Let’s Talk About Boris Johnson’s Hair
How can we not?
It’s possible that Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, aka BoJo, may not last much longer (an April exit would be appropriate given English poet T.S. Elliott’s description of it as the “cruelest month”). So before he’s gone let’s have a quick discussion about the Blonde Bombshell’s most distinguishing feature. It’s not his tenure as mayor of London or how he steered the Brexit mess to a creaky resolution or his infamous zip line ride.
It’s that hair.
That hair. It arrives before he does. It’s preternaturally blonde. It’s neither long nor short. It’s as complex and unpredictable as the climate. It’s a distraction. What does the Queen think of it? Is it meant to be nonchalant or disrespectful? Only he knows for sure.
Granted, the English are known for their eccentricities, but at the highest levels of leadership it’s expected that the rough edges will be sanded. Boris’s hair seemed to get wilder the higher he went. “The further up the greasy political pole he climbed, the messier his hair got to be,” said his biographer, Sonia Purcell. Back when he was President of Oxford Union in 1986, his tuft was the neatest thing about him. He was no shrinking violet, but he wasn’t quite leading with his hair yet.
Things started to get ruffled in the early 2000s, when his hands were often caught doing something to his hair, often before a TV appearance. His signature thatch of confusion and chaos was beginning to emerge, seemingly in parallel with the chaos and confusion of his personal life (BoJo only recently confirmed how many children he has had with his former wife, an affair with an art consultant, and his current wife Carrie: seven).
He became a mane in full sometime after he ended his reign as Mayor of London. When my son was in Boy Scout camp, the older kids would haze the newbies by giving them “swirlies” — dipping their hair in a commode while it was being flushed. It produced the same free-flying hair style as the Lyin’ King’s.
How does he do it? Is it intentional or accidental? A friend argued the other day that it’s genetic. No matter what the PM does, his hair just won’t stay put. Boris offers the same argument. He once told the Telegraph that his ‘do is “impossible to imitate as it is a product of random and competing forces of nature.”
That’s a little hard to swallow. It’s like saying Donald Trump’s hair is an accident. There’s a reason Trump didn’t come down to the Oval Office until after 10 a.m. — it took him that long to get his tresses set. BoJo probably spends at least as much time on his locks as the Trumpster does. He just uses a different approach. One theory is that he loads product in his hair and then blow dries it, intentionally creating the random, je ne sais quois effect. Trump briefly experimented with the ruffled effect, aided by Jimmy Fallon, but he never went back to it.
The question that serious people ask, however, is not how he does it, but why he does it. What the hell is the strategic objective of that unruly, unministerial mop?
It could be a branding strategy. Margaret Thatcher had her handbag (and quite a ‘do herself, we might add), Churchill had his cigar and Harold Wilson had his pipe. You have to stand out from the herd somehow.
His biographer probably has the most plausible theory. “He is the most ruthlessly ambitious person I’ve ever met,” Purnell said. “But in Britain it doesn’t go down that well to be so overtly ambitious.” She said the hair “disarmed people” into thinking he was a bit of fun and distracted from his ambition, like a “decoy” or “camouflage.”
At any rate, he’s stuck with it now. He may get it under control once he’s shown the door by the Queen at one of their increasingly infrequent meetings, but for now, trying to tame it any way, with scissors or comb or both, would be a glaring admission of defeat.
One final conjecture on the enigma wrapped inside of a puzzle that is Bozza’s hair. “What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare, and there is indeed historical precedent for the PM’s pompatus of love.
According to professor Dominic Janes, who teaches modern history at Keele University, "scruffy Boris Johnson's 'man of the people' look is part of a long British tradition." Charles James Fox, Britain's first foreign secretary in the 18th century, was actually the first to use his hair for political gains. According to Janes, Fox had a "disregard not only for style but also of basic neatness" which was the polar opposite of his early days.
As an armchair historian, I believe the real inspiration for the famous Johnson mop came from America, much the same way that Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters inspired the Beatles and the Stones. It happened one day when a young Boris was perusing the comics and came across the image that would haunt him and guide him for the rest of his days.
See you on the other side BoJo!