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Boris Johnson has been ridiculed by social media users after claiming young women should return to the office to improve their romantic prospects in the vein of Bridget Jones.
The former prime minister, 60, compared modern post-pandemic working practices, where many employees choose to split their time between working from home and their office, to those seen in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. First published as a column in The Independent in 1995, Bridget Jones’s Diary was adapted into a trilogy of hit films starring Renée Zellweger.
Johnson claimed that Bridget, who walks to her job as a publicity assistant at a publishing company every day, “had a habitat where she could be sure of finding breeding partners”, adding that the “Bridget Joneses of today” will “never meet their Mr Darcy” if they work from home.
In the article for the MailOnline, Johnson called Bridget’s office “an environment with a reasonable number of heterosexual males” and suggested “Mother Nature” would want young people to return to the office “for all sorts of evolutionary reasons”.
Social media users were quick to point out an error Johnson had made in the piece. In Fielding’s novel, Bridget doesn’t meet Mark Darcy at work. Instead, he’s an old friend of her family with whom she becomes reacquainted at her mother’s annual “turkey curry buffet” party.
“Bridget Jones didn’t meet Mark Darcy at the office. She did however meet her highly inappropriate boss who ended up being a toxic af boyfriend,” one person responded.
“Read a book Boris,” another user recommended.
Several social media users also pointed out that Bridget was “sexually harassed at both of her workplaces in the movie.”
While working as a publicity assistant, her boss Mr Fitzherbert – nicknamed “T**spervert” – openly stares at her breasts. Meanwhile, when she changes careers to work as a journalist at a small news channel called Sit Up Britain, her new manager tells her “nobody ever gets fired for shagging the boss”.
Of Johnson’s error, another social media user added: “I’ve been silent about this man’s shortcomings for too long, but I cannot allow him to misrepresent basic plot points of Bridget Jones.”
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When Johnson worked as a journalist in the Eighties, he was sacked by the Times over inaccuracies in his work.
Johnson had written a front-page article for the paper about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace, in which he allegedly invented a quote from his grandfather, the historian Sir Colin Lucas.
He later said of the incident: “The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace.”
Gaveston was actually killed 13 years before the palace had been built.
The fourth instalment in the Bridget Jones franchise will arrive in cinemas on Valentine’s Day in 2025.
The latest sequel, titled Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, will see Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant reprise their roles as Bridget and Daniel Cleaver. It will also star Leo Woodall (One Day, The White Lotus) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, Doctor Strange).
It has not yet been confirmed whether Colin Firth will return as Bridget’s original love interest Mark Darcy, much to the concern of fans. But Grant has hinted that Firth will not be a part of the sequel.
“It’s partly based on Helen Fielding’s experiences of bringing up two children by herself after her husband died,” Grant said of the film. “And so Bridget is bringing up two kids and wondering whether she should ever go back to dating. It’s a very good script.”
