A FLUTTERING heart has drawn attention to the strains facing Tony Blair.

For a baby-boomer Prime Minister who prides himself on being slim, fit, active and a little bit macho (in a nice but nasty sort of way), such an intimation of mortality must have been a shock.

The phrase the "body politic" is used to stand "for all the people of a nation in their political capacity" (according to the decrepit Chambers moulting pages on my desk). Yet what concerns us here might be called the "body political".

When a premier has as much power and dominance as Blair, his health becomes a political issue. In the curious hot-house world of politics, rumour beats faster than the Prime Minister's panicky heart. News spreads quickly these days, adding to the febrile mood as MPs fall into gossiping about what it could all mean (mostly for them, possibly for the country at large).

Most of us are allowed the luxurious knowledge that if we are ill or on holiday, work and the world will tick by without us. But Blair has made himself such an emblematic part of his Government, he has taken on so much for himself, that you wonder if he may not retire to bed wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "I'm indispensable, me."

This tendency to the all-embracing, problem-busting premier is fairly modern, with Blair and his batty nemesis, Mrs Thatcher, being the prime examples. Like Thatcher before him, Blair has become his party.

The risks in such an ego-powered strategy are clear - both to the leader in person and to their party. Such all-consuming dominance can't be good for a person's health; and, as can be seen with the self-lacerating Tories, it can leave your party unable to cope properly without you.

It is easy to imagine that Tony Blair barely sits down at night before he starts up again, remembering another problem he has to solve, another country he has to visit, another foreign leader he has to meet at World Problem School. "No time for cocoa, Cherie - I'm off to New York for a 15-minute meeting with George Bush."

These days a prime minister's accelerating heart is a big story. Yet Sir Winston Churchill, with his famous love of cigars, afternoon naps, champagne and brandy, and meetings held while he was still in bed, suffered a heart attack, pneumonia, exhaustion and lung trouble while he was in office. And still this old man led the nation.

I can't helping wondering if Winston's ghost, the smoke rising from his spectral cigar, might not sometimes surprise Tony Blair in his mini-gym at Number 10, advising him to slow down a bit.

Tony Blair's heart condition is not said to be serious and was treated quickly (about ten or 12 weeks more quickly than it would have been for ordinary mortals on the NHS). Yet the speculation will continue that he is in some way no longer quite up to the job.

This strikes me as silly, but it does chime with the excitable times in which we live, in which youth and newness is favoured before age and experience. Expecting our leading politicians to be young and thrusting puts them under great pressure. It also denies us the older operators we would once also have turned to.

There seems now to be an acceptance that an "old" politician, say perhaps one in their sixties, is deemed past it and no longer of value.

This seems to be a waste and a great foolishness.

Updated: 10:25 Thursday, October 23, 2003