Word of the week, undoubtedly, has to be fascinator. The team responsible for policing the dress code at Ascot's Royal Enclosure (surely a vocation we all hope our children will one day aspire to) decreed that no woman would be admitted unless she was wearing either a hat, or a “substantial fascinator”. As it turns out, a fascinator is a form of headgear that doesn't hug the natural contours of your bonce, as most hats still do, but is a sort of artistic installation attached by glue, hatpins or some other piece of milliner's artifice. Most of these fascinators look like kites that have got lodged in their wearer's head by accident (Princess Beatrice's butterfly arrangement at a recent royal wedding was a classic) Those made of feathers and suchlike resemble salmon flies magnified to grotesque proportions for some giant's fishing rod. The real fascination is why on earth anyone would consider themselves more attractive for sporting the sort of arrangement that Liberace would have ordered for one of his dancers.

How much better, for Ascot and the rest of us, if the requirement to sport a substantial fascinator had been taken literally. If every racegoer had to come with a Melvyn Bragg, Andrew Roberts or Simon Schama in tow, wouldn't the whole festival take on a new, and significantly more attractive aspect?

A place in history...

Coinciding with the start of Ascot, a whole absorption (is that the collective noun?) of substantial fascinators gathered in 10 Downing Street to amuse the visiting US President. The Prime Minister invited not just Andrew Roberts, but Alistair Horne, Linda Colley, David Cannadine and a real controversy (that should be the collective noun) of contemporary historians to argue over the roast beef and trifle with George Bush.

Because at least one of those invited is an assiduous diarist and sat next to Bush and across from Brown, history will enjoy a full account of the evening. And I suspect that it will go some way towards burnishing the reputations of both, even as their contemporaries increasingly consider them both history.

The whole business of politicians trying to secure their historical reputations is notoriously chancy. Churchill, of course, wrote his own history in an effort to make himself both richer, and more respected. It succeeded. Churchill's biographer, Martin Gilbert, was enlisted by John Major to follow in the prime ministerial footsteps in the Nineties, but history has yet to elevate him to the ranks of the immortals.

Indeed, one curious way in which British political history differs from American is that here, once a statesman's reputation is fixed, it rarely gets revised, upwards or downwards. In the States there are a number of presidents whose place in history has been radically reassessed after they've departed office.

So there are very few historians ready, in a spirit of revisionist bravery, to argue the case for the Rosebery, Balfour, Chamberlain, Eden or Heath premierships. I might be tempted to put the case for Callaghan (good on education, Ulster and home affairs, and the only really authentic working-class premier) but I suspect I'd have few takers.

But in the US, Truman left office considered a failure but is now remembered as the architect of Western victory in the Cold War; JFK was canonised after his death but is now recognised as a tarnished figure; LBJ left the presidency a beaten man and we now recognise, thanks to his biographer Robert Caro, his tragic greatness. Even Ronald Reagan, an object of derision, at least in Europe during his Presidency, is now seen as Truman's fitting heir, the man who completed freedom's victory.

Given how much historians have done to reverse the conventional wisdom on US presidents, but how little they've been able to revise our view of our prime ministers, no wonder it was George Bush who looked so sunny after his encounter with the fascinators.

...but no place in the sun

Back to Ascot for a second concern I feel I have to share. What is the point of fake tan?

As readers may know I harbour a deep and unbudgeable prejudice against island holidays, long days on the beach and any form of sun-seeking. It's not so much an environmentalist's dislike of jet-propelled tourism that drives this prejudice as an atavistic Aberdonian aesthetic that holds pallor as the real glamour. I think that suntans are ugly, in the same way that fishnet tights teamed with peep-toe shoes are. TTHD. Trying Too Hard, Dear. Fake tan is the ultimate crime against both nature and taste.

Never mind the absurdity of false toenails. Fake tan is like having a false ingrowing toenail - it involves going out of your way to artificially acquire something painful and disfiguring. So one of the most substantial fascinators of the week is why do people smear themselves with indelible paint that leeches into their skin with heaven knows what consequence simply to stand out on ceremonial occasions? Wasn't the point of the Roman invasion to help us to move beyond woad?

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