How Tony Blair’s holiday host “prepares” for an election

According to the Independent this morning the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has had a secret hair transplant at a clinic. Unfortunately it was less secret than he would have liked and “…acting on inside information, a correspondent of Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper was on hand outside the private plastic surgery clinic in Ferrara”.

The report goes on“…eight hours later, the Prime Minister made his exit, staggering from side to side, clutching at a guard rail, his scalp swathed in white bandages and topped by a skull cap.”

Just a year ago Berlusconi “welcomed Tony and Cherie Blair to his Sardinian villa sporting a bandanna. Local rumours that the startling new look was designed to cover a hair transplant were initially ridiculed. But as the handiwork of transplant expert Piero Rosati took root, Mr Berlusconi began to brag about the operation. “My hair has started growing marvellously,” he crowed on 30 December.”

Maybe there is a lesson here for politicians with thinning hair everywhere. Trying to cover-up a cover-up might be worse than just being straight and open or even, perish the thought, facing the world as nature intended.

Mike Smithson