LIKE BORIS AND BROWN, ADVERSITY DROVE HIM ON

IT HAS been noted that people who aspire to the highest office in the land often have experience of trauma or tragedy which perhaps drives them on to succeed. An assessment of those who have been in power over the past 30 years shows this to be more than a theory. Boris Johnson’s mother, Charlotte, had a nervous breakdown when he was ten and was a patient at the Maudsley Hospital in London for nine months with depression, rupturing his childhood. Theresa May was an only child whose mother had multiple sclerosis and whose father died in 1981 after a car crash when she was in her early 20s. Gordon Brown was kicked in the head during a school rugby match aged 16, leaving him blind in his left eye and fearful of losing his sight in his right. Tony Blair, John Major and David Cameron, too, faced immense personal and family challenges. Such setbacks tend to leave a mark on a person’s character, instilling in them a desire to achieve.