Fiona Duff: A close shave for baldies in North Korea

There’s something about people who want power that always makes me think that they must be a tad unstable. I don’t mean aspiring to run a company, more like invading Poland or having a goose-stepping army at your beck and call. I mean, one look at Hitler and you can tell that there was a bit of eye-swivelling going on with him. Stalin was so abysmally rotten that when he had a heart attack none of his minions dared make the decision to call medical help which might have saved his life

One of the maddest leaders of a country was Mao Tse Tung in China. Not only was he all-powerful, but really not very clever, which is a highly dangerous combination. He got it in his head that the country’s woes were caused by sparrows and his people were urged to kill them in their thousands.

If he’d listened to an expert, he might have learnt that sparrows may eat grain, but they also eat insects. Without the sparrows there was a quite literal plague of locusts that descended and led to the Great Chinese Famine in which around 30 million people died.

However, this week I’m wondering if Mao might have a contender for nuttiest person to run a country. Over in North Korea, Kim Jong-un has been working towards winning this title for some time.

It has now emerged that he has decreed that every man in North Korea has to have their hair cut in the same style as his barnet.

Frankly, it’s not one that even suits his fat physog, but I don’t suppose that’s something that anyone has ever said to his chubby face.

The people I worry about are the baldies – I mean a man on that level of crackerdom isn’t going to take into account the problem of not having any hair to style in the first place. It may be that the shiny-headed comrades have annoyed him in the past and this is his revenge. Now I know why Elton John had a hair transplant. – he must be planning a tour.