Can a high flier survive a heart scare?

Published on Tuesday 21 October 2003 01:00

THE contrast between the pale, drawn, tired-looking man who has graced our television screens of late and the youthful leader who stepped into 10 Downing Street in 1997, brimming with energy and idealism, could hardly be more marked.

It is only six years since Prime Minister Tony Blair - a committed family man - took office, but, physically, he appears to have aged twice that. His healthy complexion has turned a shade of grey, the wrinkles have multiplied as have the grey hairs, and the enigmatic sparkle has all but left his eye. It may sound cliched, but the Prime Minister has been looking a shadow of his former self in recent months.

And the strain of a punishing regime in office has now taken its toll, for Blair was admitted as an "acute" case to hospital on Sunday, suffering from supra ventricular tachycardia - or in layman’s terms an irregular heartbeat - where he was sedated for 20 minutes.

The 50-year-old premier spent almost five hours in London’s Hammersmith Hospital, where he underwent cardioversion, involving an injection of chemicals or electric shock therapy to stabilise his heartbeat. Doctors advised him to rest for 24 hours, but although workaholic Blair delegated a House of Commons statement on the recent Euro Summit to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw yesterday, he ignored medical advice, chairing a string of Downing Street meetings.

A Downing Street spokesman says: "He has suffered no damage and is fine. There is no reason why this should reoccur." And while many experts advise sufferers to think about stepping back from high pressure jobs, it is not considered a life-threatening condition.

Yet there are those who would think that showing such a sign of physical weakness is more worrying for Blair than just a slight health hiccup. For in politics and big business, any show of weakness can see people thrown to the wolves, with those looking to fill their shoes suddenly able to cast aspersions on the person’s ability to carry out their job to the best of their ability if they have a health problem to worry about.

So will Blair suffer more career side-effects from his irregular heartbeat than physical ones?

Of course, Blair is not the first premier to find himself in this position - Harold Wilson, like Blair, suffered a heart flutter in Paris in 1975, but was completely cured and continued to lead the country for another year.

But other political leaders have elected to step down from their stress-laden posts after suffering from health scares. Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister after suffering prostate problems in October 1963 while Tory premier Winston Churchill resigned on April 6, 1955, after suffering a severe stroke. Conservative MP Michael Heseltine bowed out of frontline politics at his wife’s request after a heart attack. Scotland’s First Minister Donald Dewar, however, died from a brain haemorrhage while still in power.

So is it time the Prime Minister heeded the signals his body is giving him and slowed down and learned to delegate? Or does physical frailty necessarily mean political frailty too? Ultimately, will his heart scare affect his leadership?

Political commentator Chris Moncrieff sees no reason why it should. "I think he is up to the demands. We have to believe what the doctors say - that he is 100 per cent recovered. If that is the case then he should be able to carry on without any bother. It is a wake-up call and a warning but I see no reason why this should affect him, although he might feel obliged to take things a bit more easily.

"He pushes himself hard and it does take its toll - but so did Margaret Thatcher. People are saying Blair is looking prematurely haggard and it is something that never afflicted John Major. He doesn’t seem to be a chap who delegates much and you get the impression he wants to be involved personally with everything.

"Callaghan once said that being Prime Minister was the easiest job in the world: everybody had an instrument and all you had to do conduct, but with Blair one tends to think that he has got a one-man band and he wields the baton as well." As for whether we push our top politicians too hard, Moncrieff believes that it is Blair who heaps pressure upon himself and his superhuman schedule is largely self-inflicted. "It’s up to the politician himself. If you choose to do what Callaghan did and delegate or do what Stanley Baldwin did when he was Prime Minister - he went off to a spa for six weeks at a time - you can do the job just as well."

It has been well documented that Blair has been under extreme duress over the past year, with the stress of his decision to send troops to Iraq, the suicide of government weapons expert Dr David Kelly and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry, plummeting popularity ratings and growing opposition from within the Labour ranks towards university top-up fees and foundation hospitals. As for whether he would be wise to delegate more, move down a gear and take it comparatively easy, Moncrieff says: "If the doctors say he can carry on as normal, it’s up to him. His wife may tell him to slow down, I don’t know - but he probably doesn’t take much notice."

Political columnist Peter MacMahon believes that the doctor’s diagnosis had political and not just medical implications.

"The news that the Prime Minister was kept in hospital for nearly five hours, was sedated for 20 minutes and treated with a procedure called cardioversion illustrated that the seemingly invulnerable can quickly and very publicly become vulnerable," he says.

"And because politics is a brutal and unsentimental profession, his opponents inside the Labour Party will have scented blood and begun to circle round to see if the wound is fatal and whether they might get Gordon Brown into No 10."

Indeed, Blair unsentimentally fought for the leadership of the Labour Party as soon as John Smith died at the age of 55 from a second heart attack. MacMahon adds: "The pursuit of power is not for the fainthearted. A weakness sensed is a weakness that will be probed."

But Newcastle Central MP Jim Cousins believes his party leader should not be too worried, at least in the terms of his health.

"I have suffered from a similar condition since childhood," says the member of the Treasury Select Committee.

"It is very worrying when it first happens. When your heart begins to race you get very alarmed. But when you know what is going on, it’s easy to deal with. As I understand it, Mr Blair’s condition is unlikely to recur but even if it does, he now knows the problem. It’s not life-threatening. There is no reason to stop being Prime Minister or scale back his activities.

"Having been through it myself, all he needs to do is be sensible."

Indeed, Blair could also take heart from Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has just been elected the new Governor of California, despite the fact that four years ago he had surgery to replace a damaged heart valve. The public certainly didn’t let that put them off casting their vote for the Austrian.

And while the 32nd US President, Franklin D Roosevelt, never allowed his electorate to see him in his wheelchair, believing this would weaken his image as a strong leader, publicist Max Clifford does not believe Blair’s recent scare will affect his public image in a negative way.

"What seems to be emerging from the medical experts is that this is nothing more than a little warning," he says. "I think in some ways it might help him because suddenly people are aware of his vulnerability and also of the pressure he is under. Anybody who is doing that job is under incredible pressure, especially if you like to lead from the front. There will be a lot of sympathy out there."

And, despite the scare, John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, believes the Prime Minister is capable of continuing his leadership unaffected. "All the medical advice we are being given is that there is no reason why he should do any less than he’s been doing," he says.

"You have to ask yourself: what would you do if you were in the situation where you have been in office for six years, you’ve got a young family and you suddenly get an intimation of mortality? That would at least make you think about how much longer to carry on, but it may be that Tony Blair’s answer to that question would be: ‘I carry on because this is what I enjoy doing’. Who knows?"

Of course, Blair may also be thinking of his close friend, the former leader of the House of Lords, Lord Williams of Mostyn. He died last month, aged 62, after a suspected heart attack, having ignored health warnings a few years earlier and continued to work a punishing schedule.