BY PETER WELBY
Anyone who has ever watched “The West Wing” will know that illness is rarely good for politicians. No self-respecting country wants a weak leader; it’s why we see pictures of Barack Obama playing basketball, or a bare-chested Vladimir Putin on horseback.
Political leaders’ aversion to sickness is particularly relevant now, when many cannot avoid it. And few have demonstrated this more clearly than Boris Johnson, whose increasingly wan videos from his self-isolation in Downing Street were suddenly replaced with the news that he had been taken to hospital, and shortly after that into intensive care. Thankfully he recovered. But the image of a prime minister so incapacitated that a deputy had to take on his duties has not, in fact, done him any political harm at all. Quite the opposite.
Johnson’s net approval rating was minus 1 percent in late January, meaning that 1 percent more of those polled disapproved of his leadership than approved of it. By April 13, when he had been discharged from hospital, his net approval soared to 40 percent.
Such a high rate is unusual, and won’t last, but it also contradicts the received wisdom about leaders being ill. So is it wrong? It is all about context; what is the illness, does it affect their ability to do their job, does the public understand it, and how much did they approve of the leader in question to start with? In any case, as with many matters that generate a lot of noise in the media and among those who work in or around politics, often the public don’t care very much.
When Tony Blair was taken to hospital with heart trouble in 2003, and for heart surgery in 2004, politicians and journalists speculated on his future — but his future was to win another election and remain prime minister for a further three years.
In 2009, questions by a BBC presenter about Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s mental health prompted a furious reaction from the Labour Party, but it made little difference in electoral terms: Labour was already likely to lose the election eight months late, and duly did so.
Farther back, before Prime Minister Anthony Eden took months off to recuperate from a recurring illness in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, his leadership was already unlikely to survive — and indeed, when he returned, he resigned. And in 1953, Winston Churchill’s stroke while in office was hushed up so effectively by the media and the government that few knew about it until after he had retired.
Political leaders’ aversion to sickness is particularly relevant now, when many cannot avoid it. And few have demonstrated this more clearly than Boris Johnson.
Even so, there is a big difference between a leader’s illness not harming their position, and an illness actively enhancing it, as seems to have happened in Johnson’s case.
In mid-April, despite the Labour Party losing its hard-left leadership, those who said they would vote for the party rose by only 4 percent, and the Conservatives retained a 21-point lead.
But Johnson’s illness is different from a normal political illness in one significant respect: It personified the national fears, and his recovery personified optimism. The language of warfare in relation to the coronavirus is a product not merely of political hyperbole, but also of a national mood of anxiety against an unseen enemy. In previous wars requiring a national effort (and economic upheaval of the kind we are seeing now), leaders who did not specially protect themselves or their families were praised — as was Churchill after his decision that the government should stay in London during the Blitz, and Herbert Asquith after the loss of his son in action in the First World War.
The narrative of politics in the UK since the financial crisis peaked in 2008 has been “we’re all in this together.” Until recently, that has not been entirely true. Whatever the rights or wrongs of austerity as economic policy, the poorest in society were affected more than others. But unseen pathogens are no respecters of wealth or privilege. –AN
