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Tony and Cherie Blair
Politicians: Case of hair today, gone tomorrow
22/ 4/2006
CHERIE Blair is plainly an ardent devotee of the school of thought that a well-trained thatch of hair is more important than anything else - including speech-making - when it comes to achieving political success.
Her critics may say that for Mrs Blair (or the Labour Party) - as was revealed earlier this week - to spend '275 a day on her tresses is stretching adherence to the policy too far ... but look where it has got them.
Who can argue against the possibility that the deft fingers of her crimper-in-chief, Andre Suard, played a significant part in Labour's three emphatic general election victories since 1997?
Mr Blair himself was subjected to much ridicule when, in 1994, he spent '60 on a haircut but a few days later he won the Labour leadership contest with a massive majority.
Compare that to William Hague, with barely a hair on his head, who was trounced when he led the Tories in 2001. Or to Margaret Thatcher - never a blonde lock out of place - who never lost an election from the day she entered the Commons in the 1950s.
Surely it was written in the follicles that the balding Neil Kinnock was never going to be a match for John Major?
But Mrs Blair isn't the first Labourite to discover that hair can get you into trouble.
John Prescott was widely criticised for taking a car, with his wife Pauline, a few yards down the Bournemouth front during a Labour conference. At first he said it was for security reasons but, when told this was already a "sanitised" security area, he shamelessly changed his story. "It's the wind," he said. "And the wife doesn't like her hair being blown about..." Later, a cowed and subdued Prescott was observed in a corner of his hotel, "the wife" wagging an irate finger at him.
Bouffant
Bill Clinton once hired a fashionable Washington hairdresser, name of Cristophe, to give him a bouffant style soon after he became President.
Unfortunately the operation, which took two hours, was performed on Air Force One on the tarmac at Los Angeles airport, thus plunging the state of California into untold air traffic chaos.
Earlier presidents had used the services of much cheaper barber Milton Pitts who, like most crimpers, had firm views on how the country should be run. Henry Kissinger, a one-time US Secretary of State, once described Pitts as "a persistent foreign policy adviser".
Nor would Tory MP Boris Johnson be the man he is without that immaculately-trained and nurtured shambles of straw thatch on his head. You want proof? I once observed Boris deliberately ruffling up his hair in front of a mirror. "Far too tidy," he mumbled.
Unlike Mrs Blair, Margaret Thatcher did not travel around with a hairdresser.
Flunkeys at the relevant British diplomatic mission were always instructed to seek out a local exponent for the daily Thatcher coiffure. However, there are no hairdressers in the Falklands, so she took her own equipment.
Once she publicly rebuked me severely for wearing a suit that was not British.
It had, as I recollect, arrived on these shores in a batch of "slightly imperfect garments" from Albania.
But I was able to exact a terrible revenge on her as I told a shocked world that the Prime Minister had arrived in the Falklands with a set of curling tongs made in Denmark.
I don't think she ever lived it down.
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22/04/2006 at 15:33
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22/04/2006 at 21:49
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