It’s time for the chop, Boris

Thinking about it, there is only one thing that my father-in-law Stanley and I really agree about: it’s the hair. His oldest son’s policies, achievements, claims (and other things) strike us both in very different ways: in Stanley’s case with a farmyard cockerel’s swelling red-breasted pride; in mine with a deep-rooted despair of the type the dwellers in the Cities of the Plain must have felt before Jehovah smote them. But we agree about the hair.

When it first went on the public stage, the hair was a glorious diversion, like Tommy Cooper’s Turkish fez, Rod Hull’s Emu or, perhaps more nobly, the playful, streaming flags and banners of the French aristocrats on the eve of Agincourt.

The blond bird’s-nest was, after all, a nod to the great British comic/ironic tradition: a public statement of its owner’s ability to see the funny side of himself in a way that Chaucer’s pompous Knight never did. It was what the FT’s How to Spend It supplement calls, in surely one of the most disgusting phrases in the language, his personal signifier.

My Northern Irish hairdresser, Colin Murphy, used to plead with me to let him at it. He believed that just half an hour in his salon could add a whole new Red Wall of electoral notches on the owner’s gold-handled cane, possibly even in Scotland.

But I knew the hair’s owner would never agree. For as it (and he) grew on the world stage, I could tell the hair was acquiring, by some mystical process, a near divine and emblematic importance – something Samson himself would have understood to the very roots of his follicles.

The hair, after all, had become an integral – no, essential – part of the package: Chamberlain’s furled umbrella, Churchill’s cigar, Wilson’s pipe.