What have the bastards – the spin doctors, the media management monkeys – done to Boris? I watched him on BBC’s Question Time London mayoral debate and, after a while, began to weep.

For a start, his famous hair – usually a joyous, anarchic, devil-may-care expression of liberty and freedom – had been welded or nailed to his scalp, making him look as though he were wearing the military helmet of a Third World totalitarian country. That’s what being a serious politician is all about, having flat hair.

And of course, not smiling – he did not grin, laugh or chuckle once, despite the obvious comic potential inherent in standing next to Brian Paddick for a whole hour. There were no jokes, there was none of those gaffes that denote a person as being human: just an endless succession of boring and questionable attacks on a nonchalant Ken Livingstone.

All the stuff that made Boris the most likable politician in the country seemed to have been expunged, leaving behind that most awful thing – a bog-standard, Old Etonian Conservative politician. The received wisdom is that Boris had to do this shtick, to darken up, if he were to win high political office.

“Boris,” the media monkeys told him, “you have to get dull. And make your hair flatter.” This strikes me as counterintuitive to an absurd degree – the Conservative party chooses a candidate who is liked by the public principally for his refusal, or inability, to play the widely despised political game, a man who has those rare commodities of personality and hinterland and wit – and then sets about methodically stripping him of all these things because they think it will alienate the voters. Where is the evidence for that? Common sense would tell you the reverse is true: Boris’s popularity is a consequence of being unorthodox.

However, the strategy, we are told, has worked, because Boris is neck and neck with Newt Boy in the opinion polls. But the Conservatives are 18 points ahead of Labour nationally and so despite the fact that London is not, electorally, a microcosm of the country, you might equally argue that Boris should be doing rather better than he currently is, especially as his principal rival seems tired and unconcerned whether he wins or loses.

Boris asked me, a year or so ago, if I thought he could win the contest. I said “yes, with ease” – assuming I was talking to the real Boris Johnson rather than Robo Boris who had been subjected to ECT and ended up a Stepford Wife. Still, rather a lobotomised Boris than a clapped-out and disgraced Livingstone or indeed poor Brian Paddick, the odd copper, who revealed himself last week to be boring, pious and weird. Better, I suppose, not be in London at all.

If they are bored with heroin and alcohol, our celebrities can always reach out for innovative ways of harming themselves. Oddly enough, the ultra-clean-living Gwyneth Paltrow has set an example by being seen tottering through several European countries promoting her awful new film while wearing 7in stiletto heels – effectively doubling her height but leaving her at the risk of breaking her pretty little neck. She’s shown off a new pair of these cripple boots in every country she’s visited.

Stiletto heels have always been held in suspicion by feminists because they make it more difficult for a woman to make a rapid escape once they have set fire to a nearby man. These new ultra stilettos, though, are something else: a woman in Japan died after falling off a pair and, according to a worried doctor in Cardiff, they result in an average of six females turning up in A&E with broken or sprained ankles every weekend.

Still, they look good, even if the celebs who wear them seem, as a result of the cautious stumbling, to be afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. A new craze, whereby famous actresses saw off their legs at the knees and get about on solid gold Versace castors will shortly hit Britain.

Fur flies in the squirrel population

More news of strange goings-on in the animal kingdom: Letchworth Garden City, in Hertfordshire has been taken over by marauding gangs of giant, mutant, black squirrels. These ferocious beasts – squirrels with attitude, you might call them – have driven out the native, pale-furred variety with threats of violence, “steaming”, playing loud music all night and dealing Class A drugs or something.

The black squirrels have begun a programme of ethnic cleansing which so far has stretched all the way into neighbouring Cambridgeshire. They look drop-dead cool, probably smoke and are almost certainly members of the Groucho club. These creatures are apparently the result of a genetic mutation – presumably occasioned by living too close to Stevenage or Welwyn Garden City.

Terrified local residents are pining for those good old grey squirrels who never did anyone any harm. As Joni Mitchell once sang, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone . . .”

Meanwhile, somewhere in a remote Scottish forest, Britain’s few remaining red squirrels are laughing their heads off.

The real villains of cigarette pricing

Apparently the tobacco companies and supermarkets have colluded to keep the price of a packet of cigarettes artificially high. Everyone is appalled, even those busybodies at Ash, who put out a condemnatory press statement. I’ve never heard them campaign for cheaper fags – still, first time for everything.

I don’t know how much extra money the firms got per packet of cigarettes – a few pence, I would guess. Meanwhile, the government continues to rake in the money from tobacco tax, which these days constitutes some 80% of a packet. That’s more than 10 billion quid every year to the exchequer, or enough to keep John Prescott in confectionery for several months.

I know what I consider to be the greater scandal – between big business screwing the consumer and the government stealing five quid from me every time I buy a packet of fags. And then not letting me smoke the bloody things anywhere. But I don’t suppose the Office of Fair Trading is interested in any of that.

Great news! The American crooner Snoop Dogg is to be allowed into the country to treat us to a reprise of his hits For All My Niggaz and Bitches and that other one about shooting someone in the guts. The last time Snoop was here he was involved in a fracas at Heathrow and got himself banned. However, a judge has ruled that Mr Dogg had been – as you might expect – playing the peacemaker during the row, in between bouncing happy children on his knee and loudly extolling the virtues of Britain’s busiest airport.

Fair enough, let him in. But might he be asked to confine his activities to singing, rather than taking part in uplifting social work? Call me a cynic, but I am not convinced it ever has much of a beneficial effect.

Times Recommends

• Hysteria alert: Fab One tour starts
• Whodunnits? A cultural religion
• Prison works. So why won't we admit it?