‘Sorry you were out when I visited,” read the note from Jacob Rees-Mogg, left on the desk of an unnamed civil servant. “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish,” etcetera.
He’s been accused of passive aggression, of course, but some phrases just aren’t big enough for the world of feelings they connote, and this is one of them. “Passive aggression” sounds like such a simple thing – conveying anger or hostility through means other than confrontation, such as avoidance, obstructiveness, sarcasm, procrastination, persistent forgetting or, in transport settings particularly, muttering. You think you understand it, then you get to the workplace note, and realise you haven’t even scratched the surface.
It is objectively irritating to be criticised at all for your working practices by a man who famously conducts his business lying down. Then consider, for context, the government offices that were never vacant, because the wine fridges and wheelie suitcases weren’t going to stock themselves or, for that matter, empty themselves. Jacob Rees-Mogg sits happily near the top of a government whose office culture is so unprofessional that it has 50 police fines and counting to prove it, so we have to file his apparently mild censure as an act of hypocrisy so breathtaking as to be a deliberate provocation. If you compare it with the classic pass-agg work notes, which are always about who has eaten whose lunch, this would be like getting a Post-it note about sandwich possession from the Tiger Who Came to Tea.
So this is passive aggression at its apex, gating off every possible response except for blank outrage, maybe arson. But they are civil servants, remember: diligent by nature, and trained to remain neutral in the face of most things. So they are caught in an existential conflict, between defending their work ethic and maintaining their imperturbable air. Sprinkle over a pleasantry – Rees-Mogg’s “every good wish”, which manages to sound sarcastic even with no context at all, just by its peculiar phrasing – and you have the recipe for a stomach ulcer. The union boss Dave Penman responded with strangled rage – “condescending, crass and insulting”, he called the missive, adding that Rees-Mogg had “completely undermined the leadership of the service.”
There is no mystery to JRM’s behaviour. As minister for Brexit opportunities, he has to create constant outrage, otherwise he’d just be staring into a void. But as people do heave themselves back into the office, willingly or not, there is the deeper mystery of work: why are people like this? Why is there at least one person in every office whose life’s work is to print out anonymous notes about cleaning the microwave or mug maintenance, who can’t rest until they’ve reset the thermostat, who enjoys nothing more than creating a drama that is technically invisible but everyone can see?
Probably, per the late anthropologist David Graeber, it’s because most jobs are bullshit, and the only way to create moments of real meaning is through the jeopardy and thrill of getting on one another’s nerves. The lockdown was painful enough for extroverts, but nobody felt it more keenly than the people whose professional raison d’être was to create ill will in a totally deniable way. Naturally, there are many more modern forms of passive aggression – particularly in emails, where strategic CCing and the use of red type really came into their own – but every remote communication contains the possibility of escape. You can mute yourself. You can mute them. You can walk away.
There are good arguments for returning to the office: how else are young people supposed to learn how to annoy each other? How do you forge strong bonds with colleagues, except by bitching about the resident note-leaver? These arguments will cut no ice, I suspect, with London’s 90,000+ civil servants, who will silently, from the comfort of their home-office, tell Rees-Mogg where to stick his every good wish.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
