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Harry Mount: Grey hair works. No hair works. But comb-overs are just a joke

While the vanity of the male in pursuit of perpetual youth knows no bounds, ridicule is his only sure reward

Sunday 08 August 2010 00:00 BST
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It turns out that Samson was wrong. It isn't having your hair cut that strikes at the heart of man's confidence; it's losing your hair altogether or, worse, going grey, that really matters. Going grey was the number one concern among men aged 45 to 54, a survey found last week. Hair loss and thinning came second.

This would not have made happy reading for David Cameron. Newspapers this week zeroed in on the grey wings over his ears, and the bald spot on the crown of his head. Journalists made out that it was the stress of being Prime Minister that is thinning and greying his hair. In fact, both processes have been going on for a while; both were apparent in April, when I tracked him for a day on the Tory battle bus before the election.

To be fair to Cameron, though, both processes are far from advanced. The grey wings are only obvious close up, and the bald spot is only about the size of a 50p piece (and here, I must confess: Cameron is my second cousin, and he has much more hair than me, despite being five years older). In the flesh, he is younger-looking than his 43 years, because of those rosy cheeks that political cartoonists have settled on as his defining feature. Despite smoking until quite recently, Cameron has the well-oxygenated, smooth skin that could go for a day or two without shaving and not show much stubble.

It's striking, though, that Cameron is doing little to conceal that bald patch or those grey wings. He's got enough hair that he could certainly drape it over the tonsure, without it looking obvious; and, if he'd started dyeing the grey patches the moment they appeared, he probably could have got away with it, without going Cliff Richard chestnut or Paul McCartney purple. The truth of it is that, these days, the one thing – in Britain, anyway – that's worse than going grey or bald, is looking as if you're trying to conceal it.

This is a fairly recent development. Until the last couple of years, the British bald man was very keen on the comb-over. The retirement last week of Robert Robinson from Brain of Britain marks the last stand of a prominent male in possession of an excellent example of the genre. Robinson was born in 1927, into a generation destined to confront baldness with Brylcreem, a strict combing regime and the careful cultivation of a long curtain of hair along one side of the head.

A crucial additional skill was that unique hand-smoothing technique used by comb-over merchants: the side-to-side stroke with a flattened palm, like a royal wave at right angles to the motion used by the Queen.

The late Cardinal Hume (born 1923) had one of the best comb-overs in the business; much assisted, for both anchoring and extra concealment, by the addition of a cardinal's skullcap. Bobby Charlton (born 1937) used to make for a splendid sight tearing through the opposition penalty area, comb-over rising to the vertical as it caught the Old Trafford wind.

Those days are gone. No male born since 1960 would consider the comb-over as a viable option: it has been ridiculed into extinction, not least by the 1992 Hamlet advert, which showed Gregor Fisher (as in Rab C Nesbitt) trying to get a picture in a photobooth which didn't expose the bald truth beneath his comb-over.

Wigs, too, have been laughed into extinction for anyone under the age of 70. Terry Wogan, 72, and Bruce Forsyth, 82, are the last stalwarts of a showbiz age that depended on the wig to sustain careers into middle age and beyond. Frank Sinatra had a collection of 60 convincing hairpieces, maintained by a small, grey-haired lady who went on tour with him, and kept his hair in a small satchel. She earned $400 a week in 1965 – a pretty decent wage for a wig-keeper.

Nowadays, the popular option is the hair transplant – the careful transfer of hair, strand by strand, from the lower, hairy parts of the head on to the sunlit uplands. Cricketers favour this, among them Shane Warne, Graham Gooch, Michael Vaughan and the Australian left-arm fast bowler, Douglas Bollinger – aka Doug the Rug.

This sort of vanity is allowed in cricketers and, in the world's most famous transplant recipient, Sir Elton John. Dyeing hair, too, is a vanity allowed in women: Margaret Thatcher's spun gold hair is assisted spun gold. In fact, it's a shock if a woman doesn't dye her hair: the 45-year-old model Kristen McMenamy who appears in this month's Vogue with natural steel-grey hair. Earlier this year, the front-row fashionistas hyper-ventilated when she took to the New York catwalk with grey hair, for a Calvin Klein show.

But, even in these appearance-obsessed times, hair dyeing and transplants still goes down badly among male British politicians; David Cameron is better off gradually going bald and grey than looking as if he cares too much about his looks. The vanity that goes with hair treatments is a killer blow to the honesty, transparency and directness of the pretty straight kind of politician. So Tony Blair is perfectly happy to paint his face a lurid shade of orange, but he has let his hair go grey. Gordon Brown – no stranger to slap while in office – also went grey over the course of his premiership.

The last three British prime ministers have been in office at an age when the greying, balding process moves into overdrive. Cameron was 43 when he walked into Downing Street; Blair was 43, too, and stayed in power until he was 54; Gordon Brown lasted from 56 to 59.

The dislike of vanity in our politicians is not shared by the rest of the world, where a leader's sleek youthful looks are valued more highly. Take a look at Cameron's meeting with Silvio Berlusconi last week, in Rome. Berlusconi, 73, is the ultimate incarnation of old age desperate to turn back the clock. Not only does he seek youth by sleeping with youths; last week, allegations emerged of him sharing a bed with not just one, but three women half his age.

He also goes for the full gamut of hair reconstruction; not just the transplant, but a dyed transplant. Both effects are highly visible, as they always are. There's the chestnutty colour that's never produced by natural melanin. And the shape of his hair transplant as it meets the forehead is much too neat, like it's been drawn on with a pen. Natural hairlines are ever so slightly higgledy-piggledy, responding to the uneven demands of nature, not the symmetrical stitches of the hair transplant specialist.

This obvious dyeing and transplant work among politicians (staggeringly obvious if, like Berlusconi, they were once bald) is only acceptable in countries, like Italy, where male vanity is not considered suspect or a touch effeminate. It is even more acceptable in countries where extreme painting, cutting and plumping up of body parts goes on. In America, the international home of plastic surgery, 100,000 hair transplants a year take place. Very few successful actors or TV anchormen risk jeopardising their career by letting nature take its course.

Politicians, too; bald American presidents are thin on the ground, Dwight D Eisenhower and Gerald Ford apart. Joe Biden, the Vice-President, has a particularly bad hair transplant, done in the Eighties, when transplants involved plugs, each containing 15 to 30 hairs. Lined up together, these give an impression of a solid wall of hair; but not nearly as solid as the current Shane Warne-style transplants, which transfer 1,000 to 2,000 individual hairs.

Biden, it appears, had a line of plugs inserted at the front edge of his receding hairline. In the intervening 25 or so years, the hair behind the transplant has disappeared, leaving him with a Hadrian's Wall of hair along the top of his forehead. This is then draped back over the scalp to give a frayed, comb-over helmet look, with the comb-over heading straight back from the eyes, as opposed to the Robert Robinson ear-to-ear look.

It's striking that John McCain, the losing Republican in the 2008 election, has a classic white-haired comb-over. No surprise, there: he was born in 1936, right in the heart of the Robinson/Charlton comb-over years.

Barack Obama, by contrast, had a full head of triumphant hair in the 2008 election; hair which looks like lasting as far as the 2012 contest. His poll numbers may be collapsing but, as long as he keeps his hair, he still stands a chance in two years' time.

David Cameron needn't worry so much about these things. Britain remains endearingly unworried about its politicians getting on a bit.

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