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It may be difficult to come to terms with. Many is the strong heart that has broken under less. Have faith, for in our hour of deepest concern, there is, fortunately, no cause for grief.
When I last visited him, John Howard was sleeping soundly. A passing orderly was kind enough to inform me that our prime minister should be back at his desk soon enough. I will spare you all the details he passed on about our leader's many problems with phlegm. All you need know is that the volume of mucus is abating; the antibiotics have kicked in; and he looks forward to a daily fare of back rubs, Jeffrey Archer re-reads and The Wheel of Fortune.
Perhaps you have been wondering how the alveoli of such a prominent figure should find themselves victim to so fierce an infection. You would think that a man like John Howard, who could survive in the backrooms of the Liberal Party for so long, is sure to know how to clear his lungs of debris.
The demands of high office can place a terrible burden on anyone's chest, and while the rest of us can take ourselves off to bed at the slightest hint of a tickle or cough, someone needs to stay behind to mind the store.
The onus of the business of good government can predispose even the strongest constitution to stress. Before you know it, yesterday's batch of jobless figures presents today as a dry, hacking cough.
As the prime minister told me last week during one of my many visits to his bedside: "If only we could clear the body politic of unemployment as easily as we daily rid ourselves of phlegm".
But even there, I felt like saying, you've failed on both counts — but I bit my lip and offered to peel him another grape instead.
It is not appropriate that I should retail the many discussions I was able to have with the prime minister in his sick room. With him bedridden and hooked up to an intravenous drip with a nebuliser over his nose, I guess my time there resembled a lobbyist's dream.
One thing I can tell you was that together we were able to watch the televised trial of Pol Pot. The PM kept nodding off to sleep every now and then, but I'd shake him vigorously each time the proceedings became interesting.
"There's another leader who has suffered for his craft", I'd told him, and as I sat him up so that he could catch a better look at the onetime commander of Khmer Rouge, he'd ramble on about our markets in Asia.
Later, when the news report went to a break, he mistook one of the nurses for Pauline Hanson and in trying to give her a hug, fell out of bed. Before I could stop him, he had prostrated himself before her.
Clinging tightly to her ankles, he thanked her most profusely for all the assistance she had given him.
"It's my job", the nurse said, "It's what I'm trained for."
I didn't say it, but I pondered how difficult it was to fathom the mind of a prime minister when it's racked by fever.
Rest assured, that despite these occasional set backs, John Howard will be on the mend and back among us soon, true to his pledge to lead Australia in sickness as well as in health. Well-wishers will be pleased to know that our prime minister's surroundings are the best private health insurance has to offer.
When leaders of the calibre of John Howard suffer so, this great nation of ours can always find them a bed.
Dave Riley