Martin Amis said Sally never really grew up. L...

Image via Wikipedia

As the awful images and news stories began to trickle out of Oslo yesterday afternoon, very soon one thing became abundantly clear: one of us had done it again. We in the white, blonde-haired male community have worked incredibly hard to rebuild our reputation since the days of  Timothy McVeigh, but appears that the cause will be set back years by this.

I am a white, blonde-haired male, but I was lucky. I was raised in a well-integrated, liberal household and I never wanted for the necessities of life: minoxidil, Top Gear DVDs, and royal wedding memorabilia. Others were not so lucky. It doesn’t take much for members of our community to fall under the influence of its more radical members: Michael Heseltine, Boris Johnson, and Matthew McConaughey.

It behooves us to recognise that there is something deeply wrong with the way we bring up blonde, white boys, and, until we have worked out what it is, we will be rightly regarded with mistrust and suspicion. I welcome the extra checks we will have to go through at airports just because it will be an opportunity to show whoever is working that the airport that we’re not all bad. I won’t be carrying any liquids, not even a nicely-chilled Pouilly-Fumee. We must all make sacrifices.

There is a temptation, of course, to try to duck the blame, to suggest that the Unabomber was more a mousey brown than a blonde, but his yearbook pictures clearly put the lie to this. It is tempting to suggest that Jared Lee Loughner only looks blonde because he is photographed under a yellowy light. Tempting, but deeply morally wrong. Who knows what colour Andrew Stack was before he went grey. Of course we know. We know in our hearts.

And it’s not fair. It’s not fair to suggest that maybe this problem is endemic in the white male community, whatever their hair colour. To try and implicate innocents like Martin Amis or Richard Littlejohn in this is unconscionable. There is clearly one factor that links all modern terrorism: blondeness.

I remember my relief when I saw Gerry Adams’ big, bushy, black beard. “It’s not just us,” I thought. To this day, I contend that Martin McGuinness’ hair is a reddish-brown.

It’s time to end the lies, though. Ever since the high-point of the Blonde Terror with the Baader-Meinhof gang, society has been rightly suspicious of those of us whose golden heads concealed dark hearts.

On behalf of all of us, I would like to apologise to the world, and suggest that we be a little stricter, a little more vigilant when we see a blonde, white man just ‘sitting’ in a park, or cafe , or other public place. It is not racist to ask him what he thinks he’s doing, or to report him to a police officer, or to search his house in the middle of the night.

We should crack down on this blonde, white, male menace.

After all, I’ll be bald soon…