Not to put down the new-look Statesman, but the picture at the top of this column is already out of date, because I have grown a beard. I have been conducting an informal poll as to whether I should keep it or start shaving again, and the results are as follows. In favour of the beard: 0. Against: 1. The one against is my wife, who thinks I look like a tramp. In fact, when we were wandering around Sandown on the Isle of Wight last week, she snatched away the beach blanket I was carrying over my shoulder, for fear that people would soon start throwing coins at me.

By a suspicious coincidence, Brad Pitt also now sports a beard, as does Xanana Gusmao, the new president of East Timor. There is, for the first time I can remember, a Premier League footballer with a beard: Abel Xavier. He plays for Liverpool, but looks like somebody out of the Bible. Many people currently high up in Formula One, where you'd have thought a smooth, aerodynamic look would be de rigueur, also have beards, and so does David Blunkett, the most successful cabinet minister. Yet only 20 years ago, beards were beyond the pale in political circles.

Margaret Thatcher said she'd never have a bearded man in her cabinet, so presumably she wouldn't have had Jesus. (Actually, we knew that, didn't we?) There's an urge to be bearded just at the moment because everything seems so glib and superficial and phoney. A beard spells complication, earnestness, meditative latency. Why latency? Well, soup, for instance, hangs around in a beard, a smile emerges slightly more slowly from the face. The bearded man also looks as though he is too lost in thought actually to shave; he looks profound, and this, I suspect - not knowing much about Islam - was why the Taliban wore them.

What I'm building up to is a recommendation for Tony Blair. If you fed details of all his image problems into a powerful computer, from the receding hairline to the off-putting schoolboyishness, it would spit out the answer "GROW A BEARD". He could get through the problematic, bristly stage while on his summer holiday, and nobody would accuse him of looking like a tramp - not even if he wandered about the Isle of Wight with a blanket over one shoulder.