"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."