THINGS have come to a pretty pass when war is in the tiny hands of the two blokes with the worst haircuts on the planet.

The awfulness of Kim Jong-Un’s top-knot topiary is exceeded only by the cascading orange swirl of Donald J. Trump’s crowning grotesquery.

Yet these two clowns have their little digits on the buttons that could unleash a nuclear holocaust on the Korean Peninsula and perhaps even the Japanese archipelago.

What is the world coming to?

But wait… when you think of it, we really shouldn’t be surprised. Those bad haircuts should have set the alarm bells ringing months ago. All we needed was a quick glance at history to realise that their forested and flaming follicles were the perfect indicators of their pugnacious propensities.

Take Hitler. If ever there was a bad-hair template for bellicosity it was Adolf’s greasy cowlick and the nosey moustache beneath. Same with Joe Stalin who doubled down on the moustache and glowered beneath a thatch so thick it probably housed the Georgian rats he grew up with.

Or take Kaiser Bill. His haircut was so horrible he hid it beneath a tin hat with an eagle on top and a curling waxed special on the upper lip.

In fact, the hairy horrors go all the way back to Egypt’s all-conquering pharaoh Thutmose III, who hid his mullet beneath a funny scarf but whose beard grew like a carrot, right out of the end of his chinny chin chin.

Alexander the Great was another giveaway. His mother wouldn’t let him cut his hair at all, so by the time he was 21 he’d conquered half the known world – auburn locks flying – in a vain attempt to prove his manhood.

And, of course, Genghis Khan was so hairy that in the few images that survive it’s impossible to discover where his hair ends and the brown bear on his head begins. But down below that little chin, his beard is a thing of Mongolian monstrosity.

And just in case you think we’re being one-sided, consider the more follically blessed of our great leaders. Take John F Kennedy of the perfect pelt, for instance: no wonder he stayed so cool in that Cuban missile crisis. His own fingers were safely tucked away in the pockets of his Brooks Brothers britches. He’d taken one look at naughty Nikita Khrushchev and grinned to himself. Bald as a badger! Ho, ho, ho…putty in his hands.

robert@robertmacklin.com