Co will be in favour of anything the union wants. After all, they want employees to have full rights from day one. So if the company has made a mistake and hired a dud you can’t let them go but have to go through some ponderous and expensive exit. Quite mad.

To be truthful I don’t really trust the bosses on the WFH issue. I can see that they quite like the idea of hanging around the house, having the odd Zoom and picking up the kids from school rather than getting up at 6.15, getting the 7.06 and coming home 12 hours later.

But Asia hasn’t heard of WFH and is, and will continue to eat our lunch if we continue to go down this route. Our country is in shocking financial shape. WFH will, I guarantee, make it worse.