So, you’re working for Shaun Bailey, in the middle of a pandemic, the nation’s in lockdown, and you’re in a strip-lit office watching a guy in a Christmas jumper crash into a table like a concussed bull, while epic self-love surges across his face and you can see him thinking: “My dancing is on fire; maybe it’s time to take this to competition level.” Across from him, there is a young man in red braces, his eyes beseeching the room to join him in joyful halloo at how hilarious he is. At what point do you think: “I really need a video of this solid-gold moment”? I’m glad I’ve seen it, because it is so fascinatingly terrible, yet at the same time, I wish I hadn’t, because you get too close to Tories doing a thing, and it immediately puts you off the thing. They haven’t just made themselves look bad, they’ve made parties look awful.
Boris Johnson ruined cake. It wasn’t a single act, but an accumulation: he deployed it first as aphorism – a “having cake and eating it” person; then as excuse – he wasn’t having a party, he was merely eating cake; then, I believe, as an attempt to humanise himself – he was given cake, because it was his birthday. One way or another, cake is now associated so tightly with that wreck of a man that the last thing you’d want to do is eat it.
It shouldn’t even be possible for Matt Hancock to put you off a workplace romance – he’s just not enough of a person to generalise from. And yet – goddamn video again – now that’s what an affair looks like, the furtive corridor-check, the teenage making out, the terrible fallout for his lover, who might just have been fooling around, but the wind changed and she has to stay like that. He took this activity, methodically voided it of glamour, eroticism and excitement, turned the consequences up to “appalling” and spoiled it for ever. He might even have sullied the concept of being in love.
One day soon, it won’t matter what any of these people get up to; in the meantime, it would be great if they could stop videoing themselves ruining things.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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