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Harry Mount 12 July 2019 7:00pm BST How do prime ministers sleep at night? This week, Theresa May said: “There are times you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about things that are
going on.” But does the heavy burden of running the country really keep them awake into the small hours? Prime ministers take starkly different approaches to getting their shut-eye. With
the bad sleepers, you can see the effect in their deepening wrinkles and oyster eyes. David Cameron, by contrast, is a good sleeper – remember that snap his sister-in-law posted on Instagram
of him snoozing next to his ministerial red box? I once asked him (full disclosure: he is my second cousin) whether he worried at night. “Oh, no,” he said, “I fall asleep before my head
hits the pillow.” That accounts for the smooth skin and that unfair reputation he got for chillaxing. He is actually very hard-working; that unaged skin belies a driven work ethic. The most
famous prime ministerial sleep pattern was Margaret Thatcher’s. Legend was that she got by on four hours a night. That was true enough – but she did enjoy a catnap during the day. My father,
Ferdinand Mount, was Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher. In his 2008 memoir, _Cold Cream_, he describes her dropping off at Chequers: “Meetings continue all
afternoon, and sometimes long after dinner, throughout the weekend until even her beautifully coiffed head begins to sink on to her briefing papers. It is at this moment that the celebrated
tact of the higher reaches of the British civil service comes into play.” In a masterly piece of diplomacy, her principal private secretary, Robin Butler, stood up, yawned, stretched his
arms out and said: “Prime Minister, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. I’m feeling extraordinarily tired.” Everyone else in the room yawned, sighed and said they were tired, too. “You run
along upstairs, then, and I can get on with these papers,” Mrs Thatcher said. At this moment, my father recalls, “she makes a show of getting down to serious work as we troop off upstairs,
but as I turn off the minstrels’ gallery towards my room, I catch sight of the little figure down below gathering up her things and going off to bed, her reputation for being indefatigable
undented.” The worst-slept prime minister of modern times might well be Gordon Brown. His well-documented burning of the midnight oil didn’t help his rage, as he hurled mobile phones and
staplers across the room. The prime minister’s life is particularly exhausting in the modern age. “The pressure to respond to every news event is immense,” Cameron told me in 2015. “When I
take people into the Cabinet Room, I say: ‘This is one of the rooms where, for five days in May, Churchill and others decided that Britain should fight on against Hitler.’ Imagine if that
happened today — after half an hour, Alastair Campbell or Craig Oliver [Cameron’s then director of communications] would pop his head round the door and say: ‘Sky News are outside. What do I
say? Are we fighting on or are we surrendering?’ You’ve got to use your time to make long-term decisions for the good of the country.” And what about the man who’s most likely to be our
next Prime Minister? Boris Johnson’s bedtime was certainly disturbed three weeks ago when he had his infamous midnight row with his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, after spilling red wine on her
sofa in her south London flat. That chaotic moment was in contrast to the order of the rest of Boris’s leadership campaign. He’s lost a stone since Christmas (down from 16 and a half
stone), and he’s smartened up his suits and his hair. In any case, his old impression of idle chaos was only ever a ruse to hide his diamond-hard ambition and taste for hard work. When I
used to edit his column on this paper, on any given day he would: put an issue of _The Spectator_ to bed, having written its editorial; advise Michael Howard (then Tory leader) on Prime
Minister’s Questions in Parliament; write his car column for _GQ_; and then do his _Telegraph _column. Boris has always been disciplined about his sleep. He gets up at 5.45am, often
squeezing in a jog before work. When he was Foreign Secretary, he says, “we [Johnson and his security detail] used to get up at six o’clock every morning wherever we were, and do a very,
very lackadaisical run round whatever national landmark: Red Square we did, Sydney Harbour…” It’s all quite a contrast with Boris’s hero, Winston Churchill. Churchill got up at 7.30am but
stayed in bed working until 11am. At 5pm, he would have a whisky and soda before a two-hour nap. If you nap, he said, “you will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one – well, at
least one and a half.” So, if Boris wants to emulate Britain’s greatest prime minister, the dozier he is, the better. • Harry Mount is editor of _The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson_
(Bloomsbury)