You may have more hair Mr President, but I've got more testosterone, says the BBC's political editor

No man can see into another's soul. Yet something tells me that it wasn't meant as friendly advice.

The comments came at the end of the world premiere of the Gordon And George Show. After more than an hour in the full glare of Maryland's midday sun I was discreetly wiping my brow.

Oh, all right, I was towelling down my bald bonce to prevent sweat dripping down my face.

The leader of the free world looked and uttered his final words at this, his historic first summit with Britain's new leader. "Next time you should cover your bald head," he said, looking straight at me.

Call me sensitive, suggest I'm paranoid if you like – we who are follically challenged are used to it – but I think his meaning was pretty plain. "Now it's your turn to feel the heat, baldie," the President was saying. "I didn't know you cared," I replied, as Dubya and the PM started walking away.

"I don't," the President snapped.

He's not been among my fans since I enquired whether he was "in denial" about the Iraq war. The cause of Dubya's ire is not, though, my present concern. It is his response I feel impelled to dwell on – a sneer at those of us lacking in the hair department.

It should not come as a shock to hear a successful politician having a go at a baldie. There have, after all, been precious few successful politicians who've sported a shiny dome themselves. Ask Messrs Kinnock, Hague and Duncan Smith.

"Not so," you say, drawing on your long memory and wider horizons. "What about the saviour of post-war Germany, Adenauer, or that fellow Khrushchev, who told the Russians the truth about Stalin, or, of course, our very own bald British bulldog Winston Churchill?"

They are all baldies, it's true, but all in office rather a long time ago. Churchill was, in fact, the last bald politician to be elected PM in Britain and that was way back in 1951 before the advent of televised politics.

Ever since I first found those tell-tale hairs on the pillow in the morning and checked in vain in the mirror to see if they'd grow back, I have waited for the emergence of a no-hair apparent.

As a BBC man I must, of course, stay strictly neutral but I confess that the decision of fellow baldie John Reid not to give the premiership a shot came as something of a personal blow. And I can't deny that I am watching Ming Campbell's poll ratings without my normal professional detachment.

Among the better revelations in Alastair Campbell's recent diaries was the tale of Tony Blair's obsessive worrying about his own receding hairline.

One entry from November 1995 records: "I'd worried Tony Blair by telling him that The Sun was doing something on his bald patch...He wasn't sure the public would want a bald leader."

Before you scoff, remember that the once Dear Leader was perhaps the best reader of the public mood we have ever seen.

If Blair is right, Britain could be casting aside great statesmen simply on account of their having too little hair.

Whatever happened to the ideas that politics was "showbiz for ugly people"?

And if television is to blame for this follicle fascism, then how much longer will the box find room for the likes of Clive James or Harry Hill or, well, me?

Try to imagine for a second the idea of a bald Jeremy Paxman or Jonathan Ross without his locks or Huw Edwards with a heavily polished dome and you will see the problem.

Happily for me, political journalism has, until recently, been regarded as "showbiz for rather odd-looking people".

I trust my distinguished colleagues and predecessors Andy Marr, John Sergeant, Adam Boulton and the rest will forgive me for saying so.

A worrying straw in the wind came when I left ITV News.

My replacement, Tom Bradby, is a fine man but he has maddeningly good looks and more than his fair share of hair.

I was once advised that viewers found bald men's heads off-putting as there was nothing to break up the view from chin to scalp.

I have never received bald hate mail but I have received specs hate mail.

"You should have gone to Specsavers," written in green crayon was one such offering – ironic given the fact that my rather bold choice of eye-wear stemmed from a desire to interrupt the endless vista of facial flesh that I'd been told was so disturbing.

I should, perhaps, have foreseen the problems that would lie ahead.

My first experience of baldness aversion came as a teenager. I still had a full head of hair – or, I should say, an almost full head of hair.

I was in hospital after a car crash, bandaged pretty much from head to foot and with tubes and wires sticking out in all directions.

A friend noticed that a tiny patch of hair – about the size of a coin – had dropped out. I decided to ask my doctor about it. He was the dashing, rugby playing, perma-tanned sort who makes nurses swoon.

"God", as he was known on the ward, swept into and was about to sweep out of my room with barely a word spoken, when I drew his attention to my sudden hair deficit.

His face froze in horror. Adopting his gravest bedside manner he informed me that alopecia induced by shock was the cause. Though he treated patients who'd barely cheated death it was clear that few things were more serious to him than the prospect of, whisper who dares, baldness.

It took some years for the rest of my scalp to catch up with that tiny bald patch and I have never been mocked for my baldness. In fact, quite the reverse.

My Seventies mop led me to acquire the school-boy nickname 'Bouffant Boy' and my children still gasp in horror at the pictures of Daddy with huge amounts of hair.

For years they were never sure whether to believe my tale about where it had all gone. Mummy, I explained, had pulled out one hair each time I was naughty.

George Bush has inspired me to say that it is time we baldies sported our pates with pride. After all, our problem is not the absence of something. It is an excess.

Our only flaw is to have too much testosterone. In other words, we're simply too manly.

With almost eight million men suffering hair loss in Britain today, we could even set up our own political party to take on those smug hairy types. I stand ready for the campaign.

Our slogan will be – The Bald Truth. Stand aside, George, before it's too late.