Tony Blair must be secretly pretty chuffed this week. It looks like he's finally vanquished an enemy he's been wanting to scrape off the face of the earth for years. Face Fuzz.

Facial hair has been the defining look of this war - when Robin Cook gave Tony Blair a "chinny reck-on" and resigned, look who surrounded him like a hairy doughnut.

Tufty Club members and critics of the war Jeremy Corbyn and Llew Smith. Just next to them on the benches were Frank Dobson and, of course, Chris Smith - who doesn't need a beard.

By coincidence, all those beardies are finalists in this Thursday's "Beard of the Season" Awards, presented four times a year by the Beard Liberation Front.

Other nods have gone to George Michael, Jimmy Hill and Michael Moore, also hairy marys.

Hairy-faced Rebels

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Even before this whiskering campaign against the war, there was plenty of evidence that Blair hates hair.

Like Mrs Thatcher, who never allowed facefuzz within a whisker of her cabinet, our Tone clearly prefers bare-faced cheek.

Hairy-faced Nasties

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Alistair Darling, Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, and Geoff Hoon are just some of Tony's cronies who've wielded the razor, rather than face the chop.

Even as a longhair, Tony himself was a smoothiechops.

A massive mullah's beard of protest has been mounting over the last three weeks, as protesters declared "Bristles not Missiles!"

One protestor was heard to comment: "I will happily grow a much bigger beard for as long as it takes for the world to stop fighting", and the amount of chin fluff at all the anti-war protests in Britain over the last few months would be enough to fill several hundred duvets.

But with Saddam's face no longer welcome in Iraq it seems Tony Blair has faced down the protesters, and regained his reputation for being a political smooth operator - the only world leader who regularly has his policies Brazilian waxed.