Beard Liberation Front
28th January
Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266
Tory Beard Wars: the return of Margaret Thatcher’s beard hatred
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that a new outbreak of Tory Beard Wars, where a Minister has shaved off his beard in unexplained circumstances is a reminder that former Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a veteran opponent of the hirsute.
She was described by the Daily Telegraph in August 2001 as notoriously pogonophobic.
The journalist Peter Hitchens who has a beard has noted in his Mail on Sunday column Mrs Thatcher’s reaction to an earlier period of beard growth on his part:
…as was Lady Thatcher, who sometimes had to endure me as a lowly member of the press party on her flights abroad. She never said anything.
You could just feel the frozen disapproval emanating from her.
Mrs Thatcher famously banned beards in her Cabinets and John Selwyn Gummer, a rare senior Tory with a beard, had to shave his beard off before joining the Cabinet.
It is not known what the origins of Mrs Thatcher’s hatred of beards was but it is thought that she felt that beards were strongly associated with rebellion and the political left.
A search of the Thatcher Foundation archive for the term ‘beard’ produces not a single result.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said Mrs Thatcher divided Britain between the clean shaven and the hirsute. Notably in 1997 Tony Blair’s Cabinet had the most beards since 1945 marking the start of a more socially progressive era even if Blair himself was a clean shaven revisionist. What the future will be under Keir Starmer, someone often pictured in the barbers chair, is as yet not fully clear
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