To be fair to the more entitled, self-pitying and tone-deaf representatives of the professional managerial class, there has probably never been a wor… - Catherine Bennett

With hindsight, we can see that if Cook's loyalty to his facial hair did not actively foreshadow his later determination to stick to his principles, it was, in the intervening years, a sign that some important part of him would never be a smooth, New Labour man. While Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, Alistair Darling and Geoff Hoon all recognised that hairiness is inescapably associated with woolly, unreconstructed leftiness, Cook stayed firm.
After he completed his speech on Monday night, he sank back into a veritable hedge of springy backbench furze, a brigade of hedgehogs led by Jeremy Corbyn and Frank Dobson, whose beards, now that Cook's has joined their number, are recognisable as individual acts of in-your-face defiance. In fact, with this week's principled resignation from the shadow front bench of the only bearded Tory, John Randall, New Labour's Tebbit-like suspicion of hairy ministers ought to become, if anything, more intense.
While Blunkett's beard is explicable, there must now be suspicions that Charles Clarke's stubble is nothing less than a signal to disobedient backbenchers that he will not be long in joining them. Resignation or the razor, Clarke; the time has come to choose.

Who are strangers to comment on a would-be parent exercising what is increasingly claimed, even if it requires the bodies of others, to be a right? Or on the choices of a surrogate mother, also assumed to be a free agent? It remains a mystery why the choice to gestate a stranger's child is almost never, if ever, taken by the richest 1%.

Repeated arguments for a much edited or secular coronation, citing dwindling Christian belief as well as protagonists less obviously creditable than was Elizabeth in 1953, appear to have dented neither the church's coronation ambitions nor the palace’s matching enthusiasm for spiritual choreography and knick-knacks. Only the Koh-i-noor has been sacrificed, to be sensitively replaced at the religious ceremony by the largest diamond in the world, the South African Cullinan. With decorative crosses over them, such jewels "remind us", the prayerbook explains to the untutored, "that Jesus Christ is king over all".