Lloyds is right to ban lunchtime drinking – but in my day it was the norm

An infringement of human rights, or a chilling sign of the new puritanism? New research shows we’re spending less on booze and cigarettes, but walk the streets around the Bank of England any lunchtime and wine bars and pubs are packed with city workers enjoying a drink and a fag. Does this tradition have a negative impact on conduct at work?

Lloyds of London have caused outrage this week by telling staff they will no longer tolerate any drinking at lunchtime, following the revelations that half the complaints about behaviour in the office involved booze. Furious comments have been posted online, including “Are we living in George Orwell’s 1984?” and “It’s the most PC capital of the world, where you can’t even go out for a lunchtime pint”.

How times have changed since I started my working life just down the road in Fleet Street. Back in the early Seventies, there was a pub every 100 yards, a posh wine bar where women were not permitted to buy drinks at the counter, not to mention the infamous City Golf Club, where drunken cartoonists would slice the necks off champagne bottles with a carving knife.

I was sloshed down there when the IRA bomb went off outside the Old Bailey and we had to rush back to the office and resume duties. Depending on the time of day, you knew exactly where to find fellow members of staff on other publications. If you felt the need to commiserate with the other lowly paid hacks on the Express you could amble round to the Cross Keys in the late afternoon. The all-day drinking culture was so ingrained that people would pop out for an early morning pint around 11.30am, then a full hour and a half at lunchtime.

By 12.30pm on Fridays, my column filed, the afternoon was written off – starting with lunch at Wheelers in Soho, drinks at the Colony Club alongside Francis Bacon and Denholm Elliott, on to the French pub on Dean Street around 6pm, followed by a nightcap at Gerry’s drinking club down the road – until I fell into a cab home at 9pm.

Then, I started in television – in the same building where I am presenting Loose Women forty years later – and found a subsidised bar, where everyone freely imbibed at lunchtime and spent hours getting sloshed every evening. Ironically, our employment contacts said (and still do) we must “not bring the company into disrepute” – but that never applied to being drunk.

By 1976 I decided to stop drinking for six months as my liver couldn’t cope. I know all about drinking in the workplace, I’ve been there, bought the T-shirt. In the cut-throat macho world of the City, though, drinking at lunchtime and in the evenings remains a rite of passage – most workers see nothing incongruous about adopting a lifestyle which might combine an extreme fitness with class A drugs and buckets of booze.

Since the meltdown in 2008, banks have sought to cut costs and reduce staff – and implementing a zero-tolerance regime in regard to alcohol could give them another excuse for redundancies, although you could argue that workers on existing contracts can’t have their terms of employment changed on a whim. And if Lloyds workers flaunt the new rule, how will they be disciplined?

I have a huge amount of experience with booze – having lived with an alcoholic and worked with chronic booze and substance abusers – and without sounding like a puritan, the time when you went out for a business lunch with a bottle of wine or a couple of glasses to “relax” or to “celebrate” with pals in the middle of the day have long gone. By 4pm, you are not capable of making the same decisions you were at noon, and that’s a fact. I don’t want to lose control either, and there’s no doubt that booze heightens your reactions to those around you – not good for business and rational decision-making, whether it is at Lloyds or in a normal office.

The drinking culture after work is also past its sell-by date. Too much of my career has been spent as one of a small number of women in a powerful job – when the blokes decamped to the pub after work, I never wanted to go – but I didn’t want to be seen as a snob either. I hate most pubs; they were built by men, for men. They are ugly, smelly and unwelcoming to most women. I can’t see anything great about most of them as a British institution.

So there you have it – contrary to your expectations, I am proud to be a killjoy, a new Puritan. I hope that other employers follow the example set by Lloyds, and sod the worker’s right to stink of beer or stale white wine in the afternoon.