Q: How shall I cut your hair? A: In silence!

Last week, 230 Italian hairdressers arrived in Rome, the final stop on a lengthy pilgrimage. they were welcomed to the Vatican by the Pope himself, but, as so often happens with papal welcomes, Pope Francis couldn’t resist adding a word of warning.

after a few nice words about the 16th- century Peruvian, saint Martin de Porres, the patron saint of hairdressers, he instructed his visitors to ‘ avoid falling into the temptation of gossip that is easily associated with your work’.

Pope Francis offered no evidence for this accusation. Who knows? Perhaps he had just picked it up from his own hairdresser, or from someone else’s hairdresser. In fact, it’s likely that he was simply passing on gossip about how hairdressers are prone to gossip.

Do hairdressers gossip more than other people? Mine prefers to snip away in silence, letting the sports commentators on Radio 5 Live do the talking. On the other hand, perhaps he has singled me out, wrongly, as the nongossipy type. It may well be that he treats all his other clients to all the latest goss on Meghan Markle, Gavin Williamson and the XL lady behind the counter in the Oxfam shop, next-door-but-one.

some people like to gossip with their hairdressers, and others do not. When the late Enoch Powell (pictured) was asked by his hairdresser how he would like his hair cut, he replied, tersely: ‘In silence.’

W.s. Gilbert, most famous as the lyricist half of Gilbert and sullivan, was similarly stand-offish. ‘When can we expect anything further, Mr Gilbert, from your fluent pen?’ asked his hairdresser.

‘What do you mean, sir, my “fluent pen”?’ snapped the irascible Gilbert. ‘there is no such thing as a fluent pen. a pen is an insensible object. and, at any rate, I don’t presume to enquire into your private affairs; you will please observe the same reticence in regard to mine.’

Well, that shut him up. Or did it? someone must have passed this tale on to someone who then passed it on to Gilbert’s future biographer, and, given that it wouldn’t have been Gilbert, then it was most likely his hairdresser.

Which means that in railing against gossip, Gilbert became an object of the very gossip he was railing against. another victim of

hairdresser’s gossip was, of all people, adolf Hitler. In her autobiography, his long-standing secretary, Christa schroeder, mentions that the Fuhrer’s relationship with Eva Braun was ‘a facade’. as proof of this, she says that ‘Eva Braun confided to her hairdresser . . . that Hitler never had sexual intercourse with her’.

as it happens, schroeder also mentions that Hitler’s chauffeur once told her that whenever they went to a strange town, he would have to search for girls for his passenger. Hitler would then ‘sit down with them and converse. He paid them, but never requested services.’

at least these stories show that it is not only hairdressers who gossip, but chauffeurs and secretaries and girlfriends, too.

Perhaps there is a walk of life in which no one ever gossips, but it is hard to think of one. We are all guilty.

In 2015, Pope Francis even told a group of nuns to refrain from gossiping, and earlier this year he told american bishops to ‘ break the vicious circle of recrimination, undercutting and discrediting, by avoiding gossip and slander.’

three years ago, when theresa May launched her campaign to lead the Conservative Party, she made a speech in which she agreed with the Pope’s anti-gossip agenda. as you may remember, halfway through her speech she listed all the things she never did.

‘I know I’m not a showy politician,’ she said. ‘I don’t tour the television studios. I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars . . . I just get on with the job in front of me.’

TO

sOME, this seemed like a sign of purity, but, with hindsight, it seems closer to priggishness. It struck me at the time as a very arid form of self-recommendation. since her election, the Brexit negotiations have been hampered by Mrs May’s inability to indulge in small-talk with her European counterparts.

Perhaps it’s time to break ranks with the Pope and the Prime Minister and to sing the praises of gossip. Isn’t it just another word for taking an interest in other people? It’s this idea that I’ll be exploring in this column on thursday.