Never trust a politician who dyes his hair or wears a wig

As I always say, you can’t trust a politician who dyes his hair or wears a wig. (This does not apply to women, for whom it is culturally acceptable to dye their hair, and to wear wigs because it is not culturally acceptable to be bald).

Right now, western civilisation as we know it is undergoing devastation by two men – one of them ageing, the other aged – with ridiculously dyed hair: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. I really am surprised that Boris Johnson’s dyed hair has not been an issue in the British press. Perhaps because they were too busy making him a hero? Trump’s farcical hair is certainly the butt of satire in the United States, and good for them.

The last time I saw hair exactly like Johnson’s it was on my second son’s head and he was five years old.

Johnson’s hair-dying (bleaching, actually) is made more risible by the fact that he has chosen a shade that does not exist in nature, not at that age. That is why he stands out: because nobody middle-aged has ash-blonde hair. All blond hair, even in the northern hemisphere, darkens and discolours as the years go by. Before it turns white, it goes a dark blond. Most times, the ash-blond children of the north end up brown-haired adults. My son with the Boris hair now has a brown crop at 28.

Have you never wondered why you rarely-to-never see properly blond men, not even demonstrating in parliament square in Iceland during the Panama Papers crisis? It’s because men don’t dye their hair, and true blondes/blonds in adulthood are extremely unusual. They exist, but as a rarity, like true redheads.

In Malta, the association between problematic politicians and hair issues is unavoidable. Alfred Sant wore and still wears wigs of fluctuating colour intensity and design. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando dyed his hair brown for years. Joseph Muscat disappeared from public view for an entire summer, leaving his wife to appear in public without him, then reappeared with a failed scalp lift and a ring of stitches clearly visible beneath the hairline under intense stage-lighting.

Now that Boris Johnson has become the target of public anger, a false idol whose feet of clay have been exposed by the fall-out after the vote, his Andy Warhol hair is going to start looking like not so much Brand Boris as Brand Idiocy.