RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The sun has its hat on, we’re not going to work today!

The sun has his hat on,

Hip Hip Hooray,

The sun has his hat on,

We are not going to work today!

With temperatures soaring into the 90s in old money, the unusually warm weather has given the WFH brigade another convenient excuse to skip.

Not that they needed one. Despite all Covid restrictions being lifted months ago, more than five million people are staying away from their workplaces.

London is leading the way, with more than a third of workers yet to return to their offices. Unsurprisingly, the government has resisted all incentives from ministers to return to full throttle. The home office is half empty. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, only four out of ten employees are at their desks.

Yesterday Secretary of State ‘Fizzy Lizzie’ Truss launched her Tory leadership campaign and Home Secretary Priti Flamingo was weighing her prospects. But if they can’t convince their own staff to come to work, what chance would they have to jump-start the rest of the country if one of them becomes prime minister?

And now a heat wave is coming, manna from heaven for the WFH addicts. It’s too hot to work, they’re bleating. The daily commute is a bit ‘sticky’. Employers reported a spike in the number of employees who got sick.

“So many workers are fed up with their jobs and lifestyle in general that the chance for a day off in the sun is just too tempting,” says Laura Rennie, who runs a Human Resources consultancy in Kilmarnock.

Honestly, who can blame them? Especially when they are encouraged by a burgeoning ‘Aitch-Arr’ industry to put their ‘well-being’ above their responsibility to the people who pay their wages.

It’s all about work-life balance these days – work is a distant second.

The pandemic has institutionalized laziness and fostered a culture where people have become accustomed to believing they have the right to decide for themselves where and when they work.

So when the sun is out, why not go to the beach instead of taking the train into town. It’s their yuman rites, right?

Some HR professionals are even suggesting that companies give their staff a few extra “sunny vacation days” each year, on top of their statutory five-and-a-half weeks of paid leave.

No wonder the economy is going to hell in a pushcart.

Laziness isn’t the only vice that has become institutionalized. So is scaremongering, epitomized during lockdown by the Two Ronnies of Doom and their Priapic charts of death.

Now it’s the turn of something called the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to warn that unless we stay out of the sun: you are all going to DIE! This precious quango is what we used to call Public Health England, that utterly useless body believed to have been liquidated after being exposed as woefully inadequate in preparing for the pandemic.

Instead, it simply turned into the UKHSA and continues to give the same kind of intelligence-abusing, nanny state “advice.” Stay indoors, draw the curtains, don’t let your kids play outside, stay hydrated. If you must go outside, wear a hat and bring a bottle of water.

This week the UKHSA issued a silly ‘Level Three Heat-Health Alert’ for London and the South East. “Drink plenty of fluids and avoid excess alcohol, dress appropriately for the weather, and slow down if it’s hot.”

The rest of the country was limited to a ‘Level Two’ warning. “Hot weather can be dangerous, especially for very young or very old people or people with chronic illness.” Thank goodness they are watching us. That would never have occurred to me otherwise. Why is it always assumed that we are far too stupid to take care of ourselves?

Who said you don’t need a weatherman to know which direction the wind is blowing from? Today, the weatherman has taken it upon himself to order you to drink more water.

The Met Office has issued an official statement telling us to stay indoors and take extra fluids. What the hell does it have to do with them?

Even the railway companies sprang into action, warning that the heat could cause the tracks to buckle – a summer twist on the ‘leaves on the line’ excuse – after some sleepers caught fire.

And of course, the global warming alarmists were back in force, blaming the high temperatures for “climate change.”

From the frenzied overreaction to a few days of sunshine, you’d think Britain had never experienced warm weather before. Some of us are old enough to remember the summer of 1976, when the heat wave lasted for two whole months, reservoirs and rivers dried up and there were poles in the streets. This was Third World again – 96 degrees in the shade. Newspapers wrote ‘Whew, what a sob!’ headlines and fried eggs on the sidewalk.

No one has issued a level three health warning. We just started working on it. The country did not stand still for the duration. We weren’t bombarded with doomsday warnings that everything from the NHS to the power stations was on the brink of collapse.

In desperation, Labor MP Denis Howell, a former football referee, was appointed Drought Minister. His solution was to import a Navaho medic to perform a rain dance.

It worked spectacularly. The heavens soon opened and within days Howell was reappointed as Floods Minister.

What’s the guess that next month at this time the heat wave will be over and half the country under water. No doubt the UKHSA and the Met Office will warn us to stay dry and not leave the house without an umbrella.

And the WFH brigade will be back inside, munching on their Hobnobs, and still refusing to go back to work because it’s too wet.

Forgive me for escaping the Tory leadership circus for now. Watching a dozen politicians form a Weakest Link-style circular firing squad is not my idea of ​​a quiet night.

Frankly, I find the sheer misery of so-called colleagues laughing at each other and peddling dirty files to their rivals, quite repulsive.

The only thing that has amused me so far is the revelation that Penny Mordaunt once worked as a magician’s assistant. Perhaps, instead of meddling in tedious TV debates, the candidates could all be tried out by a Tommy Cooper manqué to see who makes the cut, so to speak.

I really like the idea of ​​seeing Fizzy Lizzie sawn in half, or Dishi Rishi spinning on a giant wheel as his opponents hurl knives at him.

Just like that!

Until then, shut me out. Shake me, wake me up, when it’s over.

Almost exactly a year ago, this column featured a photo of Sajid Javid with his arm around his protégé, Rishi Sunak. They grinned from ear to ear.

I noted: ‘In 1974, while reviewing a concert by a young singer/songwriter, the critic Jon Landau wrote: ‘I saw the future of rock and roll and it’s called Bruce Springsteen.’

“When I looked at that photo of The Saj and Dishi Rishi, I thought, ‘I’ve seen the future of the Conservative Party – and Boris Johnson isn’t in it.’ †

Mystic Rich strikes again.

The list of LGBTQWERTY+ candidates continues to grow. Soon the acronyms will be longer than the alphabet itself.

The latest additions include members of the 2S community, who now feature on application forms for membership of London’s fashionable Soho House club. It stands for ‘Two Spirits’ – a term for Native Americans who exhibit both male and female characteristics. I spent some time poking around Soho myself. You come across all kinds. It was there that Ray Davies of The Kinks met Lola, who walked like a woman and talked like a man.

But I’ve never come across a half-man/half-woman Red Indian. Unless, I guess, you count that guy from the Village People.

He must have been a member of the LGBTYMCA+ community.