Following the eclipse of Miss World as a major media event, the tendency to judge figures aspiring to global prominence on how well they fill swimwear has diminished. But not disappeared altogether. Last summer both David Cameron and Barack Obama were appraised by judicious critics on their beachwear choices. And in previous years the seaside ensembles of figures from Vladimir Putin (aggressively bare-breasted) to Silvio Berlusconi (similarly naked above the waist but with a penchant for piratical bandanas) have also excited attention. Although in Silvio’s case we probably now enjoy just a little too much detail about what he likes to keep covered and uncovered.

The interest in how leaders of the free world look in their trunks is entirely understandable. We’re nosy, aren’t we. And there’s always the potential for comedy in seeing how figures we expect to see encased in grey suiting cope with the demands of beach casual. Henry Kissinger in Speedos is always going to be worth a gawp.

But public interest goes beyond simple curiosity about how the other half dives. We increasingly judge our leaders in the same way as prospective buyers might appraise bloodstock at an Irish horse fair. Is that a well- turned calf, are they glossy and in good health, do they run well over soft ground? Are our leaders fit, capable of beach frisbee and blessedly free of tummy bulges? Part of the appeal of Barack, and before him, Dubya, was that they were hunky regular guys at home in the surf.

The tendency to look for supreme physical fitness in our leaders is, ironically, one of the many cultural consequences of Camelot. JFK and his brothers burst into public consciousness as a group of healthy all-American boys who could be photographed, every summer, frolicking in the waves off Hyannisport, showing off the sort of rippling muscle tone you were unlikely to get Alec Douglas-Home displaying. The irony of such display lay in JFK’s own profound physical frailty. His body was so racked with pain he was almost permanently on the most powerful medication.

The reality of JFK’s physical weakness is explored in illuminating detail in David Owen’s fascinating book In Sickness and In Power. But while Lord Owen laid bare the extent of JFK’s fakery he, like poor Nicolas Sarkozy, still seems to be in thrall to the essence of the Kennedy myth — the idea that robust health is a precondition for political mastery and world leaders must indeed show themselves physically fit for office.

But history tells us a very different story. The two greatest European leaders of the 19th century, Bismarck and Salisbury, were fragile bundles of ill-health, given to nerve-storms, physical prostration and long periods when they required delicate nursing and cosseting. The two greatest war leaders democracy has ever had, Churchill and Lincoln, were both depressives whose melancholia manifested itself in physical weakness and debility. And while all four were very different characters one thing united them. None of them was going to look good in Vilebrequin.

The truth is that those who have been the most fitted to lead were among the least fit around. And our increasing focus on the physical appearance of leaders simply reflects our growing inability to pay serious attention to their ideas.

History has become history It also reflects our increasing estrangement from our own past. One of the many malign consequences of the accelerating decline in the study of history is that we have lost meaningful standards of comparison for current events. Discussion of politics is impoverished because people rarely draw parallels with any event much before 1979.

A recent survey of history students at one of our best universities revealed that fewer than one in ten could name a single 19th-century Prime Minister. When it comes to foreign affairs a simple, caricature, one-dimensional view of America’s role prevails that shows no understanding of the competing visions of that nation’s destiny outlined over the years by Jefferson and Jackson or Truman and Taft.

A recent article in The Independent attacked one of our finest historians, Andrew Roberts, for his approach to the history of the British Empire, accusing him of blood-soaked nostalgia for the white man’s burden, simply because he took the trouble to reconstruct, as a proper historian should, how people thought and felt at the time they acted. We’ve now reached a stage where we are so prone to arrogance we judge the past by the standards of the present, but we labour under so much ignorance that we can’t illuminate the present with proper insights from the past.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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