Rainbow lanyards aren’t the problem – it’s being made to wear one at all
There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now...
I wear a tie every day, except when swimming or operating a lathe. The things that wear ties out are lanyards. The horrible plastic badge-holders swing at waist level just where my pudding-fed abdomen eagerly thrusts forward a (rather nice, actually) reticent Lanvin silk tie. It didn’t take many swings for the silk to get the worse of the engagement. I can’t find any ties for sale on Lanvin’s website any more.
There is, however, an even more serious crime to be laid at the lanyard’s door. MPs are forced to wear one, or suffer the risk of the Serjeant at Arms (who wears a sword) barring them or expelling them from the Commons. In 2019 MPs received the New Members’ Guidebook telling them they are ‘required to wear a visible photo-identity pass’ at all times.
It seems obvious to me that this is a gross breach of parliamentary privilege, but MPs don’t know their own business. In 1934 the humorist AP Herbert took the Commons Kitchen Committee to court for serving alcohol without a licence. The court determined that no such complaint could be heard against Parliament as it was a matter of privilege.
But today MPs pretend they are employees, which they are not, at a ‘place of work’. They don’t even claim the trivial privilege of roaring around drunk day and night. It is only to be expected that they willingly bear around their necks the yoke of servitude called by that strange name, ‘lanyard’.
So it seems natural for Minister without Portfolio Esther McVey to opine on the lanyards of civil servants. They should not, she thought, be colourful, like the rainbow colours of the LGBTQ+ movement: ‘They should be a standard design.’
When it came to it, the Government chickened out of issuing any ‘guidance’. The real problem is not wearing a rainbow lanyard or one with skulls and crossbones or the black flag of anarchy; the problem is being made to wear one at all. It is an ID card under another guise. Its public display means that the secret police don’t even have to bark, ‘Papers! Papers!’
I’d like to see the abolition of lanyards in at least one manifesto.
Now here’s a fun fact I’ve just worked out in my lunch break: did you know that if you laid out, end to end, all the company lanyards manufactured and handed out every year, they would stretch just far enough to adequately mummify everybody who even remotely cares about the colour of those worn by civil servants, then you’d have a sort of anti-woke chrysalis you could gently roll down Whitehall, before using the lanyards’ own retractable reels to sling the whole thing into the sun? No? Well, it’s food for thought.
Lanyards, from the French lanière, meaning lash or strap, originated as an accessory for soldiers, yet now find themselves hapless pawns in another kind of conflict. Indifferent though I am to that debate, I feel they had it coming. These days, nothing so ubiquitous can avoid being entangled with the culture wars.
Their rise, tightening around the throats of the professional class, has been phenomenal. You can now barely open a door in central London without a lanyard. On the other hand, you can also open any door with one. A friend of mine, a management consultant and the swaggering embodiment of LinkedIn culture, claims they are ‘the white-collar equivalent of a high-viz jacket’ – meaning wherever you are, nobody will question you if you’re wearing a lanyard, they’ll just assume you’re meant to be there.
It’s true. As Jesus Christ, exec vice president of Christianity Inc, says in the latest version of Matthew 19:24, ‘Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God… unless he is wearing a lanyard, in which case he can briefly flash his pass to Saint Peter, who’ll squint, nod and press the buzzer.’
I am now at a point of stubborn resistance. Like all the cool kids in my office, I keep my security pass in my pocket. As metaphors go, having my work persona on a literal chain around my neck is a little too clunky. Besides, other, more colourful people can do what they like, but I think I’ll keep my identity to myself. That way, nobody knows that I’m really boring.