Partygate treatment of cleaning staff tells all about No.10 culture

While that might be at the deep end of deeply unpleasant, you can easily picture the general scene in workplaces the country over: tea bags and coffee grinds left in the sink; used tissues left where they fall on the floor; rotten fruit cores abandoned on desks; bins overflowing.

I imagine these filthy fiends are better at home, partly because they have more respect for their own environment where there is less likely to be someone to pick up after them, but largely because they have an entire lack of respect for the person picking up after them at work.

There is an old dating adage about monitoring how the person you are dining with treats the wait staff. If they make eye contact, talk politely and tip meaningfully then they are a keeper.

It's similarly how to judge the character of those you work with. Creating a daily pig sty shows an arrogance - unthinking or otherwise - towards the office cleaning staff that is perfectly telling as to their character.

The Sue Gray report into Downing Street's pandemic partying contained many a disgraceful revelation but, perhaps most unedifying and most revealing, was the line about how disrespectfully the security and cleaning staff were treated.

Among stories of being left to clean up vomit and scrub red wine from walls, Ms Grey wrote that she had been “made aware of multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff. This was unacceptable.”

During the press conference on Wednesday, where he made the laughable claim of having been "humbled" by the Grey report, the PM made sure to point out that he had spent time that day touring Downing Street to apologise to those staff members.

The prime minister knows very well that the behaviour described is unacceptable. He is a member of the British upper classes, for whom decency towards "the staff" is an ingrained element of basic good manners.

Or should be, unless one is too arrogant – or perhaps too drunk – to mind one's Ps and Qs.

The Downing Street permanent staff do not change with the administration; they exist on a permanent basis, watching prime ministers and cabinets and civil servants come and go, come and go.

Yet these core staff, the people who keep the buildings running and do the vital work of protecting their colleagues' health, safety and wellbeing, were ill treated on Boris Johnson's watch and that says much about the attitude of Downing Street civil servants to those they presumably view as beneath them.

It was interesting to hear the prime minister refer to these staff as "guardians" - a semantic trick that implies respect for their work, yet a respect entirely lacking in practice.

We know Mr Johnson's thoughts as to the "blue collar" workers in his employ thanks to the 1995 newspaper column in which he said working class men were "likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless." Still, a man with any class, and certainly of his class, should be able to rise above such risible views to ensure they are at least treated respectfully, how superficial the sentiment or otherwise.

Treat everyone equally is such a simple, easy to achieve mandate. Barack Obama was particularly good at it, displaying a classless class, an everyman sensibility, missing from our own premier.

When he arrived at Downing Street on his first visit to London in 2009, Mr Obama shook hands with the police officer stationed outside. A frippery, an otherwise insignificant thing, yet huge. For British politicians staff such as police officers are invisible, part of the scenery. They might as well shake hands with the railings or exchange a paw bump with Larry the cat.

As Gordon Brown followed the US president towards the Downing Street front door he passed by the officer's outstretched hand, not so much a snub as merely unseeing.

In a similar vein, a job advert for a cleaner to work on the Royal Estate, either at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle, was causing ire this week as the position appears to pay less than the national minimum wage at £7.97 an hour – £1.53 less than the national minimum wage for people over 22.

Bed, board and bills are covered as part of the post so the overall package is more tempting than the initial remuneration might suggest. However, a salary of £19,900 does come across as a slightly misery offering from one of the world's richest women.

Meanwhile, Early Years Scotland has re-iterated concerns that private nurseries are losing staff due to inferior pay and conditions compared to council-run early years facilities. The organisation reports nursery practitioners leaving for supermarket or delivery work where the pay is better. The problem, say private providers, is a shortfall between what they are paid by councils and what it costs to provide ELC places.

Underfunded, undervalued – it's a cry we hear repeatedly from workers in these types of front line jobs.

One of the many lessons of the pandemic is the importance of key workers, who those workers are, and the value of their work.

But it's one thing to feel disrespected by management-imposed pay structures and entirely another to be undermined by immediate colleagues.

A truly decent person doesn't treat work subordinates as equal because they have been told on a management training course that it makes them look fair and decent; they don't do it because their mum handed the rule down as wisdom or because their father made a point of modelling the behaviour.

They do it because they simply and naturally see other people - regardless of rank or role - as equals. That's a vital part of human decency and morality that can't be taught and that is sorely, glaringly missing from our current ruling class.