‘Trump’s decomposing ear of corn’: what does ‘hair certainty’ tell us about our leaders?

From Starmer’s stiff quiff to the Maga movement’s glossy TV locks, a politician’s mane can speak volumes – it says as much about what side of the divide they sit on as it does about the prevailing political winds

Labour has an image problem. In a recent YouGov survey, people expressed a view that the party is “dishonest”, “only interested in themselves”, and “the same as the rest”. It’s no wonder that they are currently, terrifyingly, 10 points behind Reform in the polls. They also, by a slightly different – you could say less data-driven – metric, have a different kind of image problem. They lack “hair certainty”, from the top down.

The idea of “hair certainty” was coined by the writer Simon Doonan. Writing in the buildup to the 2016 presidential election that would see Donald Trump first take office, he explained: “Presidential hair = hair with certainty … Hair-certainty describes hair that is what it appears to be. No illusions. No Greco-Roman fakery. Presidential hair can be thick or thin. Presidential hair can be messy. Presidential hair can be sparse, naff, and filled with dandruff. But, whatever it is, it just needs to have that certainty.”