Derick Allsop reports

Derick Allsop reports.
Ron Dennis, the team principal of McLaren-Mercedes, insisted yesterday that there was no pact with Williams-Renault to ensure Jacques Villeneuve beat Michael Schumacher to the Formula One world championship.And he denied his drivers, Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard, were allowed to pass Villeneuve and take first and second places at the controversial Grand Prix of Europe as a reward.The head of Williams, Frank Williams, had already dismissed the leaking of taped pit to driver conversations during the race as an attempt by Ferrari to discredit the British teams and deflect attention from Schumacher’s disciplinary hearing in Slough today. And I hold nothing, absolutely nothing, against people with hairless chins – as long as they keep their daft prejudices out of my face.. Michael Schumacher is not the only one having to explain his actions to motor sport’s governing body today. True, you don’t push food through an orifice in the middle of your pate. But let me assure you that it really is quite easy to keep dinner out of your beard – you simply apply good table manners, and keep your moustache trimmed so that it does not become a soup strainer.There have been times when facial hair has been far more popular than today (I hear it is pretty fashionable in parts of Afghanistan). I am confident that beards will come into mass fashion again. That said, I have no wish to be some kind of beard Messiah (but I note that Jesus, God and the prophets are all strangers to the razor).

We get round that problem not by shaving our scalps but by washing our hair regularly, something we beardies are perfectly capable of applying to our chins. I’ve removed it only a couple of times over the years, been horrified by my appearance and immediately regrown it. The occasional trim and a shave around the periphery once a week is all the maintenance required.Why have a beard? Give me one good reason why not. It seems highly likely that the reason men can grow them is that they served some purpose during our evolution. I’ve not heard a completely convincing explanation for what this purpose might actually have been, and I accept that beards may have no real function in advanced industrial societies But they don’t seem to do any harm. So why waste time and energy, every day, scraping very sharp steel across your face (or getting a whirring little machine to do it for you)? It’s not natural.The most monstrous allegation of all is that beards are inherently unhygienic, trapping extraneous matter and providing a refuge for other life forms, as described in Roald Dahl’s The Twits. But if that is the case, then the hair on your head is unhygienic too.

It was a struggling, straggly affair at first; but as the hair on top of my head began its retreat, it thickened up and became excitingly piebald. Back then it was about the only thing we had in common, but the beard was the beginning of a crucial and complete reconciliation. It provides me with the tiniest hint of what it might be like to be black or gay, always useful for a white middle-class liberal. And it gives me an excuse for all those job interviews I’ve failed over the years.

Just blame it on bosses whose minds were as small as their chins were smooth.My father is a long-term beardie and I began growing my own the day I left school. How can we be considered collectively, when we are all individuals. And how can anyone form a view about, say, our reliability based on something as superficial as facial fur. I ring MORI to ask if it knows of any polling research that reveals people’s distrust of or uneasiness with the bearded. The researcher I speak to says she will try to find out, but adds that she would not be surprised if such was the case.Weird, isn’t it.

A Peak District National Park committee is appointing a new warden. The only applicant without a beard gets the job, and one of the councillors on the committee actually tells him afterwards that that is why he succeeded.Case 2. You read or hear the odd item which makes you realise some people, quite a lot of people, not only lump all of us beardies together but go on to hold something against us.Case 1. But I have become aware that it’s out there, ugly, unkind, invincible, like any other unjustified prejudice. Then the egregiously smooth Peter York gave a chillingly credible account of how corporate image-makers – and now, it is alleged, political ones – have set their faces against the beard. Research had shown that Joe and Joanna Public think beard-wearers “strange, divergent, unreliable” They are “individualists, not team players”.