Rob Blackhurst

Watching Ed Miliband on Andrew Marr's sofa this morning felt somehow poignant. He's still a young and good-looking forty, light of manner, and amiable. What will years of the grinding exhaustion and unremitting pressures of leading the party do to him?

When Blair was elected in 94 the Tories briefly characterized him as Bambi mainly because even though in his early forties, he could have passed for ten years younger. As soon as he was elected the hair thinned and grayed, and the face became owlish and knotted with tension. He has aged thirty years in the last fifteen.

Blair's recent memoirs blame the tyranny of modern travel for some of this. Because it is now possible for world leaders to travel to three continents in as many days, they regularly do. Whereas once leaders would sail to annual summits set years in advance, now they get on planes at least weekly to travel to European summits, Nato summits, G8s, G20s, Commonwealth gatherings, UN General Assemblies, State Visits as well as informal and formal bilaterals. They work in a constant state of semi-exhaustion, punctuated only by the even more gruelling trial of election campaigns. Modern politics is, above all else, a feat of physical endurance.

Towards the end of his life, Churchill's physician, Lord Moran, told him: "You were born with an enormous physical inheritance, and you have spent almost every last drop". But even Churchill, a politician who worked hard by the standards of the age, seemed to get long spells of rest. During the war, he disappeared from Britain for weeks at a time. In 1942, he was away for over a month, visiting Roosevelt, attending summits. In between, he spent several days holiday in the on the rocky-mountains, and would while away happy hours playing cards on weeklong transatlantic crossings.

Even his wartime schedule during the dark days of 1940 -in which he worked on papers from his bed until midday and took a two hour nap in the afternoon – would be impossible for modern politicians. But, usually, he got the important decisions right. The treadmill of modern power hasn't served us well in recent years. Is it possible that better, more reflective decisions would have been made over Iraq and the regulation of financial markets if politicians had had slept more than five or six hours a night?