The UK loses its alpha-male

Jonathan Freedland, Guardian News Service, London

Tony Blair may be the consummate television performer, but just this once he will be glad the cameras were not there. A moment of ill health, even a funny turn, caught on film can be politically lethal for a leader. The sight of the first George Bush vomiting into the lap of his hosts and then collapsing during a Tokyo state banquet in 1992 came to signify a presidency in terminal decline. In 1979 images of a crumpled Jimmy Carter, exhausted by a 10 km run, became the instant motif of a man facing defeat.

There are no pictures of a stricken Blair, experiencing what must have been a frightening ordeal, to denote an ailing premiership. If there were, Britains' image of the UK premier would be changed forever. Instead of the young, fit 21st-century dad -- the boyish leader who promised to make Britain a "young country again" -- we would now think of Blair as a middle-aged man with mortality hovering over his shoulder.

He is spared that sudden, unwanted image change -- just so long as Sunday's heart scare is never repeated. In the cruel calculus of politics, he cannot afford to have a single further medical episode. If he does, Sunday would be elevated from a one- off into the first sign of a "condition". And few leaders can survive that label around their neck.

Perhaps it's proof of the extent to which politics is still a primal, visceral business. We somehow expect the tribal chief to be the strongest in the pack, an alpha usually-male who gives off the scent of raw physical power.

This is most pronounced in the U.S. where, as one Democratic speechwriter once put it to me: "There is a subtext of male violence running through all politics." Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in California seems to confirm that wisdom: voters pick a leader who, on some level, they believe could defend the tribe. Small wonder that, as Robert Dallek has uncovered in a new biography, John F. Kennedy went to extreme lengths to conceal the truth of his desperate ill health: He understood that political power and personal strength were indivisible.

All this should be less true in Britain. With no president, the British should focus less on the individual at the top. But Blair's ever-more presidential style has left him vulnerable to the application of U.S. standards. He places himself at the center of every decision, relegating his ministers to the status of aides, so that voters soon believe he is single-handedly running the country. If those hands are trembling, voters worry.

Besides, even pre-Blair Britain yearned for fitness in its top dogs. In a parallel that will not please the prime minister, nearly 50 years ago the UK premier of the day Anthony Eden collapsed with a high fever in October 1956 -- and had resigned by the following January. True, he had led the country into an unpopular Middle East war and his ill health became a symbol of his political weakness -- but that will do little to comfort Tony Blair.

Or perhaps Blair will have a more philosophical reaction to his brush with mortality. Perhaps he will step back and realize there is more to life than a job which grants no real day off. He has a young son he must want to see more often, and he would not be human if he did not yearn for fewer hours, less travel and more sleep.

His office in Downing Street, London, insists, of course, that the opposite is true, that Blair is "100 percent recovered" and was back at his desk at 9 a.m. on Monday. But maybe we should listen to the words of Blair's greatest rival (the British finance minister Gordon Brown), following the other major personal-political event of the weekend. "I'm a father and that's what matters most," gushed a beaming Gordon Brown following the birth of his son John. "Nothing matters more than that. Nothing." That might suggest a change in priorities, a realization that there is more to life than politics and ambition.

So, on the face of it, Blair is determined to go on and on, while Brown appears ready to slow down. The irony is that even if that's how the weekend affects the two men personally, it could have the opposite impact politically.

Brown suddenly looks a different man: Happier, rounded and more human. Last year there was genuine sympathy for him and his wife, Sarah, when their infant daughter -- born prematurely -- died. Now there is public delight for the couple. For the second time in less than two years, the voters have seen a human side to Gordon Brown and warmed to it.

The prime minister, meanwhile, has taken a blow to one of the key facets of his image. New Labor is no longer new and he is no longer the youthful man of vigor. The talk instead is of past British Labor titans who lost their lives in mid-career -- John Smith, Hugh Gaitskell, Tony Crosland -- and of PMs -- of both leading parties -- who quit through ill health: Tories Eden and Harold Macmillan and Labor premier Harold Wilson.

In the delicate, fascinating equilibrium of the Blair-Brown relationship, the central one in British politics, something has shifted this week.