www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article3855717.eceIs Boris Johnson hair today, gone tomorrow?
It's the morning after the night before. Little did you know that your mayoral vote was influenced by follicular matters
Lisa Armstrong
At the time of writing I have, I must confess, no idea of the outcome of the capital's monumental and nail-biting mayoral battle. But whatever the result, I think we can all agree that, in the end, it will be the hair that did it.
Specifically Boris's. Ultimately we will either have fallen, hook, line and sinker, for that adorably cute and yet strangely virile magnolia swirl, which (memo to the spin-doctors) no amount of frantic restyling has quite subordinated. Or we won't have.
This may seem a trivialisation of what has been a gladiatorial struggle for one of the world's great cities.
But follicles and what groovy types used, about 40 years, to call “hairdos” are clearly legitimate matters for endlessly absorbing debate. Especially when the hair and the dos in question belong to political sorts, which is why there are 200 online discussions feverishly dissecting Hillary Clinton's new swoopy bits.
The truly powerful instinctively know this. When Margaret Thatcher summoned Nigel Lawson to No10 to offer him the Chancellorship, her first words of advice were: “Nigel, you must get a haircut this afternoon.” And they say the woman was out of touch.
In different and yet spookily similar circumstances, Greg Knight, who was made MP for Derby North in 1983, languished on the back benches for years until a kindly colleague showed him the light. Knight promptly shaved off his beard on the eminently sensible grounds that Mrs Thatcher would never promote a man with facial fungus. Shortly afterwards he was appointed to the whips.
I could go on - about how Arthur Scargill's comb-over, even more than all that shouting, ensured that no member of the female species would ever be able to contemplate him without sning; about how Al Gore's post-holiday beardy look prompted pundits to view him as no longer dull but something even worse - European; about how Bill Clinton's infamous cut aboard Air Force One sparked a national furore culminating in a Newsweek investigation into just how vast a delay was sustained by the nation's air traffic as a consequence (two minutes, as it turned out, but by then the damage to Bill's image was done)... all these anecdotes illustrate the same point. Hair is a catalyst for life or death in a political career.
And Boris's hair is even more important than that. In so many ways it is his destiny. Not since Michael Heseltine felt morally obliged to swing a mace around in the Commons (the details escape me but it must have been something to do with needing to live up to that tempestuous bouffant) have man and mane been so fatally intertwined.
Consider, for instance, what it must have been like to rise through the ranks at Eton and Oxford with the hair texture and “do” of a two-year-old. Must have felt like more of a hair don't. No adult, observed a journalist in The New Yorker recently, naturally has hair that colour.
Boris does - despite his Turkish slave ancestors. Indeed, so tenacious is the particular strain of blondness that courses through the Johnson veins that, as his mother (not without some pride, one senses) recently revealed, two of Boris's four children are blond, although their mother is of Indian descent.
So much of this blond stuff does Boris have (his scale is uncommonly productive for one so fair and of middling years; really it's very Samson) that allowing it to air-dry au naturel is, apparently, not an option. Disconcerting as it is to picture Boris with a hair dryer, needs must in such an obsessively busy schedule.
Tenacity in hair colour is useful. In a politician it is splendid (thank you, Hillary, for pointing this out, but then you've had plenty of your own bad hair days to teach you what tenacity really is). But with supreme blondness comes a price. While his school friends were chillaxing on their gap years and growing their hair, Boris had to contend with the awful truth that on him, anything much longer than a crew cut would make him look like Claudia Schiffer's uglier sister.
Imagine next the anguish on discovering that if he had a hope in hell of being taken seriously as a political journalist and, later on, as candidate for Henley, the mad tufts and chaotic non-partings (think Kansas after a particularly devastating tornado) would have to be constrained into a more conventional look. Then consider the double horror of realising that a conventional look, with neat side-parting and slicked-down ends, would make him look like Hitler's ultimate dreamboat.
Such physical quirks are sent to build our characters. And Boris, as befits his profoundly held beliefs in the imperfection of mankind, has used his fluffy, floppy, muzzy blondness to pursue a third way, one that allowed those wisps to roam like prosperous free marketeers all over his scalp and sometimes to take the plunge all the way over the precipice into his eyes, while at the same time using those manly but sensitive hands to gently yet firmly chivvy it back into place.
Watching Boris marshal his locks is like watching one man and his sheepdog herd sheep, one of the few genuinely pleasurable displays in modern politics - confusing, at times impenetrable, but always mesmerising. And my, don't the womenfolk, from the toddlers who recognise a kindred spirit to the white-haired party faithful, who also recognise a kindred spirit, adore him.
Of course beneath the shambolic layers and the Lady Di-isms (he's not beyond flirting through the fronds, but then with hair like that, what choice did he have but to grow up a people-pleaser and a bit of a joker?) there beats a ruthless logic and first-class brain.
Intellectually, Boris is a brunette. Then again, spiritually, he will always be the blond who has more fun.
And so the blond whorl became the perfect metaphor for the man who, as a child (or perhaps as an adult - the beauty of that hair is that no one can really tell the difference) said he'd like to be world king. In an era where political hair is all about control, Boris's has come to represent a one-man bulwark against conformity and political correctness. This entire contest wouldn't have been nearly such excellent spectator sport without it.
