Nobody in their right mind would want to be a politician

IF Andrew Neill asked me what the time was – let alone my views on the single market – I’d be a puddle of fear on the floor. And throughout the general election campaign I wondered how politicians can cope physically and mentally with being interviewed, heckled, hated. Maybe I’m getting soft but they are, though we often pretend otherwise, only human.

But I suppose politicians actually enjoy this business and they are fantastically vain. Yet before social media made everyone available to everyone 24/7 it was possible to escape the noise and, perhaps like Churchill, go and build a brick wall in order to forget the world. A few years ago Dr David Owen, former foreign secretary, wrote a book called In Sickness And In Power: Illness In Heads Of Government Over The Last 100 years. In it he said that “there has been all too little systematic research on the relationship between leaders’ ill health and poor decision-making”.

We’re not simply talking about Diane Abbott making a fool of herself in a couple of interviews because her diabetes was out of control. We’re talking about President Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, his excruciating back pain treated with mood-altering steroids and amphetamine injections. Thank goodness he was enjoying a fairly pain-free interlude when the Cuban Missile Crisis blew up.

But how do you balance the right to confidentiality of the individual patient against those of the public’s right to know?

And anyway it’s not clear cut. When they were in government both Churchill and Roosevelt suffered fewer depressions than when they were out of government. Which proves that in some cases power is a tonic as much as constant scrutiny must be almost unbearable.

So perhaps politicians really do thrive on this madness. No I can’t understand it either.