Checking the PM's pulse

I was holidaying recently in the city of Twice (it used to be called New York, until a songwriter declared it to be "so good they named it Twice"), and found myself sitting in Katz's Delicatessen.

As I waited for my order of sour-pickled green tomatoes to arrive (poised to connect myself via a pair of nipple clamps to a car battery and re-enact the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally), I recalled the first time I'd ever visited this legendary establishment, and saw Ronald Reagan's former press secretary, Jim Brady, being wheeled in and placed at an adjacent table.

Mr Brady had been paralysed by a bullet to the head, received during the 1981 assassination attempt on the President, and knowing him to have been a staunch supporter of the progun lobby, I went over and politely asked him how he felt about the issue now. And do you know what? He just stared blankly ahead, saying nothing and dribbling all over his lox and bagels. Really, the manners of some people.

Despite receiving several bullets himself, Reagan immediately downplayed the near-fatal incident ("Honey, I forgot to duck" were his first words to his wife), just as Tony B Liar did last autumn when his heart problem first became public.

While cynical journalists were still reeling from the revelation that the PM had a heart at all, press spokesmen were assuring them that this was a trivial incident, even though his "harmless supraventricular tachycardia" required an electric shock of several thousand volts to correct it, and there was even a brief period when John Prescott was effectively (no, make that ineffectively) running the country.

In last night's The Downing Street Patient (BBC2), Michael Cockerell examined the ways that post-war prime ministers have dealt with illness and infirmity, constantly striving to project a vigorous alpha male image, even on days when they're feeling (and behaving) more like an epsilon semi-moron. And he gave us his conclusion at the outset, by observing that "when medical doctors get together with spin doctors to issue a bulletin from Number 10, the one prescription they're rarely on is a truth drug".

Those of us who grew up laughing at the USSR's unconvincing attempts to make their moribund leaders seem dynamic in public (they simply looked embalmed) were soon given pause for thought, because it transpired that, on matters of health, all Number 10 press spokesmen suffer from a curious physical deformity: a forked tongue. In 1953, for example, Churchill suffered a stroke that put him out of action for months, yet Downing Street insisted all was well, and the press dutifully colluded in what Bill Deedes called "an agreement, not a conspiracy, to keep it quiet".

When Eden led the nation into the disaster of Suez, his judgment was surely impaired by the mixture of barbiturates and amphetamines he was swallowing (to cope with the after-effects of a botched gall bladder operation), while Wilson began experiencing mental problems early in his final term of office, yet stayed on for several years, before wisely quitting in 1976. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, who was singularly unable to recognise that her lift was no longer stopping at all floors, and finally had to be booted out after giving the game away by declaring: "We are a grandmother."

But the real target of the programme was Tony B Liar, a man who'll happily double the staff of the intelligence services to pry into everyone else's lives, yet is surprisingly reluctant to tell us the truth about his own. Hearing his sincere denials of a long-standing heart problem (cut with compelling testimony that Bill Clinton and the Queen have known about it for years) was a sobering experience, and gave us all a yardstick by which to judge other pronouncements from this self-confessed "pretty straight kind of guy."

Just as the mere mention of fleas can turn a previously itchless audience into a bunch of scratchers, so all this talk of cardiac arrests doubtless sent millions of viewers into palpitations, but at least we learned from the excellent Dr Thomas Stuttaford that the correct initial treatment for a racing heart is "to pour iced water on the patient's face" then "press on their neck". Perhaps it's just as well that I wasn't walking past Chequers in my St John Ambulance uniform on that fateful day, otherwise I might have been tempted to press the prime ministerial neck just a little longer than was strictly necessary.