This year has been quite eventful for me. With a mix of excitement and nervousness, I released my memoir, “How Not To Be A Political Wife.” I chose to be candid—perhaps some might say a bit too candid—about various experiences and individuals who have been part of my journey.

As the publication date approached, I found myself feeling somewhat anxious. I worried that I might have crossed a line, that the content was too revealing, and feared the possibility of causing embarrassment for myself and others involved.

To my surprise, there were only a handful who viewed it negatively. In fact, many people responded with kindness. In my conversations with readers, it became clear that they valued the straightforwardness of my observations and anecdotes.

It appears that honesty truly is the best approach.

The experience of writing the book has reinforced for me that truth has a liberating power. It has definitely been a journey toward self-acceptance and emotional maturity. Despite my missteps and setbacks, I find myself feeling happier than ever.

There’s real sense of liberation that comes with having nothing left to hide. In a funny kind of way it almost makes you less vulnerable, especially in this hyper-judgmental, rather prudish modern world. Admitting one’s ­mistakes, owning them rather than shying away from them, can be revelatory.

Once you’ve bared your soul, you’ve nothing left to lose. People can turn their backs on you if they want, and that’s fine, it’s their choice. What remains is all yours – and utterly ­authentic. No more games, no more pretence, no more hiding. It’s a nice feeling.

Perhaps this experience is what has now led me to peel back the final layer of the onion, to remove the last piece of my carefully constructed suit of armour. To expose, accept and finally come to terms with an aspect of myself that has caused much pain and anxiety over the years: my hair loss.

I started losing my hair as a teenager. At a time when most girls were obsessing about boys and clothes, I was worrying about disguising my ever-thinning ­parting.

When I was 16, my hair, which as a child had been dark and thick, was cut short to help conceal the shedding and I spent hours in front of the mirror ­carefully arranging each strand to disguise the worst.

I started losing my hair as a teenager. At a time when most girls were obsessing about boys and clothes, I was worrying about disguising my ever-thinning parting

Once you’ve bared your soul, you’ve nothing left to lose. People can turn their backs on you if they want, and that’s fine, it’s their choice

I was incredibly self-conscious about it, not to mention utterly obsessed. I used to dread getting caught in the rain: the thinning strands would separate when wet, exposing my damp scalp beneath.

I refused to dance at discos and nightclubs: I couldn’t risk sweating.

For the same reason, I began to avoid sport and swimming. I dreaded overhead lighting, along with sunny days (in retrospect, this has been a bit of a blessing: unlike so many of my girlfriends I sunbathed very little, which has paid off in later life). A soft-top car or a fairground ride was out of the question: wind was the enemy.

While my peers frolicked in sea, sun and outdoor adventures, I hid away, deeply ashamed and fearful of ridicule.

I would like to say that it wasn’t as bad as I imagined but it was. I recently met up with an old friend after several decades – one of the first things she brought up was my hair.

Some of the less kind students at school mentioned it, and not in a nice way. I remember at university meeting a nice fellow who also seemed to like me. We got on like a house on fire – but he quickly made it clear that a romance was out of the question.

‘I just can’t have a girlfriend with thinning hair,’ he said. After that, I was so pathetically grateful for any kind of male attention I made some serious errors of judgment.

People don’t really talk about the emotional side-effects of hair loss, but they are very real. People may joke about it, but it can cause severe anxiety and depression, in men as well as women (although it’s fair to say that it is far more accepted that men might lose their hair than women).

I ­completely understood why Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022 after he made an unscripted gag about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, a result of her alopecia.

As for the medical profession, they seem to treat it as an ­exclusively physical problem. Doctors were certainly unable or unwilling to see quite how ­distressing my hair loss was for me, or how much impact it had on my mental health.

They could see that I had a problem, but they genuinely had no solutions. One told me to eat more meat; another sent me to be tested for polycystic ovary ­syndrome (PCOS). The test was negative.

I tried various trichologists including the late haircare legend Philip Kingsley. There were ­occasional improvements, but never anything that seemed to reverse it or put a stop to it.

The truth is, long-term hair loss – as opposed to the kind people sometimes experience when they go on a diet or dye their hair to a crisp – is very hard to resolve, despite what all the snake oil salesmen out there will tell you (and no, rosemary oil does not work).

Over the years, the problem waxed and waned. My type of hair loss is hormonal – androgenic, aka male pattern baldness, so it can fluctuate – and in my particular case was (and still is) exacerbated by an underactive thyroid.

When I was pregnant, for ­example, the shedding almost completely stopped as a result of all the pregnancy hormones ­sloshing around my body.

But as soon as I stopped ­breastfeeding and my cycle went back to normal, it started falling out again – with even more of a vengeance.

My last big bout of shedding happened about 15 years ago, as I entered perimenopause and then the menopause itself – a tricky time for even the thickest of manes, follicular kryptonite for me.

It got to the point where, whichever way I cut it, or however skilfully I styled it, I just couldn’t hide the fact that I was going bald.

Doctors were certainly unable or unwilling to see quite how distressing my hair loss was for me, or how much impact it had on my mental health

A photograph of me at a friend’s 40th was the final straw: it was time to contemplate the ‘W’ word.

The hair-loss industry has a ­million different words for a wig, which is the one word no one ever wants to use. But whatever you call it – ‘hair replacement system’, ‘hair prosthetic’, ‘topper’, ‘hairpiece’, ‘extensions’ – ultimately that’s what we’re talking about.

They all lead to the same ­conclusion: you are basically wearing someone else’s hair as a hat.

This is itself quite an irksome prospect, especially since if you are wearing it, it follows that they are not. There are very real ethical concerns around the vast expansion of the hair extension and human hair wig industry over the past couple of decades and I was very conscious of this.

I did my research and ended up going to Lucinda Ellery. As well as being very carefully sourced, her systems are also very cleverly engineered to be worn all the time.

This has the great advantage that you can delude yourself (in the nicest possible way) that you are not, in fact, wearing a wig.

It works much like a weave, common among women with Afro hair, and I have to say, for me, it was the perfect solution.

I didn’t have to take it off at night, I could swim, cycle, dance – do anything, really – safe in the knowledge that my hair would stay firmly in place. A joy.

I have lived with this solution for almost 15 years now and it has served me brilliantly. It has allowed me to hide my problem, and it has given me immense ­confidence, especially in our increasingly and incessantly visual world.

But then a chance encounter with a woman called Dr Ophelia Veraitch, a Harley Street ­dermatologist specialising in the treatment of hair loss, changed all that.

I had gone to see her for an entirely unrelated matter and mentioned during the course of our consultation my long- standing hair loss. She asked if she could take a look and so I showed her what was underneath my system.

Initially, she was not overtly ­optimistic. But, after further examination and blood tests, she came back to me. Things had moved on since I first started going bald.

Her clinical opinion was that some improvement might be achieved through a combination of medication, topical solutions, supplements and in-clinic ­treatments, including PRF ­(platelet-rich fibrin, a concentrate made from my own blood) and dutasteride mesotherapy (in which a testosterone blocker is injected into the scalp).

There was no guarantee. But she was fairly confident, she said, that some degree of improvement could be achieved.

There was a caveat, though: I had to stop wearing the system.

T his came as a bit of a blow. I have spent a lifetime trying to hide my hair loss from the world – and, to an extent, from myself. Could I really manage without this ­emotional crutch, even if the ­ultimate prize would be to get some – maybe even all – of my own hair back?

I went away to think about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I said to myself, why not? What have I got to lose? What have I got to hide? What does it matter, really, if the world gets to see me as I really am, rather than the image I have ­cultivated for so many years?

I began to think also, that it might be a helpful thing to do. More than 30 per cent of women – about the same percentage as men – have permanent hair loss. Many more experience periodic bouts. Wouldn’t it help if this was acknowledged, de-stigmatised, even normalised?

This isn’t something women and girls should be ashamed of. And yet, as I know from personal ­experience, it can really alter one’s sense of self, erode confidence, make a woman feel less-than.

H air is considered such a big part of the ­experience of being female. A bald woman, or a woman with thin hair is a witch, a hag, fundamentally unattractive, and very probably evil.

It’s there in the fairy tales, there in popular culture, from Roald Dahl’s The Witches to last year’s hit movie The Substance. ­Elizabeth I was mocked for her hair loss and for her attempts to conceal it. After the Second World War, women who were deemed collaborators had their heads ­forcibly shaved as punishment.

I don’t want to feel like that when I look at myself in the ­mirror. And I don’t want other women to feel it either.

And so, I decided to take the plunge. I decided to show the world what real hair loss looks like and to not be ashamed of it. My only regret is that I didn’t do this in the summer: it’s awfully chilly without my hairpiece!

That is not to say I will never wear a wig again. Wigs can be fun and fabulous and there are – and will be – plenty of times when I will wear one.

But I wanted to share this part of my lifelong battle against hair loss to show other women and girls in the same boat that it really doesn’t matter if, like me, the top of your head looks like scorched earth and the rest like tufts of dry grass in a desert. No one should think anything less of you for it.

In the meantime, I have my little fantasy: to celebrate my 60th birthday in two years’ time with my own head of hair. All mine, no one else’s. It doesn’t have to be thick or long or luxurious, just all mine.

If Dr Veraitch can achieve that, it will be living proof that dreams, sometimes, can come true.