‘And I saw when the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the Four Beasts saying, “come and see”.’

Revelation 6:1

It’s said the great civilizations of the past didn’t disappear overnight in sudden cataclysms. Instead, they slowly and sadly declined over long years. The Roman Empire, for instance, slipped away through an embrace of decadence and lead piping in its plumbing. A lethargic and slowly lead-poisoned empire was - eventually - too tonto to survive.

And so, like standing in the calm eye of a hurricane, when standing at the centre of a slow-motion apocalypse it can be difficult to tell that anything is wrong. But the signs that we’re doomed can be seen by those who choose to look.

The first seal heralding our own slow demise was opened this week when the media went into febrile paroxysms over the significance of David Cameron’s changing hairstyle. What was the meaning behind Cameron’s switch from a parting on the right to a parting on the left? Articles that didn’t quote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who were as rare as non-piss poor journalism.

Confirming eschatologists’ fears, the total length of column inches devoted to Cameron’s new hair was *exactly* 666 miles. Miles and miles given over to whether the shift of parting was symbolic of Cameron’s political journey. Only mere inches, however, recorded that within days Cameron had changed again to a far more symbolically apposite spiv’s greasy quiff.

Let’s be emphatic about this. David Cameron wants to be the next Prime Minister - one of the world’s most powerful men - and current opinion polls show him having a good chance. Yet the media have so little to say about him that they went to town on his haircut.

He was also given a free ride over his House of Commons speech responding to the Budget. What it lacked in anything meaningful it made up for in endless flaccid jokes about Stalin and Michael Foot, a man anybody born after 1980 has never heard of. Listening was like trying to eat a spare rib with no meat on it but smeared thick with lemon curd. Or as Lib Dem leader Ming Campell cattily put it afterwards, ‘Once again, I am struggling to match the intellectual rigour of the previous speech’.

In the Book of Revelation, when the first seal is opened, a man appears on a white horse. There has been much speculation through the ages as to the man’s identity. Is it Jesus? Is it the Antichrist? More worryingly, we have no idea whatsoever how he wears his hair.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)