Does His Majesty’s Government have a policy on civil servants wearing fetish clothing in the workplace? It’s not the sort of question you’d expect to find in the rather mind-numbing list of written inquiries asked by members of the House of Lords. But Baroness Jenkin, who is still waiting for her answer to that question, was at it again this week: she wanted to know if Keir Starmer’s administration considered ‘Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism to be a protected characteristic within the meaning of the Equality Act 2010’. Isn’t democracy a wonderful thing?
If you think this bust-up is something that can only happen in the civil service, think again
With no context or background to these queries, many people were baffled. Why was the good Baroness suddenly asking these questions? Was there a ‘pup’ in the Treasury, or maybe a dominatrix in Defra? A Leather Quango Queen?
One possible theory has now emerged. Staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are said to be unhappy about the workplace outfits of one of their colleagues. Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a co-chair of the civil service LGBT+ network, is reported to have upset some staff with her attire. One told the Mail on Sunday: ‘If you worked in a bank or any other office job, you couldn’t wear that kind of stuff, whether you’re a woman or a man… It’s highly inappropriate attire’.
We haven’t seen the garments in question – and Tweedale didn’t respond to a request for comment – but the available photographs of Tweedale suggest an unfortunate portmanteau look, merging the aesthetic of a 1970’s Radio 1 disc jockey and a 1980’s Goth. However Tweedale chooses to dress, let’s hope Tweedale is good at the day job: nearly four million people are currently on means-tested benefits. The DWP has got its hands full as it is without the distraction of a row about what staff wear.
But if you think this bust-up is something that can only happen in the civil service, think again. Our wonderful Sir Humphries are merely trailblazing, crashing through barriers and glass ceilings. For they are following one of the current mini-crazes popular among well-positioned progressive-types – like most of these, imported from the United States – the idea of ‘bringing your whole self to work’.
The charity Mental Health First Aid England, for example, tells us: ‘We want organisations to empower employees to bring their whole self to work. By bringing together diversity and inclusion with health and wellbeing we can drive positive transformation in workplace mental health and performance.’ What this means, translated back from the Artificial Intelligence, is that everyone would be much happier at work if they could freely display their own foibles and quirks. Maybe that’s what been holding back Britain’s productivity figures – and if we are all free to stick pencils up our nostrils, put our knickers on our heads and shout ‘I’M A TEAPOT’ every now and then, our output will soar?
One inevitable question that arises from this idea of bringing your ‘whole self’ to work is this: how much self is too much self? When it comes to ‘kink’, it seems to fall one of two ways. There is the secret kind of kink, and the exhibitionist kind. (I speak as an outsider here; I cannot fathom either of these, and my attitude has always been ‘Isn’t sex weird enough without adding all kinds of paraphernalia’?. But from what I can tell it’s what gets many people through life. I was once employed to compile readers’ survey answers for a publisher of erotic fiction; it was the least sexy experience of my life, and I’ve been in a car crash outside Scunthorpe. But my goodness, I learnt a lot about both varieties.)
The secret kinksters would hate the idea of bringing their whole self to work; the lion’s share of their fun comes from nobody knowing what they’re up to. This is much more difficult nowadays when most outré sex acts carry neither legal sanction or social stigma. But you’re in for trouble giving the green light to exhibitionists to bring their whole selves to work. Why? Because their whole selves are exhibitionist. They like to disconcert and disturb and shock.
But what about their colleagues? Surely having to acknowledge rubber shorts, gags and whips around the filing cabinets is asking too much of a fellow worker? As with so much of this increasingly public behaviour, it is goading as a territorial power display, trying it on, daring you to object. Baroness Jenkin’s questions sound funny, until you realise they’re not: this stuff is serious, and it needs to end now. Good luck to her.
Wherever you work, it’s best to follow some simple advice: turn up, do the job, then go home and maybe have a good scourging with a like-minded friend. But dear God, don’t force the rest of us to have to picture it.
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