The recent story about the royal household advertising cleaning jobs at less than the national living wage adds a pungent top layer of Downton to the uncomfortable politics of household work. It's easy to be disapproving about the Windsors' embarrassingly miserly employment practices: while it's nice to see them economising, paying only £6.67 per hour, well under the recommended London living wage of £8.55, it seems likely that there are better targets for savings than those who wipe down the surfaces after the festival of Tupperware that is the royal breakfast. Hell, I pay my cleaner nearly 30% more than Liz 'n' Phil pay theirs and I'm some way behind them on the Sunday Times Rich List.
But beyond a few basic principles – pay decently, be respectful, wipe down the toilets before they get there – many people find it difficult to negotiate the relationship between cleaner and cleaned-for, whichever of those roles they're undertaking. When you hire someone to clean your home, you are making a couple of value-laden personal declarations: my time is too valuable to spend vacuuming the skirting boards; and, yet, despite my disposable income, I'm a sorry excuse for an adult and I need someone else to clean up my mess.
Whenever I mention my cleaner in conversation, I rush to exculpate myself by pointing out that I'm a single parent who works full-time. My discomfort is both shapeless and bottomless. My great-grandmother kept an immaculate home while looking after 12 children; both my grandmothers left their south Wales villages at 19 to go into domestic service in London, dodging the shadowy menace of the "white slave trade" and the priapic sons of their employers. I'm not sure whether they would think that my unfamiliarity with the business end of a Dyson represented progress, or whether they simply wouldn't recognise me as a member of the family at all. I guiltily imagine them, in their fiercely overheated corner of Methodist heaven, shocked into uncharacteristic silence by my incompetence.
Women, in particular, are trained to see their domestic environment as a reflection of their personal qualities. Only the strong and the stubborn feel no shame if a friend drops round unexpectedly when the house is a mess; more often, a peculiarly female ritual will play out, in which the hostess will make a joke about her sluttishness and the visitor will protest that everything looks lovely, while ignoring the strong smell of onions. The modern ideal of a clean, well-ordered home is one in which all the intimate manifestations of day-to-day life have been ushered away, to be replaced by a domestic facsimile: the spotless tea-towel, the sparkling floor. And this kind of set-dressing requires punishing inputs of time and effort that few can spare.
Those of us who are too lamentably weakminded to reject society's expectations at least need to extricate ourselves from the guilt. After all, nobody frets about paying someone to change their car brake light or paint the stairwell. Domestic work, in all its small, comfortable glories, is worthwhile stuff – whoever does it. And it's not so hard to avoid being exploitative or disrespectful. I remember being grimly fascinated by a cleaner's account of being asked to handwash her employer's lingerie: I suspect we can all agree that if someone's scrubbing your knickers, it has to be either because you're paying them an hourly rate that would make Bob Diamond blush, or because they really, really want to.
Pay a decent hourly rate; ask after their children; offer them a cup of tea. If you're feeling punctilious, check with HMRC whether you should be offering holiday pay or paying national insurance. As any adult couple will tell you, the division of domestic labour can be fraught with personal politics, but so long as cleaners feel they're being paid honest rates for valued work, there's no rational reason for anyone to agonise over the decision to employ one.
