TOM Paulin - the sixtysomething ex-Trot poet who features regularly on late night arty-farty telly slots - reportedly charged Newsnight Review £90 for having his hair dyed, on the grounds that a boy just has to look good for the camera. The BBC allowed the claim.

I’ll spare the Marxist component of my readership the obvious in jokes about how such behaviour has its objective roots [geddit?] in the Healyite degeneration of the International Committee tradition, and simply note that that on the sporadic occasions I am on the box, all I get is a courtesy cab and a modest appearance fee.

Actually, I did find myself in the Newsnight Review green room one Friday evening a few years back, immediately prior to doing a live piece on some news story - the death of over 1,000 people after an Egyptian ferry capsized, nothing remotely important really - before the programme moved swiftly on to matters rather more highbrow.

Luckily, I was able to make small talk with Ian Hislop, swapping anecdotes about the late Paul Foot. Meanwhile an immaculately-quiffed Mark Lamarr understandably ignored me and concentrated on chatting up two stick-thin identikit long-haired blondes that I probably should have recognised but didn‘t.

But anyway, back to the former Socialist Labour League rhymester with whom I started this post. For Liz Hoggard in the Independent, Paulin’s resort to artificial means of banishing grey hair is indicative of something she calls ‘the male beauty crisis'.

Fellas, on this line of reckoning, are becoming as hung up about their looks as women have traditionally been, thanks to the rise of pretty boys in movies and on magazine covers. Well, I was arguably a pretty boy myself, back in my glam rock days of three decades ago. I confess to the use of Grecian 2000 and Clinique for Men even now. By bloke standards, that makes me something of a metrosexual, I guess.

But a ‘male beauty crisis’? Really? Oh well, it’s a safe bet that it will never reach the far left. This is a milieu where 1990s Marxism T-shirts, faded from hundreds of washes, still constitute a fashion statement, a decently-sized beer gut is not considered anything of which to be ashamed, and facial hair is de rigeur after 50.

Until we get substantiated reports of leading male comrades trying on alternative outfits before meetings and then asking their partner whether or not their bum looks big in them, we will still be a long way away from the birth of Botox Bolshevism for boys.