Seeking leaders with heft takes democracies to strange places

Shakespeare may have given a peevish Julius Caesar the imprecation “Let me have men about me that are fat”, but this week Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was told he “needs to shed a few pounds” — and by a senior member of his own party to boot. Peter Mandelson, svengali to previous Labour leaders, thought Starmer needed to be svelte to look a convincing winner. To complete the Shakespearean contrast and paraphrase the peer, he believes Starmer needs more of the “lean and hungry look” Caesar feared in his enemies.

It’s an intriguing example, in this mammoth year of elections across the globe, of how important physique remains in democratic choice. And there is some evidence that it does matter.

Last week, newly re-elected MP George Galloway dismissed “little Rishi Sunak”, the prime minister, as an inconsequential individual: a lightweight, in the political parlance, a slight figure, both literally and figuratively. It’s a shorthand that even Starmer himself has stooped to at prime minister’s questions, asking the 5ft 7in Sunak last year: “Is he starting to wonder if this job is just too big for him?”

This was a low blow in every sense. But these jibes play into a fundamental tendency of the human race: to mistake physical attributes for the other sort of fitness — to lead.

Take the US presidential race (and brace for a carnival of depressingly telling insults from Donald Trump). In America, the vast majority of winners have been not only over average height but often more than six foot, from Abraham Lincoln (6ft 4in) to Barack Obama (6ft 1in) and Trump (6ft 3in). Joe Biden is three inches shorter than his likely opponent, Trump, but we’ll see if that anomaly survives a second contest.

“These things are powerful when they reinforce people’s pre-existing concerns,” says Luke Tryl of More in Common, who has been conducting back-to-back focus groups in the UK as the general election nears. He is curious about the subconscious associations — his participants also call the PM “little” and note his intriguingly short trousers. But how much does this lead, he wonders, to a follow-up judgment about his seeming “weak”?

On occasion, sheer bulk acquires a political symbolism of equivalent heft — think of Germany’s Helmut Kohl, dwarfing the French President François Mitterrand as they held hands in postwar solidarity. Would the moment have been so moving if the German chancellor had not been a giant?

As a German critic noted of his girth: “Kohl’s body is the body of the Federal Republic.” But the same observer disapproved of the chancellor’s famously huge appetite as “the rule of the belly over the head”.

Literary observers have always been good at skewering the ease with which we associate masculine physical substance with the real thing. In A Very British Coup, a novel by the former Labour minister Chris Mullin, the self-satisfied seriousness of a security meeting in the White House is denoted by the jawlines: “They were all big men with heavy jowls and big bellies. The heaviness of their jowls lent gravity to the occasion.”

Perhaps we should draw a veil over a bit of SW1 shorthand that has sadly fallen out of fashion: the concept of political “bottom” to denote the ability to draw on experience or expertise.

It’s a far cry from Mandelson’s desire to see Starmer in better shape. But confidence in a party leader’s capacity to meet the 24/7 demands of modern campaigning — and governing — is a universal requirement these days. Hence Sunak’s boasts about fasting for his health.

One of the first political events I attended as a young enthusiast featured veteran Douglas Hurd. I asked him for the number-one necessary characteristic for success in politics and he had no hesitation: physical stamina. A reply so weighty I’ve carried it with me ever since.

miranda.green@ft.com

Letter in response to this column:

Get to the bottom of it / From Alastair Conan, London CR5, UK