Donald Trump in White House and Boris Johnson in Downing Street would be hair-raising

I CAN’T quite shake the image. If Donald Trump gets into the White House and Boris Johnson moves into Downing Street, how will we cope with all that hair? asks Clodagh Finn

With the Trump Thatch on one side of the Atlantic and the Boris Barnet on the other, all talk of ‘heads’ of State is likely to mean something else entirely.

It would, of course, be comedy gold. A dystopian hell, mind, but anyone with a penchant for a bad pun (is there any other kind?) would be in seventh heaven: ‘Boris wins by a hair’; ‘Trump is hair apparent’; ‘Is this the final hairdown?’ Pause here for groans.

It’s not as if hair isn’t important. There’s been a lot more talk of it than you might imagine in the US presidential campaign, though that’s not entirely a good thing.

Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders registered his disgust when a reporter asked him if he thought Hillary’s hair was getting more scrutiny than his.

Sanders replied: “I don’t mean to be rude here. I am running for president of the United States on serious issues, OK? Do you have serious questions?”

And top of Sanders’ list of serious issues is the “grotesque level” of income and wealth inequality in the US, where the top 0.1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

If the media want to talk about hair, he said, then we have a “real problem”. And he’s right, we do have a real problem because serious questions are out of fashion.

It’s not that people are unwilling to ask them but when, for example, Trump’s hair stays put in a blast of wind, it’s his previously quoted explanation that makes the news, or at least the Twitter feed, which seems to be the same thing these days: “I do not wear a rug. My hair is 100% mine. No animals have been harmed in the creation of my hairstyle.”

That is far more digestible than any discussion of, say, wealth inequality, though Trump has had the decency to explain that he was a self-made businessman who started his business empire with a small loan from dad — “small” in this case was a piffling $40m.

In some ways, it makes perfect sense to focus on the wondrous hair of our two blond(ish) protagonists because what is going on underneath the weave is far more difficult to untangle.

And, of course, hair in itself is a sort of language, according to the social historians, who argue that hairstyle can communicate many things — gender, class, even political ideals.

It might be pushing it a little to suggest that Trump’s impressive comb-over reveals his propensity to cover over the truth, but only a little.

Certainly his coiffure, held together with aerosol and artifice, is a good parallel for the tricks he plays with the truth.

He doesn’t have too much respect for veracity, as the chilling results of a fact-checking exercise carried out by the Washington Post show only too clearly. When the Post vetted the truth of the presumptive Republican nominee’s ‘statements’, over 70% of them were awarded, if that’s the right word, the paper’s maximum dishonesty rating of four Pinocchios.

In case you wondered, the other 30% got a rating of just three Pinocchios. How can this man have got so far? The Post might well be asking the same question as one its columnists, Dana Milbank, said he would eat his own words if Trump was named presumptive nominee.

Last week, Milbank was served up some Mexican-themed dishes, including grilled newspaper guacamole, in a little culinary acknowledgment of Trump’s plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico.

Things aren’t much better under Boris’s barnet. In his campaign to get the UK out of Europe, he’s been throwing around a host of inflammatory words, comparing the European project to Napoleon and Hitler’s expansionary campaigns.

When UK prime minister David Cameron made noises about the security threat of a possible Brexit, Johnson retorted that all the talk of “bubonic plague” and “World War Three” were wildly exaggerated.

And he’s just the man to tell us about exaggeration. In a recent article, he reminded us that he spent many years in Brussels — “I rather love the old place” — and how, as a former Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph, he ‘informed’ readers “about euro- condoms and the great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp”.

Boris’s vision of Europe is of a bonkers bureaucracy with straight bananas and, for years now, he has been peddling the kind of distorting scaremongering that makes every decent citizen want to batten down the hatches against the invading hordes.

Sometimes it hard to tell the difference between his real statements and the ones on the Twitter account written by Boris’s hair, though I’m not suggesting he writes the latter.

“I am some very important protein filament,” reads his hair’s profile. A sample post runs: “I wish Boris would stop scratching me. It’s making me look like a fool.”

But then Boris plays on his image of the blustery, idiosyncratic, dare we say, buffoon. His air of cultivated chaos, quick banter and often impenetrable puff is the perfect match for that shock of unruly hair.

Though, he did seem shocked when, in 2012, US chatshow host David Letterman asked him if he cut his own hair and if he thought it might be holding him back.

Johnson replied: “Until you mentioned it tonight, I’d never regarded it as a drawback.”

When Letterman asked if there was a chance he could become prime minister, he delivered this gem: “I have about as much chance as being reincarnated as an olive.”

Let’s hope that , for once, he’s getting close to the truth this time. Even within a hair’s breadth.