Margaret Thatcher had that famous reticence about her mother and became ever more markedly dogmatic in adulthood eventually prompting Brian

Margaret Thatcher had that famous reticence about her mother, and became ever more markedly dogmatic in adulthood, eventually prompting Brian Walden’s impertinent observation in an interview: “They think you’re off your trolley.”Unhappiness is the grit in the oyster. The even more boring, but equally driven, John Major had that downward lurch to a Brixton garret at a similar age. Even the Prime Minister, a balanced young man with untroubled blue eyes, was knocked sideways at the age of 11 by his father’s stroke. Is there not an implication in Mr Weinberg’s research that MPs should be doused in tranquillisers and sent off to health farms to relax in white towelling robes? And is this implied search for mental hygiene not, actually, unhealthy?It is remarkable that, as any historian would tell you, almost all prominent figures in public life are driven characters, overcompensating for some trauma or unhappiness in their early lives. We are aware that much mental disorder is misunderstood, that schizophrenia is nothing to do with a split personality, that terms such as “nutter” and even “care in the community” can cause terrible offence. We know that up to one-fifth of our prison population might be classified as suffering mental health problems, and that mental illness is either symptom or cause of much avoidable suffering at all levels of society.But it is not a frivolous speculation – at least, not wholly – to wonder whether a certain amount of psychological disturbance is not necessary for the achievement of change in society.

We understand that mental illness can be a serious matter, a tragedy for families and individuals. It is a commonplace that you have got to be pretty strange to want to be an MP, and what are academic researchers for if not for dressing up the commonplace?

What Ashley Weinberg and his colleagues at Manchester University do not ask – and this is an indictment of modern academic research, because it is a far more interesting question – is: do you have to be mad to rule the world?
Now, before mental health charities inundate our letters page, let us make a distinction. BEING an MP leads to higher levels of physical and emotional stress, researchers have found Well, knock us down with a ballot paper. And he successfully fought it off with chemotherapy, returning to the stage with an acclaimed performance as Wilhelm Furtwangler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich, in Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides (1995), which raised the question of the ambivalent conductor’s motives in playing for Hitler’s regime.After the London run, Massey want to Broadway with the play, for what was sadly to be his last theatrical triumph.Daniel Raymond Massey, actor: born London 19 October 1933; married first Adrienne Corri (marriage dissolved 1968), (one son), second Penelope Wilton (one daughter; marriage dissolved), third Lindy Wilton (two stepdaughters); died London 25 March 1998.. With typical wit and charm he joked about it: “If you’ve got to have a serious illness, that’s the one to get, because it’s get-at- able”. Later he and Lindy married, but in 1992 Massey was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.

Massey later described her as “an evil woman, a psychopath”, comparing her emotionally with Myra Hindley; such criticism totally estranged him from his actress sister Anna. (“It’s not Anna’s, it’s my problem,” he would admit.) Massey did not see his mother for the last 10 years of her life and did not go to her funeral.In the mid-Fifties he married the actress Adrienne Corri (his mother refused to attend the wedding). “We were agonisingly incompatible but we had an extraordinary physical attraction,” he stated. The tempestuous marriage ended in 1968, and after another relationship which produced a son, Paul, he married the actress Penelope Wilton, with whom he had a daughter Alice.