Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams. Paul Martin

after a sleep-deprived marathon of negotiation, representatives of 160 nations agreed the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases. Three years later, fatigue helped to set back the environmental cause. In November 2000 an international summit convened in The Hague to thrash out unresolved problems left hanging by the Kyoto treaty. The negotiations ground on for 12 long days, leaving the delegates exhausted. In the early hours of the morning on the final day the British deputy prime minister, John Prescott, proposed a deal that he thought would break the logjam. But the deal collapsed, reportedly because the French delegate refused to make a difficult decision. A furious Prescott laid the blame squarely on the French environment minister. He told journalists: ‘She got cold feet, felt she could not explain it, said she was exhausted and tired and could not understand the detail and then refused to accept it. That is how the deal fell.’ The summit ended without reaching agreement.

      The burden of work on the politicians and officials who run our nations has grown inexorably over the years. The number of decisions they must take has mushroomed, as the world has become an ever more complex, law-bound and media-scrutinised place. The insatiable demands of the 24-hour news media add greatly to the load. Political leaders are frequently overloaded, with insufficient time to think and formulate policy, let alone get enough sleep.

      Academic observers of the British government scene calculated that between the 1960s and the 1990s the average working day for government ministers grew from 14 hours to 18 hours. The eminent political historian Peter Hennessy described the job of a British cabinet minister as ‘a conveyor belt to exhaustion and underachievement all round’, while a former senior adviser to the prime minister wrote that ‘Ministers are governed by diaries which seem designed to break them in physique or spirit in the shortest possible time.’

      The diaries of the late Alan Clark, who served as a government minister in the 1980s and early 1990s, give illuminating glimpses into the sheer grind of ministerial life. Clark observed colleagues who were ‘boss-eyed’ with fatigue after working past midnight. One diary entry from 1984 describes how the civil servants would always find more work for him to do, no matter how little sleep he had had:

      Today has been vilely full. Went early to Leicester after a late, late vote and impossible to drowse in the train as officials were watching me beadily in case (their excuse) anything in the brief ‘needed explaining’. I dropped off, as good as, several times during monologues at the various offices.

      To add to the hazards of politics, Clark’s life was occasionally jeopardised by an exhausted government driver who had a tendency to nod off while conveying the minister along motorways at antisocial hours. Alan Clark’s experiences were by no means unusual. Geoffrey Howe, who was Foreign Secretary in the 1980s and who, like Alan Clark, worked under the notoriously unsleeping eye of Margaret Thatcher, described his gruelling work regime like this:

      During six years at the Foreign Office I took home, to work through overnight while others slept, no less than 24 tonnes of paper … Six o’clock was my normal time for getting up. My average bedtime was about four hours earlier.

      The long-hours culture affects not only the elected politicians but also the officials who serve them (and, some would claim, run the country). Sir John Coles, who was head of the British Diplomatic Service from 1994 to 1997, described the problem like this:

      Long working hours, pressure and flurry were part of Foreign Office culture. We liked to feel busy and under pressure … But it became necessary to question some of this culture. These things did not necessarily lead to good policy. Tired, pressurised officials were liable to make mistakes.

      The demands now are, if anything, even greater. In December 2000 Tony Blair was asked, during an Internet chat forum with members of the public, what he remembered dreaming about on the night after his first general election victory in 1997, and what was the last dream he remembered. The prime minister’s answer was revealing about the punishing lifestyle that goes with his job:

      I don’t remember getting much sleep at all that night … After a couple of hours’ sleep, we were up early to prepare for going to Buckingham Palace. As for dreams, I’ve not had much chance for sleep over the past few days, let alone dreams.

      Jet lag caused by frequent international travelling adds to the problem. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the USA on September 11, 2001, Tony Blair engaged in a gruelling programme of shuttle diplomacy that saw him travel more than 40,000 miles on 31 international flights in the space of a few weeks. And the fact that he then looked tired made the front pages of the newspapers.

      British Members of Parliament work some of the strangest, if not the longest, hours of any legislature in the world. In October 2000 The Times published the results of one of the most detailed surveys ever carried out into MPs’ lifestyles. The survey revealed a nightmarish world of long hours and chronic sleep deprivation. Most MPs said they worked between 71 and 80 hours a week, with one in six working up to 90 hours a week. One government minister logged a working week of 91 hours in Westminster followed by 20 hours at the weekend, leaving an average of eight hours a day for everything else including travelling, family life and a little sleep.

      The response from one MP was illustrative. The constituency he represented, and where his family still lived, was a long way from London. He would leave home at five a.m. on a Monday morning and return in the small hours of the following Friday morning. His weekend at home would be spent on constituency business, and then there were the occasional foreign trips with a parliamentary committee. He and his partner planned to go out together on Saturday nights but he was usually so tired by then he would fall asleep. Once, while driving home from London, he had almost fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed. There has been some modernisation of parliamentary schedules, in response to pressure from MPs, but the long-hours culture remains deeply embedded.

      Some politicians cope with the long hours with the assistance of drugs of various kinds. In the USA, coke is a favourite – particularly the diet cola variety. During the US presidential election campaign in 2000, candidate Al Gore engaged in an electioneering programme of awesome intensity, involving 19-hour days and an itinerary that criss-crossed the continent. ‘Our campaign consists of a lot of long days and a lot of short nights,’ said Gore’s spokesman. ‘While some candidates may look for their feather pillows, Al Gore is looking for every single undecided voter he can find.’ To help him remain awake and vaguely sentient, Gore reportedly drank copious amounts of Diet Coke. One of his aides was explicit about the reason: ‘These are high-caffeine days. He needs his fuel to get through them.’ Sadly for Gore, the caffeine was not enough.

      George W. Bush, who beat Al Gore by the slimmest of slim margins, became notorious during the election campaign for his verbal fluffs and tortured syntax. Whole books have been dedicated to Bush’s gaffes, malapropisms and garbled sentences. One American psychologist even suggested that Bush’s difficulties with the spoken word resulted from a lack of sleep in someone who apparently needed a lot of it.

      Perhaps the defeated Al Gore could draw a minuscule crumb of comfort from an informal survey, which was conducted several months after the presidential election and reported to the International Conference for the Study of Dreams in July 2001. This survey found that conservative Republican supporters were nearly three times more likely to experience nightmares than their less conservative Democrat opponents. Half of the dreams recalled by Republicans were nightmares, compared with fewer than one in five of Democrats’ dreams. Moreover, the conservatives’ dreams were generally more frightening and more aggressive in content.

      When the next big crisis erupts on the world stage, remember this. The politicians and officials who will be handling that crisis will be getting little sleep, perhaps for days at a time, and they will consequently become even more sleep-deprived than they already were. Their reactions, judgment, rationality, mood, memory, creativity and social skills will deteriorate, and they will become more prone to taking inappropriate risks. You might conclude that the world would be a safer and saner place if our leaders and their officials spent more time in bed (asleep).

Truly,