<FONT face="Comic Sans MS" size=2>The genuine hair to Blair strategy <BR>Janice Turner <BR><BR>Cherie's misfortune is to live in an era when middle-aged women cannot be complacent about their looks <BR><BR><BR>LORD SUARD of the Lowlights. It would look fabulous above André Suard’s West London salon. And creating a Baron of the Barnet would seem a canny long-term investment for the Labour Party, considering Cherie Blair’s hairdresser charged &pound;7,700 to keep her do just so throughout the last election. <BR>This is the first time that political parties have had to submit such detailed accounts to the Electoral Commission so we don’t know for sure whether Cherie had a personal blow-dryer traipsing behind her around 50 constituencies in 1997 or 2001. But I would guess not. <BR><BR><BR><BR>André Suard’s presence on the 2005 election trail could be judged as a because-I’m-worth-it diva demand, yet more evidence of Cherie’s accession to First Lady grandeur. But rather she is telling her party what she has learnt over eight bitter years: “If you expect a word I say to be reported, if you want a photo opportunity to feature the people I actually meet, if you want me to convey the political message of the day, then you have to take my hair out of the equation.” The Labour Party got a top-flight QC to argue its case for a whole month — and she only asked for &pound;275 a day. Imagine if she’d billed them by the hour from chambers. <BR><BR>In 2001, when Hillary Clinton addressed a graduating class at Yale, an audience of America’s most brilliant young women, she remarked with weary irony: “The most important thing I have to say today is that hair matters . . . Pay attention to your hair. Because everyone else will.” And the Clinton and Blair hair trajectories follow the same course: style-free, blue-stocking mop to ill-judged fashion experiments to uncontroversial chic. Only when the scary fringe of indifference is replaced by the helmet of high maintenance do the critics finally move on. <BR><BR>Of course, Sanda Howard is delighted to point out that she had no tonsorial assistance throughout the whole campaign. But then Mrs Howard, a former Vogue cover model, with a perfectly symmetrical, fine-boned face, could forget to wash her hair for months, scrape it into a Vicki Pollard scrunchy and still look down imperiously from the hair high ground. And I think she knows it. <BR><BR>But there are lesser women — myself included — for whom hair was scribbled on by nature as a vague afterthought. Sometimes the raw material is poor. To adopt the measure of duvet quality: I have two-tog hair but long for eight-tog locks, the Rich Girl Hair belonging to Rachel Weisz, Nigella Lawson or the royal girlfriend Kate Middleton, which I will never enjoy in this life unless I have extensions grafted from the scalps of Romanian virgins. Or there are some faces, such as Cherie’s, which don’t suit hair at all; no style truly works. Only with a crash team of experts can it look even OK: left to its own devices it falls into a default mode of pig-in-a-wig. <BR><BR>And it should be pointed out that high-maintenance hair is nothing new. Rather it is modern Wash &amp; Go insouciance which is a blip in hair history. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen — along with my mother and every woman of her generation, regardless of social class — are slaves to the frequent salon shampoo and set. It seems like a drag to me. But at least once these ladies had selected a style, some time around their early thirties, they never had to change it again. But this breed is dying out, as evinced by Asda this week announcing it will no longer stock blue-rinse hair colour owing to lack of demand. <BR><BR>Cherie Blair’s misfortune is to be fiftysomething in an era when middle-aged women are forbidden to be complacent about their looks. Today we must always be a-changing, rootling out and burning our favourite comfy clobber, panting to keep up with the exhausting, ever-faster spinning fashion carousel. And constant rug rethinks — having chunks carved out of your bob because “choppy” hair is trendy even it makes you look as if you’ve just endured chemotherapy — show a woman is still trying, hasn’t yet surrendered to frumpy old age. <BR><BR>If Cherie has developed a taste for designer duds and personal stylists, it is the fault of every person who ever cackled at her Brandrethesque jumpers or prison warden skirt-suits when she first entered No 10. Cherie was a brain on a stick, a girlie swot, nose deep in law books, with no interest in fashion or any innate good taste. She chose, after all, a career with the dullest possible professional wardrobe and even a wig so as to opt out of the hair conundrum. <BR><BR>It was relentless, cruel criticism about her weight, wardrobe and weird Cruella spiky crop that drove her towards crystal-bothering charlatans such as Carole Caplin. And then perhaps because Cherie fell for flattery, or her latent showbiz gene (inherited from her father) was suddenly activated, or because feminism has lately been eclipsed by narcissism (as Maureen Dowd has put it), Cherie appears to have developed a taste for the peacock preening of modern celebrity — and has been lambasted for that too. Likewise Camilla has journeyed through the headlines from scruffbag to sensation to showy spendthrift within a single year of public life. <BR><BR>Cherie’s misfortune is to live in our shallow age when the Oscars are more about frocks than films and even 20-year-old Coronation Street popsies have their tit-tape stuck on by personal stylists. Anyway, according to Grazia magazine, hanging out with your hairdresser is the latest A-list trend. Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Simpson are both pictured arm in arm with theirs, Kate Moss is shown having dinner in Cipriani’s with no less than her “hair guru”. In the absence of a boyfriend, why not hang out with an easy-going male who doesn’t only notice when your roots need doing but whips out a bowl and little brush right there? <BR><BR>But those who forestall all holiday chit-chat at the hairdresser with a large pile of magazines and regard the now obligatory head massage as intrusive and vaguely pervy, balk at life being a perpetual salon. However, it should be remembered that in every survey, hairdressing emerges as the happiest of all professions: each day you get to make a dozen or so people feel instantly better. So in the midst of a tough and dirty election, who would you rather be trapped with in a campaign bus outside Walsall: a gossipy, nice-smelling guy wielding hair straighteners or John Prescott?</FONT>