Incredible stamina
L rr Ihe incredible stamina which had JL allowed him to do the work of two men was beginning to flag. He no longer had the time or inclination to play golf.' So wrote Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's press secretary from 1969-76, of his leader's condition in 1975, concluding: 'For his health's sake it seemed right that he should retire.' That was already Mr Wilson's privately declared intention, and in March 1976 he duly carried it out. Nothing we know of Mrs Thatcher's character suggests that she is likely to harbour such an intention. Nor does a moment of weak- ness, bravely overcome, before the Sri Lankan parliament, in the midst of an excessively arduous tour, show that Mrs Thatcher's health is breaking down. It is,
however, a reminder that her good health and powers of endurance have been an essential condition of her political achieve- ment. Anyone who has accompanied her on an election campaign, or listened to the Downing Street briefings on the subject, knows the extraordinary hours she is able to work without becoming exhausted. The Brighton bomb gave the public an unex- pected glimpse of the sort of hour at which she may still be found working. Where Harold Wilson listed golf as his recreation, she puts music and reading. But we doubt whether she has alarmed Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, by having less 'time or inclination' for these: she has had little enough time for them for many years. For her, to work is to play. She would never want to spend afternoons reading Jane Austen in the garden at Number Ten, still less would it amuse her to make the Macmillanite boast of having done so. Whatever intimations of mortality an eye operation or a cold in Sri Lanka may bring, they will never be an excuse for idle relaxation. Tory MPs who hope otherwise are wasting their time.
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