TOO POSH TO DUST

Why does outsourcing housework still sit so uncomfortably with some of us? Oliver Keens breaks down his misgivings and explains why he'll never pay anyone to scrub his toilet

- Oliver Keens

I like my house to be clean at all times, just in case anyone comes round. This includes if a cleaner comes round – which pretty much answers the question of why I’ve never had one. Yet I didn’t realise there was more going on behind a lifetime of unease around the notion of hired help until I was on a date recently. She asked if I had a cleaner, the clear implication being: “I’m not going anywhere near your bed if you don’t regularly have it professionally cleaned.”

Something I had always considered to be a luxury was suddenly being presented as mandatory. I replied with my honest answer: “A cleaner? That’s a bit... posh, isn’t it?” It was an instinctive judgement that I couldn’t justify at the time. After weeks of lying on my spotless yet empty bed, I slowly started unpicking why I’d used that specific word: “posh”.

The last major discussion around the status of cleaners in British life came in May 2020, during the Covid pandemic, when the Tories let them return to work while close family members were still shut out. It led many to decry the priorities of a government that seemed so at ease with domestic servitude that it prioritised “the staff” over basic family bonds. Guardian columnist Owen Jones sparked a debate about whether employers of cleaners should effectively furlough their staff, which amusingly prodded the sensibilities of the 17 per cent of UK households who use them.

Confusion and anxiety over the subject is a relatively new phenomenon. Bertie Wooster never fretted about Jeeves; Will Smith never felt awkward around his butler, Geoffrey, in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. By contrast, today I don’t know anyone who doesn’t engage in a frenzied bout of “pre-cleaning” before their cleaner arrives. In part, to hide the drug paraphernalia and evidence of a sexual private life. But it’s also due to a latent uneasiness about someone else doing tasks that most ablebodied humans can do themselves.