STARMER'S BALD(ING) TRUTH

In the great British tradition of national hypocrisies, few things command more solemn reverence than a politician’s hair. We affect to despise the superficial, yet we scrutinise the scalp with the forensic intensity once reserved for the entrails of sacrificial goats. Keir Starmer, that most methodical of men, has presented us with a puzzle worthy of a particularly pedantic detective novel. Does the Prime Minister wear a wig? Or, to put it in the language of our more excitable tabloids, is the leader of His Majesty’s Government in possession of a supplementary thatch? The question has haunted the commentariat like a mild case of dandruff that refuses to yield to Head & Shoulders.

One approaches the topic with the caution it deserves. Accusing a man of artificial cranial enhancement is no light matter. It strikes at the very heart of authenticity, that elusive quality without which no modern politician can hope to survive the scrutiny of a focus group or a late-night podcast. Starmer, after all, rose to prominence as the very model of the serious professional: former Director of Public Prosecutions, knight of the realm, wearer of sensible suits and expressions of measured disappointment. His hair, in its earlier iterations, suggested the careful grooming of a man who had read too many bar exams and not quite enough poetry. It was neat, controlled, the sort of coiffure that whispers “I have opinions on sentencing guidelines” rather than “I once crowd-surfed at Glastonbury.”

Yet power, that great alchemist, works strange transformations. As the years have advanced and the polls have fluctuated, Starmer’s locks have taken on a certain defiant lustre. They sit there on his head like a well-behaved constituency that knows its place. Observers with too much time on their hands—and in contemporary Britain that category includes most of us—have noted the suspicious consistency. No errant strand dares rebel. The grey, when it appears, does so with parliamentary timing, as if scheduled for Prime Minister’s Questions. One half expects it to rise and give a short statement on fiscal responsibility before returning to its appointed position.

The satirical possibilities are almost too rich. Here is a man who spent his career prosecuting the powerful, now accused by the court of public opinion of concealing the naked truth of his own pate. The wig, if wig it be, becomes a perfect metaphor for New Labour’s long evolution into whatever this is: a careful construct, meticulously maintained, designed to project competence while hiding the inevitable thinning that comes with age, responsibility, and the slow realisation that governing is harder than opposing. Boris Johnson, by contrast, wore his dishevelment like a badge of honour—a thatch that looked as though it had been styled by a hedge fund manager in a hurry. Starmer’s alleged prosthesis suggests the opposite temperament: the control freak who cannot even let his own follicles run wild.

And yet the scalp has always been the politician’s most treacherous constituency. It rebels without warning, defects at the first sign of stress, and leaves its owner exposed to the sort of low comedy that no spin doctor can fully suppress. The rumour that the Prime Minister maintains a discreet arrangement with a wig-maker is merely the latest chapter in a saga as old as power itself: the eternal struggle between nature’s parsimony and the vanity required to rule. Baldness, that great leveller, has toppled more careers than most policy disasters, yet it has also produced some of history’s more enduring leaders—provided they had the wit, or the wreath, to conceal the evidence.

Let us begin, as all good farces must, in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar, conqueror of Gaul and occasional dictator, was famously thin on top. Suetonius records the embarrassment with the relish of a man who enjoyed watching emperors squirm. Caesar combed his remaining strands forward in the desperate manner later perfected by estate agents and minor television presenters. The Senate, in a rare moment of mercy—or perhaps simple pragmatism—granted him the permanent right to wear a laurel wreath. Not, you understand, as a mere symbol of victory, but as the world’s first recorded political comb-over. The wreath sat upon his head like an official denial, shielding the public from the distressing spectacle of a bald autocrat. One pictures the senators nodding sagely: “Yes, yes, very triumphal, and incidentally, it covers the bit that’s missing.” Caesar’s solution was elegant, classical, and thoroughly dishonest. It set the tone for two millennia.

By the 17th century, the problem had grown more democratic. Syphilis, that generous gift of the New World, was stripping the scalps of kings, courtiers, and commoners alike. Louis XIV of France, the Sun King himself, took to wigs to disguise his own premature retreat. His cousin Charles II of England followed suit, and suddenly the powdered wig became the uniform of the ruling class. What began as medical camouflage hardened into fashion. Judges, bishops, and prime ministers donned them as a matter of course, transforming the House of Commons into a sort of geriatric fancy-dress party. The wig was never merely hair; it was a declaration of status. It said: “I may be rotting from within, but at least my head looks expensive.” When William Pitt the Younger taxed hair powder in 1795 to fund a war, the fashion began its long decline—proof, if any were needed, that even governments will sacrifice vanity only when the alternative is bankruptcy.

Across the Atlantic, the American Republic offered a more puritanical approach, at least in theory. The Founding Fathers, many of them bewigged in the European style, eventually shed the habit. Yet baldness remained politically radioactive. Historians note that only three presidents have been authentically bald: James Garfield (barely seen by the electorate before an assassin settled the matter), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford (who, one might argue, was never properly elected anyway). Eisenhower, the last bald man voted into the White House, won in 1952 and again in 1956, but his victory owed more to D-Day than to his gleaming dome. After him, the television age rendered the naked scalp an electoral liability. John F. Kennedy, with his luxuriant thatch, set the new standard: hair as campaign asset. Since then, voters have consistently preferred candidates who look as though they could still appear in a shampoo commercial. Richard Nixon, whose hairline had the good sense to hold the line despite every expectation, was a rare survivor. Some suspected a pact with darker powers; others simply noted that the devil, like voters, has his standards.

In Britain the prejudice has been even more pronounced. Winston Churchill, that magnificent bulldog of a man, was the last genuinely bald prime minister, elected in 1951. He wore his baldness like a challenge, growling that “a man of my limited resources cannot presume to have a hairstyle.” After Churchill, the list of bald or balding party leaders who came to grief reads like a cautionary tale: Neil Kinnock, William Hague, Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith. Each brought formidable intellect or ideological fervour; each discovered that the British electorate, when faced with a choice between a shiny head and a tolerable quiff, will choose the quiff every time. Baldness, it seems, signals either excessive honesty or insufficient vanity—both fatal in the modern marketplace of promises.

Elsewhere the story varies. In Russia, a curious folk tradition known as “bald-hairy” has governed the succession for two centuries: leaders alternate between the follicle-challenged and the lavishly maned. Nicholas I begat Alexander II; Lenin (bald) gave way to Stalin (hirsute enough, if one discounted the moustache); Gorbachev’s famous port-wine birthmark sat atop a head that needed no further adornment. The pattern has held with the grim reliability of a five-year plan. One wonders whether the Russian voter subconsciously demands the alternation as a form of cosmic balance—bald for the hard times, hairy for the thaw. Even the great moral exemplars were not immune. Mahatma Gandhi embraced baldness late in life with the same serene indifference he brought to salt marches and imperial oppression. He cut his own hair in South Africa when barbers refused him service, producing a result that friends compared, not unkindly, to the work of enthusiastic rodents. The image of the bald ascetic became part of his power: here was a man who had renounced not only empire but vanity itself. It is a standard few contemporary politicians have the courage—or the bone structure—to emulate.

Today the battle continues with more sophisticated weaponry. Hair transplants, toupees, and the discreet services of Mayfair trichologists have replaced laurel wreaths and powdered periwigs. Silvio Berlusconi’s follicular adventures became a minor European soap opera. Donald Trump’s hair has inspired more conspiracy theories than most foreign policies. And Starmer’s wig, whether fact or journalistic fever dream, fits neatly into the tradition: the modern leader’s attempt to project competence while quietly negotiating with the inevitable. In an age of high-definition cameras and merciless social media, the scalp is no longer private property. It is a billboard for character—steady or slippery, youthful or weathered, authentic or artfully enhanced. The wig, real or imagined, serves another purpose - it distracts. While the nation argues over whether the Prime Minister’s barnet is entirely home-grown or partly imported from some discreet emporium in Crewkerne, more substantial matters—winter fuel payments, planning reforms, the small matter of how one actually runs a country in the 21st century—can proceed with slightly less immediate scrutiny. It is the political equivalent of a magician’s assistant in a sequinned dress: look over here at the shiny distraction while the real trick happens elsewhere. Starmer, the former prosecutor, knows all about misdirection. One wonders whether he appreciates the irony.

There is, of course, a certain pathos in the spectacle. Baldness, like death and taxes, comes to us all (except, apparently, to certain ageing rock stars and television personalities who can afford better lawyers). To resist it is human; to do so while simultaneously preaching the virtues of honesty and straight-talking is to invite the gentle mockery of those who notice such things. A Prime Ministerial wig, perched atop the head of a man once tasked with upholding the law, has a pleasingly bathetic quality. It reduces the grand figure to the level of the rest of us, fretting over receding prospects and wondering whether that new product on the shelf really works as advertised.

The irony, of course, is that baldness has never prevented greatness. Caesar reshaped the Mediterranean; Churchill stared down Hitler; Eisenhower presided over post-war prosperity; Gandhi humbled an empire. Their hair, or lack of it, was incidental. Yet the electorate, that fickle creature, persists in the belief that a full head signals vigour, trustworthiness, perhaps even moral fibre. We claim to elect leaders on policy, judgment, and vision, yet we still judge them by the state of their parting. In the end, Starmer’s wig—whether fact or fevered invention of the commentariat—tells us less about the man than about the age that obsesses over such trivia. We have become a culture that elevates the superficial because the substantial is too difficult, too contentious, too likely to expose our own contradictions. The history of baldness in politics is less about hair than about the lengths to which men (and, increasingly, women) will go to maintain the illusion of control. 

Starmer’s wig, should it exist, is no more ridiculous than Caesar’s wreath or Pitt’s powdered extravagance. It is simply the latest prop in the eternal comedy. The real question is not whether the Prime Minister wears one, but whether we, the audience, still require the performance. In an age that lectures endlessly on authenticity, we remain strangely forgiving of the small deceptions that make our rulers look slightly less mortal. After all, if a man cannot be trusted to manage his own scalp, how can he be trusted with the economy? The logic is flawless, in its own peculiar, parliamentary way. And so the show goes on—wigged, un-wigged, or somewhere artfully in between—while the rest of us, bald or otherwise, watch and pretend not to notice.

JAMES TOLKAN (1931 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

James Tolkan, the American character actor whose face suggested a man perpetually on the verge of issuing a parking ticket to the cosmos, died on March 26, 2026, at the age of 94. He had spent the previous six decades reminding cinema audiences that authority, like baldness, was not to be trifled with.

Born in 1931 in Calumet, Michigan, to a cattle dealer father whose idea of drama was probably a stubborn steer, Tolkan might have been expected to spend his life herding livestock rather than glowering at screen teenagers. Instead, after a brisk year in the US Navy—where he no doubt ordered the Pacific to pipe down—he drifted to New York and submitted himself to the tender mercies of Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. The Actors Studio taught him emotional truth; Hollywood taught him that emotional truth looked best when delivered at top volume by a short, bald man with eyes like two angry drill bits.

The result was a career of magnificent typecasting. Tolkan specialised in the sort of authority figure who made Al Pacino in Serpico seem evasive and Matthew Broderick in WarGames look like a truant. His signature role arrived in 1985 as Vice-Principal Gerald Strickland in Back to the Future, a performance of such volcanic disapproval that entire generations of schoolchildren learned to fear detention more than nuclear war. He repeated the trick in the sequels, proving that even time travel offered no escape from a man who could ruin your entire decade with a single barked “McFly!” In Top Gun he played Commander Stinger, the only character capable of making fighter pilots feel they had let their mothers down. And as Detective Lubic in Masters of the Universe, he literally brought a shotgun to a laser fight.

Short, wiry and permanently unimpressed, Tolkan brought to every scene the air of a man who had already read the script and found it wanting. He married Parmelee Welles in 1971 and remained, by all accounts, a model of domestic tranquillity—perhaps because he had exhausted his daily quota of outrage on set. In an industry addicted to youth, beauty and false modesty, Tolkan was a corrective: a living reminder that a well-timed scowl requires no CGI. He leaves a filmography of glowering excellence, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, somewhere, a Hollywood producer is still slightly afraid of him.

MONKHOUSE CANCELED IN THE BARN

In the sanctified barn of The Repair Shop – that weekly cathedral of televised sentiment where a chipped Staffordshire figurine is treated with the solemnity of the Turin Shroud – the experts gathered one recent afternoon around a stack of dog-eared notebooks. These were not the usual heirlooms of some dear departed auntie’s recipe for spotted dick. No, these were the handwritten joke books of Bob Monkhouse, filched in 1995 by some light-fingered opportunist, recovered after a reward the size of a small mortgage, and now, in 2026, presented for restoration by the comedian’s writing partner. The restorers flicked through the pages with the caution of bomb-disposal experts handling a suspect package. And then, horror of horrors: a gag about housewives. The segment was scrapped mid-filming. The books were handed back with the murmured equivalent of a health-and-safety disclaimer. Bob Monkhouse, dead for the last twenty-two years, had been cancelled anew – not by an angry mob with pitchforks and Twitter accounts, but by the gentle custodians of BBC comfort television, recoiling as if they had unearthed a cache of unexpurgated de Sade.

One can picture the scene with a certain dry relish. The camera crew, faces frozen in that peculiarly British expression of embarrassed moral panic, the sort usually reserved for discovering that one’s grandmother once owned a golliwog. The producers, no doubt consulting their internal risk-assessment matrix, concluded that Monkhouse’s quips – handwritten, cartoon-illustrated, dating back to an era when “inappropriate” meant “not suitable for the vicar’s tea party” – posed an existential threat to the viewing public. Never mind that The Repair Shop exists to soothe the nation with the restorative power of varnish and nostalgia; never mind that the show’s entire premise is the gentle preservation of the past. When the past turns out to have had a sense of humour that did not arrive pre-approved by a 2026 diversity officer, the past must be binned. It is, as the managing director of Ricochet productions put it with the icy politeness of a firing squad, “not appropriate for a programme.”

This is not mere editorial squeamishness. It is the latest twitch in a continuous psychopathic need – and psychopathic is the word, for there is something clinically detached about the urge to erase – that afflicts a certain strain of modern liberalism. The compulsion is not to argue with the past, or contextualise it, or even laugh at it. It is to delete it, as if comedy itself were a contagious disease best eradicated before it infects the young. Traditional comedy, the sort Monkhouse practised with the effortless polish of a man who had catalogued a million gags on index cards the way other people hoard stamps, must be airbrushed from the record. In its place we are left with the unfunny comedy of the left: the stand-up routine that is really a TED Talk with swear words, the sketch show that lectures you on pronouns before you have even settled into your seat, the satirical panel game where every punchline is pre-vetted for microaggressions. The result is not laughter but a low, compliant chuckle of ideological agreement – the sound, one suspects, of people who have forgotten what a joke is for.

To understand the scale of the loss, one must revisit Bob Monkhouse’s life and career, not as hagiography but as a corrective to the present-day caricature. Born in 1928 in Beckenham, the son of a civil servant, young Robert Alan Monkhouse was the sort of precocious child who could recite entire music-hall routines by the age of six. He served in the RAF, wrote for The Goon Show, and by the 1950s had become the smooth-faced, quick-witted fixture of British light entertainment. Game shows were his bread and butter – The Golden Shot, Family Fortunes, Bob’s Full House – but his true métier was the stand-up, delivered with a delivery so silken it made other comedians sound as if they were gargling gravel. He was, in the parlance of the time, “a pro’s pro”: a writer who supplied gags to everyone from Max Bygraves to the Queen’s Christmas broadcast, and a performer who could ad-lib his way out of a power cut.

Yet the man was never merely a joke machine. His private life was a tangle of affairs, two marriages, estranged children, and the quiet melancholy that often attends those who spend their days making strangers laugh. The stolen joke books – those very same volumes now deemed toxic – were his life’s work: a vast, cross-referenced archive that functioned as both database and autobiography. He would sit up until the small hours, scribbling, doodling topless cartoons in the margins, filing away observations on human folly with the fastidiousness of a Victorian lepidopterist. The jokes themselves were not, for the most part, the crude club-room smut his detractors now pretend. They were, at their best, miniature essays in misdirection: the setup that lulled you into complacency, the payoff that revealed the absurdity beneath. “I’ve got a wife who’s an angel,” he once said. “She’s always in heaven when I’m in hell.” The line works not because it is vicious but because it is precise; it captures the domestic truce that passes for marital bliss with the economy of a haiku.

What the cancellers fail to grasp – and their failure is total, a sort of willed tonal deafness – is the subtlety, the nuance. Monkhouse’s comedy was never the blunt instrument of the shock comic. It was the rapier of the technician who understood that laughter arrives most reliably when the audience is simultaneously flattered and gently betrayed. He could do the blue material when the occasion demanded – the after-dinner circuit of the 1970s was not a Montessori playgroup – but his public persona was one of urbane mischief. He mocked himself more than anyone: the receding hairline, the perpetual tan that looked as if it had been applied with a paint roller, the image of the lounge-lizard host who secretly knew every trick in the book. There was, beneath the sheen, a melancholy intelligence that recognised comedy as the last refuge of the civilised man in a world bent on taking itself seriously. He once observed, in a rare moment of candour, that the secret of comedy was not to be funny but to make the audience feel clever for laughing. That is nuance. That is the sort of insight a risk-assessment form cannot compute.

The psychopathic need to erase him is, of course, part of a larger pattern. It is the same impulse that has seen entire back catalogues of Fawlty Towers episodes locked away like radioactive waste, that has turned the Carry On films into objects of embarrassed academic study rather than sources of uncomplicated mirth. Liberals of the current vintage do not merely dislike traditional comedy; they experience it as a personal affront, a reminder that once upon a time people laughed without first checking their privilege. The solution, therefore, is prophylactic deletion. Better a world without jokes than a world in which someone, somewhere, might be reminded that grandad once found a gag about mothers-in-law hilarious. The endgame is inevitable: a comedy landscape populated exclusively by the unfunny. We already see it on the fringe circuit – the performer who begins every set with a land acknowledgement, the Netflix special that is ninety minutes of performative guilt, the satire that dares not satirise the side that pays the bills. It is comedy as therapy, comedy as sermon, comedy that leaves you feeling improved rather than amused. One longs for the days when the worst sin a comedian could commit was being boring.

And so we arrive, with the inexorable logic of a Monkhouse one-liner, at the death of comedy itself. For comedy, like all art worth the name, requires risk. It requires the freedom to say the unsayable, to notice the ridiculous in the sacred, to flirt with the edge without falling off. Monkhouse understood this instinctively; his entire archive was a testament to the belief that humour is anarchic, ungovernable, and therefore precious. Those who cancelled him in The Repair Shop – earnest, well-meaning, and utterly humourless – do not. They believe laughter must be earned through moral purity, that the past must be retrofitted to the present’s specifications, that a 1960s gag about a nagging wife is not an artefact of a less enlightened time but an active threat to be neutralised. In their zeal they have misunderstood not only Monkhouse but the nature of the form. His comedy was never crude; it was precise. It was never cruel; it was observant. And it was never safe; it was alive.

The notebooks have been returned to the family, no doubt to gather dust in some attic while the producers congratulate themselves on their ethical hygiene. Bob Monkhouse, meanwhile, lies in a Kentish churchyard, his epitaph no doubt already prepared in his own handwriting: something wry, something rueful, something that would have made the barn fall about laughing. The joke, as ever, is on the rest of us. In our determination to sanitise the past we have sterilised the future. And in the silence that follows, one can almost hear the ghost of the old pro delivering the perfect closer: “Well, that’s showbusiness – you can’t please everyone. Especially when you’re dead.”