Gordon Brown now suffers that incurable syndrome: ex-PM. (2011)

“Analysing the psychological impact of power on a leader’s personality, Owen points out that these people, with huge doses of daily adrenaline, are in a perpetual state of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Simon Jenkins,
The Guardian, Thursday 14 July 2011 22.00 BST

Since the second world war, only Attlee, Churchill, Douglas-Home and Wilson can be said to have left office in relatively good order. Eden and Macmillan left sick. Heath, Major and Blair left afflicted by failure. Thatcher and Brown left in a maelstrom of skulduggery and treason.

The closest to perfection was Alec Douglas-Home, who led his party to a creditable defeat in 1964, and then returned in glory to a distinguished period at the Foreign Office in 1970. A Scots grandee, he was once heard at Pratt’s, the London club, chatting about what to do with ex-prime ministers, having apparently forgotten he was one.

Douglas-Home appears to have been immune to what David Owen – in his study of leadership pathology, In Sickness and in Power – called the “hubris syndrome”. Analysing the psychological impact of power on a leader’s personality, Owen pointed out that these people, with huge doses of daily adrenaline, are in a perpetual state of post-traumatic stress disorder. The public presentation of men such as George Bush and Tony Blair might be that “of affable guys who can be trusted”. Yet their inner hubris was “a great menace to the quality of leadership and the proper government of the world”.

The unnaturalness of a senior politician’s life, the lack of normal relaxants (other than alcohol), and the aloofness from family and friends, creates a disorder of which medical science is largely ignorant. As Owen points out, this omission is a serious matter that surely merits as much study as does ordinary illness.

To the end, Macmillan and Callaghan demonstrated the well-known feature of the syndrome, the fantasy that they would one day be “called back” to save their countries. Heath was sure Margaret Thatcher would make such a mess that he would return to power. Indeed, on the eve of the 1979 election Thatcher’s aides were so convinced she would lose that they asked Heath to share her last pre-election party broadcast, reducing her to a fury of frustration and tears.

Read the full article on the Guardian’s site here.