18 February 2016
The Bald Facts
by J.R.Thomas
In the latest weekend supplement of one of our daily competitors, a staff writer, noted for her insight and erudition, wrote a profile of the Tory hopeful for the May London Mayoral election, Zak Goldsmith. In it, and as a final proof of Zak’s strength of character and sense of independence, our thoughtful scribe pointed out that Zak did not trouble to comb his hair, thus attesting to his full fitness for this great, if not ancient, office. In such insights is political wisdom founded, and our revered editor immediately dispatched your correspondent to seek out the academic disputations supporting the interrelationships of unruly and fulsome hair and political power.
If any proof is needed as to how appallingly underfunded our educational system has become, this must be it. Not a single university, not even a re-designated and aggressively marketed former polytechnic, has a faculty, department, or even senior reader, in political trichology. The academic libraries are completely bald of learned published texts on the connection between hair arrangement and political inclination, of the political theories of curly conservatism or lank liberalism or spiky socialism. We were told of a student somewhere in the University of Upper Islington who is deep into the cause and effects of the Corbyn beard and its links with Marxist determinism, but he seems to have cut and gone.
So we have to take a few faltering steps into this deeply contentious matter ourselves. It is not so easy as might first appear. Certainly one can see a correlation between Mayors of London and failure to visit the hairdresser with sufficient frequency. The current occupant of the office indeed appears to rarely trouble the barber at all, as even when shortened his upper levels still resemble a haystack after an autumn storm. His predecessor seemed to strive for petit bourgeois respectability in matter of his own crowning arrangements – his long locks became shorter and shorter as his power base grew, his T shirts were beaten into lounge suits; even the outcrop on his upper lip giving way to smooth skin. And yet one always felt that deep down, Ken was a man who resented all forms of hair salons, a man to whom the barber’s chair was only tolerable as the price for ultimate power; who, once the People’s Committee for Tonsure was supreme in the land, would have cast away his brush and comb set and let it all grow long and free.
But that is only one relatively junior political office. The great office, source of ultimate control and patronage in the land, must surely give the clearest indication of what lengths, or crew cuts, a man will go to to achieve power. (We exclude the lady holder, as the Blessed Margaret’s arrangements, permanent waves, and subtle highlights will be the subject of Charles Moore’s forthcoming fifth volume of Thatcher memoirs, “Thatcher: De-Thatched”.)
The bad news for bald men is that they are rarely winners in either the Tory or the Labour Party. For Labour, only Atlee was really polished – on his pate rather than in his conversation – and in the Labour Party it seems vital that to get on, a good thick head of hair is just as important as trade union sponsorship. Whatever his other failings Gordon Brown got that one right, Tony Blair having let his own publicity go to his head. His grip on power failed as the hair thinned from his scalp. Maybe the comrades in the 1930s should have noted the alarmingly close relationship of Ramsay MacDonald to the Marchioness of Londonderry and her unsuitable circle, but why would they, his fiery Scottish brogue declaiming the forthcoming socialist nirvana rendered utterly convincing by the head of iron grey hair framing the impassioned words?
Stanley Baldwin made the Blair error, not seeing that it was all getting a bit thin, and was supplanted by the grizzled but plentiful Chamberlain. Then came the great exception to the rule – the shiny expanse of Churchill. In wartime there was little light to reflect, but can a man have ever been better equipped to bounce off what light there was? Churchill, you might say, disproves our theory, but Churchill was a rebel at a time when the country needed a leader who rejected the hairy conventions, and one who did not have to waste time at the barber. By the mid 1950ss the Conservative party reverted to its roots and since then the short back and sides has reigned supreme. (Though to many true blues, Edward Heath had about him a suspicious thinness; surely it was that, not the miners, that did for him in 1974?).
But this is all old hat. Where, you ask, is the startling revelation, the astonishing deployment of the new academic theory, the insight which changes political behaviourism for ever?
Dear readers; we present to you: the Presidents of the Fifth Republic of France. To a man, all glory in the receding hairline, the sleeked back strands of what little there is. Indeed, so alike are they, that there must be in some back street in Paris a Salon Des Coupes De Cheveux Présidentielles, an obscured glass window and creaky door marked only by a red and white pole and security men whispering into radios. But, you ask (there is always one hothead who asks): what about Sarkozy? What about Sarkozy, indeed? No French comeback for him, unless Carla ruthlessly deploys the razor.
France is the exception that proves our exhaustively researched study. Everywhere else, if you want to get to the top, the top must be thick or the hairweave convincing. In Germany, in Poland, in Norway, in Hungary, thick hair rules. Maybe not in Russia, but Putin’s days are obviously numbered.
So you sigh, trim the guff, what is the point of all this research? ‘Tis obvious; we now predict the winner of the 2016 USA Presidential election: Donald Trump. Donald Trump, by a bouffant head.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the Shaw Sheet
